Author Bio: Ellis Freel is a poultry and animal science major in the Dale Bumpers College. Here she outlines a session in which she joined a UA K9 training session. While this was not a full internship, her experience is a great example of trying out professional experiences!

My future career goal is to become a veterinarian and study pathology of animals. I have a passion for the outdoors, kindness, and youth development. As a person that has experience with training dogs, this K9 training was a whole new level that opened my eyes to new possibilities I hadn’t even considered on the training level. Thanks for reading.

Dogs have about 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to the humans mere 6 million. With all these extra olfactory receptors, they also have the ability to compartmentalize the smells they smell into different parts of their brains, that proportionately speaking, is 40 times greater than a human’s ability to analyze smells. These smells go into all different categories inside their brains, and they are able to recognize these smells quickly going forward. Another difference between a human and dog brain is what our brains do during environmental stability. Our brains tend to “tune out” things that remain constant in our environment and then notice when something changes. An example of this phenomenon as it relates to smell is similar to a Febreze commercial when it mentions people going “nose blind” because they adapt to the smell they are consistently surrounded by, especially when this smell is not immediate and filters in slowly. Dogs don’t have this ability within their olfactory system and their brains. Instead, when a dog smells chicken, it smells the same strength of that chicken for a long while after the chicken is gone.  

This ability creates the perfect combination of characteristics to employ dogs as trackers for the police force. I had the opportunity to join one of the University Police Department members, Officer Shetlar, during one of their weekly, routine training regimes for their K9 unit. K9 dogs are basically dogs that are trained to sniff out certain chemicals that can be found in explosives, drugs, bombs, narcotics, and guns. Each dog is specified to a specific weapon and a few distinct chemicals. Some dogs are bomb dogs, and others are narcotic dogs. The different smells they find just depends on the training the dogs have been trained to do. Scent tracking is what we focused on during this training session, but there is also bite training that a few of the dogs are trained to do as well that function as a way to catch criminals on the run and to protect the officers.  

Before bringing the dogs in the building, you must set the scene for training. Setting the scene consists of planting different narcotics and chemicals throughout the building. For training, officers practice sniffing in different settings from open places, to small rooms, to grass, to asphalt, to cars, and everything in between. We trained the narcotic and bomb dogs in small rooms and planted different drugs in cupboards, behind trash cans, and inside boxes to make the scene as realistic as possible. Smells are denser than the air surrounding the container that is containing the smell, so a routine practice that makes the scene realistic is waiting fifteen after planting the smells to let the smell marinate and flow downward toward the floor against surfaces for the dog to be able to recognize them. Since the smells fall with gravity against surfaces, when a dog recognizes the smell, he will move his head up against the wall toward the container with the smell because the smell is more concentrated the closer you get in proximity to the container. The dog’s olfactory system knows that and is able to point accurately in the direction of the smell it detected. Whenever the dog has as change in behavior as a reaction to the smell, that is called a hit. A hit from a K9 dog is enough to get a warrant for searching your belongings in lieu of protecting you and your community. The dog is trained on the smells through operant conditioning—receiving a reward for a wanted behavior and learning from that reward. Every time a dog hit and pointed to a smell, the dog was given a toy of preference and praised, which then prompts the dog to continue that behavior.  

Overall, this experience was a phenomenal opportunity to learn more about dogs and their psychology with learning. Dogs are often deemed “a mans best friend” and in the form of K9 police dogs, they serve as both a companion and protector of not just their immediate owner, but also the whole community.