George Livergood knows more about his dog than most people know about their kids.
For nine years, the 57-year-old Chicago police officer has patrolled the corridors of Midway and O’Hare airports with Arno, a Belgian Malinois trained to detect explosives, and the effectiveness of the search depends on Livergood’s ability to read his pooch like a poker champ. n Livergood recognizes that if Arno licks his lips while sniffing a piece of luggage, there’s probably nothing more dangerous inside than a moldy sandwich. He knows that a droopy expression means the dog is bored, in need of a break or a pep talk. And he realizes that when Arno sits down by a car, his lips puckering and quivering, his cheeks puffing with excitement, it’s time to call the bomb squad. n “I love my dog. I love the dog program,” says Livergood, a fast-talking cop with a barrel chest and a silvery flattop. “I wouldn’t be a true believer if I didn’t think our dogs were better than anything else.” n It’s a common sentiment in law enforcement and the military, where the dog has a centuries-long record of distinguished service. Canines have defended ancient Greek fortresses, brought canteens to the wounded on the battlefields of World War I and chased down countless perps from Chicago to Shanghai. n But the dog’s status as the gold standard of security work is starting to be challenged. Researchers are experimenting with a wide range of animals whose cheap cost, easy trainability and hyper-acute senses are allowing them to grab a small but growing piece of Rover’s action. n “Very often people who hear about the project start laughing. They think it’s a joke,” says Bart Weetjens, who has trained African giant pouched rats to detect land mines. “Then they see it’s serious, see that it works, that it can be useful. In this case, [rats] can save human lives.”
Weetjens grew up in Belgium with an odd taste in pets. His idea of a great animal companion was a gerbil, a mouse or some other rodent, creatures whose surprisingly keen noses left a lasting impression: One hamster with a yen for the scent of armpit loved to slip inside Weetjens’ shirt cuff and climb until she reached the promised land.
Like all mammals, her ancestors had developed a sharp sense of smell to stay alive during the reign of the dinosaurs, when furry, bite-size critters dared not show themselves by day. “Their adaptations reflect this long period where they were basically masters of the night,” says Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum. “With both the exquisite adaptations of olfaction and acoustics, mammals are really unmatched in the animal kingdom.”
When Weetjens became an engineer, looking for a way to help African nations rid themselves of land mines, he knew that dogs weren’t an option. Though they’ve been successful mine hunters since the Vietnam War, they can cost $20,000 each to train and thousands more to feed and board, too steep a price for much of the developing world.
That’s when Weetjens remembered his beloved rodents. Certainly they would be cheaper-and perhaps equally effective.
A colleague suggested the African giant pouched rat, which is big-the size of a cat-but not heavy enough to set off a mine. It’s resistant to the diseases of sub-Saharan Africa and can live for up to eight years. And because it hides its food in the ground, it’s accustomed to sniffing out buried objects.
Weetjens set up base at a Tanzanian university and created a training regimen of positive reinforcement. He gave each rat a whiff of TNT, then offered it a banana or some peanuts. Soon, the rat associated the odor of the explosive with food, and could pick it out of a medley of scents. When it came across the smell in the field, it would scratch at the ground, telling its handlers that a mine might lie beneath.
At a cost of about $5,000 per rodent, Weetjens built a group of 250 rats, some of which have already been dispatched to a minefield in Mozambique. Each has proven to have a personality as distinct as any dog’s-some are stubborn, some are lazy, some are workaholics-and such individual traits have caused the trainers to grow fond of their charges, though Weetjens says the rats remain haughtily focused on their job.
“The bond can be a problem with dogs. They want to play,” he says. “A rat is rewarded on food. It keeps on going.”
Geva Zin was also looking for an alternative to explosive-sniffing hounds, but he was driven more by curiosity than necessity. A veteran of the Israel Defense Forces’ canine unit, he was training mine dogs in Eastern Europe when he noticed an animal that seemed born to scour the ground.
“I look on the pig in Croatia, always his nose is in the land,” Zin recalls in his labored English. “He put the nose in the water, in mud. He don’t care. He smell inside, look for small animal, mushrooms, small roots.”
