The AKC OB club I train my dog at purchased a BP vest for our one of our local k-9 units. The PD was kind enough to bring 7 dogs out to do a demo for us. It was awesome!

I have had this burning question I have been wanting to ask a expert about police dogs. Last year I saw a documentary on the dogs trained for the military and law enforcement. On the documentary they said when a bad guy is hiding, his fear only made it easier for the dog to find because of a pheromone coming from his pores. It was NOT adrenaline, something else. ??

I asked the officer about this and he said that dogs could find a person even if they were, calm, un-afraid and that the perps "fear" didn't necessarily help the dogs.

Would love to know more scientific facts on this.

Don't know the scientific answer to this but true or not I know some officers actually let the dogs smell suspects after they are in custody so the dog picks up what they believe is the fear scent you are talking about.

I don't know if you want to call it a fear scent; however I believe that every thought that a person has is created in the mind and shoots down the axion into what is called the synaptic gap at which point it is turned into a gaseous state. At this point the gas is absorbed by the next cell etc... While this is going on it makes a neural link to whatever part of the body you are wanting to use like "hand move". Simultaeously there are hormones and other chemicals being used by the body that gives that particular thought a different chemical makeup. These chemicals course through your body and have to go somewhere. I believe they exit the skin via skin pores. In conclusion I would say that after training the dog the same way over and over the dog can smell the difference between (thoughts)smells.

There is basically one non-specific, *physiological* stress response regardless of how the conscious mind decides to interpret it ("good" vs. "bad"). As a matter of fact, subjecting someone in a coma to a physical stress would incur the same response without ANY conscious thought whatsoever.

Search with terms 'GAS', Dr. Hans Selye, Stress response for more info.

Fear, excitement, anxiety, excitment, a "thrill", injury...these are not differentiated by the part of the brain handling the physical response. It all boils down to physical preparations for fight-or-flight, which include a whole host of chemical and mechanical changes.

I would imagine being pursued by a K9 would evoke a profound stress and hence a subsequent physical reaction.

I recently arrested some 15 year old kid who apparently didn't think thievery would warrant hand-cuffs and fingerprinting. He was cool and dry back inside the Walmart. After sitting in a cell for a while, it smelled like he changed into week-old, unwashed, work-out clothes....and looked like it with soaked underarms and such.

Now, he was downright terrified, and certainly not all prisoners absoloutely reek like that. But if it's simply a matter of degree, it stands to reason that dogs could pick up the changes in much finer increments.

Some pretty good answers. My experience is that the dogs are obviously much hotter on tracks and searches when a suspect is pumping out adrenalin because there are other chemical reactions going on as a result. I can't say that they actually smell 'Fear", what they are sensing/smelling is the odors eminating as a result of a biological chemical process which stems from a stressed person. I guess if you wanted to use laymans' terms you could say they smell fear.

Howard

Just my 2 cents. I do believe that there is a difference in the scent of a criminal under stress. I base this several K9 deployments since 1992. One example that I can tell you is a situation in which I did a building search after several officers had walked through the building looking for a second suspecet in the building.

They missed the suspect as he his under a teachers desk and pulled the chiar back under the desk making it appear that nothing in the room had been disturbed.

When I released the dog to search he ran down the hallway just past a T hallway. Abruptly stopped went down the other hallway and into a room and began attempting to crawl under the desk from the opposite side of the chair. The suspect yelled he gave up and he was called out of hiding.

The suspect told me that a Police officer or officers walked by his position 3 times when searching. The dog found him in less than 3 minutes. He easlily sifted through the 6 plus scents of the officers who had been in the building and hit on the suspects scent.

I'm with Howard. I don't think dogs smell fear per se. A scared, stressed person can put out more odor than a relaxed person, because stress can cause a person to start sweating. It also makes them breathe deeper. All these things combined creates more odor. What a dog usually detects relative fear in a person are the physical signs and nonverbal behaviors fear tend to make one elicit. Interesting question though.

DFrost

I’m going to jump on the “no fear scent” band wagon. I believe that under high levels of stress… Just committing a burglary and worrying about getting caught just causes you to give off more scent.

I have noticed over the last few years that different types of drug abusers give off more or less scent. I’ve seen s bunch of very scared heroin abusers who tend to give off very little scent. Probably because the heroin use slows their system down. Crack cocaine users tend to give off a large amount of scent because their systems are going a hundred miles an hour. Any of you notice this too?

dogs do not smell fear..... Like one person said they could find a person no matter what smell they had. However dogs are masters of body language, they can read the body language of people better than people can.

Whether there is difference in the scent or it is stronger there is definately a difference. Dogs being creautures of habit remember this type of scent and what it lead to in the past.

I agree that a person on different substances will give off different amount of scents. Just as older persons may not give off a lot of stress when they walk away as their endocrine systems don't produce scent.

This conditioning is no different than a dog who begins to pick up cues from a radio, overhead lights etc.