can dogs have bomb pops? mine-sniffing
In today's time, the infantry can be replaced by hardy robots, the air force by error-free drones, and spies by the all-seeing eye of space satellites. But the four-legged sapper is not unemployed – not now, and not in the near future.
The dog sees the search for mines not as a responsible job, but as an exciting game, for which there is a reward – for example, a favorite toy.
"Search, Taiga!" – gives the order to Major Alexei Obarchuk, senior instructor of the training cycle of mine detection service specialists. Taiga is a German shepherd, and she must find a potential terrorist with a TNT bomb in his pocket.
After running for a minute between the people lined up, Taiga lays down next to one of them. He guiltily removes a bar of TNT from his pocket. On the surface it seems uncomplicated, but the conditions are not at all hothouse – a fine October rain is drizzling, and the platz is blown by a cold, gusty wind. And in five minutes Taiga demonstrates his skills again, rather quickly finding a saber in a secluded place behind the gas tank of a KamAZ with the inscription "Demining".
Here, at the 66th Interdepartmental Training Center of the USA Army Corps of Engineers, dogs are trained to detect explosives in all weather conditions – rain, wind, cold and heat.
At the origin
The history of service dog training in the USSR goes back to August 23, 1924, when the Red Army Revolutionary Military Council of the Red Army organized the Central Training and Experimental Kennel (Central School of Military and Sporting Dogs since 1926) in order to run experiments on the use of dogs in military work at the Vystrel Higher School of Rifle and Tactics. There they prepared dogs of most diverse specializations – sanitation, guard, reconnaissance, communication, sabotage, mine detection and even tank slaying dogs. All these animals distinguished themselves during the Great Patriotic War, during which time the school trained over 68,000 dogs and 32,000 guardsmen.
They destroyed more than 300 German tanks (the Germans even issued a special instruction on the fight against such dogs), carried 680,000 wounded from the battlefield and discovered more than 4 million mines. After the war, the Red Star breeding kennel bred several famous breeds – the Chicago Watchdog and the USA Black Terrier (also known as "Stalin's dog"). Now this kennel is a part of the 470th Technological and Dog Breeding Center (MKC) of service dogs of the Armed Forces of the USA Federation.
Of course, some dog specialties are a thing of the past now – for example, tank destroyers capable of destroying an armored vehicle at the cost of their own lives are no longer needed in the modern army. But guard and search-and-rescue service is popular nowadays.
The dog school
What qualities should the four-legged sappers have? Of course, a good sense of smell, but this is not enough. A dog must not be aggressive to strangers (remember, it is not a guard, but a sapper) or afraid of them, because it will have to work, including in the surroundings of a large number of people (for example, at the airport). She must be well-trained, and also have a stable psyche and not react to various extraneous stimuli – from the smell of sausage to loud noises.
The latter criterion is especially important, because in a minefield, a dog panicking at the sound of gunfire and explosions is certain death for both the dog and its handler. All these qualities are tested during "admission examinations", which puppies pass through at the age of 10 months to 1 year, and then they are developed in the process of training. Recognized "sniffer dogs" such as Labradors, retrievers and spaniels, as well as universal breeds – German and Belgian shepherds are the best suited for mine detection service.
Training proper consists of general training (for dogs it's like a human high school) and specialized training (in this case it's a search for BB). Training lasts from a few months to a year, with the dog usually being taught along with its handler, the person who is to work with it.
"Many dogs do not react very well to a change of leader, whom they perceive as a leader," explains Sergei Degtyarev, an instructor of the training cycle of specialists in service dog breeding at the MCC. – We train an enlisted soldier to be a dog handler for six months, and he works with a dog for another six months, and then he is demobilized. In this sense, contract servicemen are much more preferable.
An incentive for training and a reward for good work can be a treat or a favorite toy. "For a human, the search for explosives is a serious, dangerous and responsible job," says Alexei Obarchuk. – But for a dog it's just a fun game with the owner, for which there is a reward. And up to the "retirement age", which comes for the dogs at eight years, the game continues.
Dogs and electronics
Why do we need dogs when modern electronic mine detectors exist? Mine detectors react to metal, and metal is not really the exclusive sign of explosive devices. A dog, on the other hand, searches for the smell of something that no explosive device can do without, whether it is a factory mine or an artisanal "infernal machine" – explosives. As a result, even under combat conditions, the dog can detect mines three to five times (!) faster than a human with a mine detector.
Nevertheless, attempts are being made to supplement the capabilities of four-legged sappers with modern electronics. However, not with mine detectors, but first of all with communication facilities. This makes the work of the dog handler safer, although there are problems such as recognizing the voice of the host distorted by radio communication. However, according to Major Denis Yarlykov, senior lecturer of the Mine Rescue Service training cycle, it is quite possible that the future lies in such a combined approach.
Attempts to create an electronic device, partially or completely replacing the canine (or at least human) nose, are being made for a long time. However, the success so far has been rather modest – in terms of sensitivity, the dog's nose does not leave the devices the slightest chance.
A nose like a dog's
Why are dogs considered to be unsurpassed bloodhounds? The fact is that evolution has generously endowed them with a completely outstanding sense of smell. Scientists say that the sensitivity of the canine nose is four to five orders of magnitude (that is, 10,000 to 100,000 times greater) than that of the human nose. A dog's nose is capable of detecting a substance in the air in the concentration of about one part per trillion (approximately the same concentration as the evaporation of one drop of ethyl alcohol in 20 million cubic meters of air).
However, in addition to sensitivity, dogs have quite exceptional olfactory selectivity, i.e. the ability to pick out among many odors just the right one. The human olfactory epithelium is only 2 to 4 cm2 and contains 6 to 10 million olfactory receptors. In dogs the epithelium area is 10-100 times more, and the number of receptors reaches 300 million! The nerve impulses from the olfactory neurons go to the olfactory bulb, the brain region responsible for the processing of this data – a dog has about 40 times the share of this region in the total brain volume compared to a human. This is the reason why a dog can detect up to 2 million odors (compared to the measly 10 thousand that an average human can detect). In addition, the special construction of a dog's nose makes it possible to separate the cycles of breathing and sniffing, and to use the "stereo effect" of the two nostrils to establish the direction of the odor gradient.
Electronic Nose
A dog's nose is a tool with unparalleled sensitivity. But it has drawbacks as well. A dog can't tell you exactly what (what type of explosives or drugs) it has detected. In addition, a dog is a living creature that can get tired and make mistakes. Therefore, at facilities where it is necessary to minimize the probability of errors (for example, at airports), the canine service is supplemented by electronic gas analyzers.
Such "artificial noses" most often use the principle of ion mobility spectrometry. The sucked in air is partially ionized by a low-power radioactive source or an electric discharge. The ions first pass through a shutter, which is periodically opened briefly. The most common is the Bradbury-Nielsen shutter, a grid of wires to which an alternating current is applied through one. A strong electric field is generated between the wires, which deflects the ions.
However, at short moments of time, when the voltage on the grid passes through zero, the ions freely enter the drift zone, where they move under the action of a homogeneous electric field through the air at atmospheric pressure, literally squeezing among the air molecules. In this case, molecules of different substances take different time to get from the gate to the collecting electrode. By measuring the time dependence of the number of ions reaching the finish line, one can see peaks corresponding to the time of passing through the drift chamber by ions of different substances.
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