Zin returned to Israel and talked a research institute into hosting a training center for mine-detecting pigs-no small accomplishment in a land whose dominant religion regards swine as nature’s foulest creature. As he worked with the undersized Sinclair breed, Zin came to believe the ancient bias was unfair: The pigs were clean, hard-working and intelligent, as capable as a dog of finding a bomb beneath the earth.
That prompted him to explore another animal’s potential for security work. As a soldier, he had used dogs to search Palestinians’ cars for explosives at border crossings, and he vividly recalls the volcanic arguments sparked by canines, considered filthy, wretched beasts in Arab cultures. Goats, Zin reasoned, would be a far less offensive choice.
He says the results for both animals have been encouraging, but that moving from the practice ground to the real world doesn’t promise to be easy. With decades of investment in dog work, Israeli military officials have scoffed at his innovations, he says.
“The IDF doesn’t like a new idea. They are very square,” he grumbles. “They believe in dogs. ‘Don’t tell me about pigs, don’t tell me about goats.’ Army people are very, very square.”
That might be true in Israel, but in the United States, the military has eagerly explored the promise of new animal sentries. In the late 1990s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s top R&D shop, approached a Georgia scientist about his studies of wasps that use scent to find caterpillar-ravaged plants. Was it possible for those same insects to smell explosives?
Thus was born the concept of the Wasp Hound. Researchers taught the bugs to detect various odors, rewarding success with a dose of sugar water. Unlike other creatures, which can take months to prepare, a wasp can learn to pick out a scent in less than five minutes, says Glen Rains, a University of Georgia agriculture professor who has worked on the project. And each wasp costs only pennies to produce, he added.
The Wasp Hound is a wand loaded with several of the insects. When the wasps encounter the odor they’ve been trained to recognize, they crowd around the small hole that allows air into their chamber. A computer tracks their movement and tells the person holding the wand that a bomb could be near.
Rains says the device would be most useful in controlled settings, such as inspecting a car or suitcase. It has proven successful in trial runs but research funding has run out, so further investment would be needed to bring the Wasp Hound to market.
Another military project, developed by the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research, is an early-warning system for water contamination that uses bluegills as an aquatic version of a canary in a coal mine. The fish, confined to a submerged tank, are hooked to electrodes that track signs of stress, alerting attendants to check the water for possible toxins. The monitor is already being used in a New York City reservoir.
The Navy, meanwhile, has its own corps of underwater protectors. Since Vietnam, it has trained dolphins to use their built-in sonar to search for sea mines or enemy frogmen. Though they were deployed as recently as 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war, they appear fated to be replaced by underwater robotic vehicles.
“The Navy’s stated premise in developing technology is to get the human beings and all life forms out of places that are dangerous,” says spokesman Tom Lapuzza.
Indeed, many scientists are pursuing high-tech devices that one day could put detection animals out of business. Teong Lim, founder of Newberry Park, Calif.-based Electronic Sensor Technology, says his company’s $27,000 zNose instantly identifies a wide range of dangerous odors, including chemicals that dogs aren’t trained to find.
Such “electronic sniffers” are one more challenge to the dog’s preeminent security role, but don’t cry for Fido just yet. Demand for canine services has jumped in the post-9/11 world, and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which trains bomb dogs for airports and mass-transit systems, has tried to ensure an adequate supply with its own breeding program.
The first subjects were Labrador retrievers donated by the Australian Customs Service, but like all breeders, TSA officials couldn’t help but dream of a superdog. And so, seeking to mix the endurance of a Labrador with the otherworldly sniffing powers of a Hungarian hunting dog known as a vizsla, they created the Vizslador.
The TSA says initial results have been promising. One puppy joined the training program at 8 months old-the typical Lab doesn’t start until 14 months-and graduated to a job at Dallas’ Love Field Airport. There, the reddish, floppy-eared dog named Qquigley (the first “Q” denotes the litter that produced him) inspects vehicles and luggage, roams the perimeter and mixes with passengers. He’s a friendly fellow who can morph into the Incredible Hulk at the first hint of an explosive.
“When he gets his nose on it [during training sessions], man, I tell you, he pulls you as hard as he can,” says Terence Crear, Qquigley’s handler. “He’s just a mean machine.”
And at the end of the day, he goes home to play football with Crear’s kids. Try doing that with a wasp.
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To watch a video about security dogs that work at O’Hare International Airport, visit chicagotribune.com/superpets.
