Cancer In Dogs

shari forbes: dogs are referred to as man'sbest friend, and apologies if you're a cat lover; it's not me who says that, it's justwhat they're known as. they're members of the canidae family -- the family that alsoincludes wolves, jackals, coyotes, foxes, all those dog-like mammals. the domestic dogis a sub-species of the grey wolf. scientific name is canis lupus, and many of the dogsstill look or resemble their ancestors the wolf -- so, the husky, the shepherds, youcan probably think of a few others. but the majority of dogs don't resemble the wolf,as you all know, and regardless of this, it has been, even if you can't believe it, it'sbeen proven that they genetically diverged from their ancestors the wolf approximately15,000 years ago. and so as you probably can

imagine, 15,000 years is a long time, theyare in fact one of the oldest domestic species in the world.so why did we bother domesticating the wolf? well, basically it was the early hunter-gathererswho actually tried to domesticate them because of their amazing hunting capability. so theyused them to hunt for food and to assist them in capturing prey and that was really theirfirst role in a domesticated environment. their second domestic role was for herding.so you may be familiar with shepherds herding livestock, particularly in mountainous regions,and you will be familiar with the fact that many farms still use dogs for herding live,sorry, livestock such as sheep and cattle -- domestic livestock.their other historical role that they're well

known for is carrying and pulling loads, andthe well-recognised would be the huskies, who are often seen pulling sleds, which carryboth passengers as well as carrying supplies and resources and food. and that's often invery icy or snowy conditions, such as canada, where i spent quite a bit of time. so theyhave been around for a long time in their domestic roles, but we continue to expandthose roles. you're probably familiar with the rescue dogs; the most famous or well-knownwould be the st bernards. these are the ones that were originally used in the italian andswiss alps to find missing people, and now they're often sent in to find in missing hikersand other people as well. but most of us would be more familiar with dogs just simply ascompanionship, so most of us probably have

a dog simply as a pet, not for hunting orherding or anything else. they're also used for assistance though, so as well as beinga companion they can also assist people in need, such as the guide dogs that assist thevisually impaired. and this assistance has been extended into other industries and thepolice and the military is the one that i'll probably focus mostly only tonight, becausethat's where we work with these dogs. so within the military, police have been,sorry, the military have been using them for many years. dogs have actually been used inwarfare since as early as the 7th century bc, but most of the knowledge we have of dogsin warfare is to do with the last century or so, particularly with world war 1, worldwar 2 and subsequent wars thereafter. in world

war 1, they were used to deliver messages,not unlike the carrier pigeon. they were also used again for their pulling power, so theywere used to pull guns and ammunition, and you can see here an image of the belgian machineguns being transported onto the battlefield by one of their dogs, and this was not uncommonto see this. during world war 2, they were used again,similar to rescue dogs, to actually recover injured soldiers or injured victims from thebattlefield and to get them back to safety. unfortunately towards the end of world war2, they became very experimental, so attempts were made to actually strap explosives tothem and send them onto the battlefield to try and destroy invading tanks. they werealso used for medical experimentation. i'm

pleased to say, both of those roles failedpretty miserably, so as a result dogs were no longer used for experiments, or experimentation,and so most dogs from world war 1 and world war 2 are remembered as in fact war heroes-- as being very instrumental to the military unit that they were a part of.one of the best known examples of this, and you may have heard this story, if you haven'tit's with the smithsonian institute that you can read it, was a very small dog known assergeant stubby. now i know he doesn't look scary, so what was he doing in the military?but h was actually a very important war hero. at the end of world war 1, he was the mostdecorated war dog in history. he was also the first dog to be officially promoted throughthe ranks to sergeant. so his name is just

stubby. sergeant is in fact his title, andhis rank, and you can see here he's very well decorated with the medals on his coat. nowsergeant stubby started his life as a stray, so he was actually taken in by an officerwho was living on a military base at that time in america. but he very quickly becameintegrated into the unit. so each day he would go out with the officers, the soldiers. hewould actually perform the drills with them, he learnt all of their bugle calls and heeven had a modified salute. so at the time that the sergeants would stand to attention,or soldiers would stand to attention salute, sergeant stubby would do the same as besthe could. so he stood to attention, he raised his little right paw, he placed it on is righteyebrow, and that was his salute. and this

is what i'm told; he did actually do it. sohe was really considered a member of that unit. he was very instrumental to the military,and as a result of that, he got taken to war -- very unheard of back then.now why is he so well decorated? well, he was with that unit for 18 months on the battlefieldon the western front, and during that time, he was involved in 17 battles. he did a numberof amazing things. he did rescue a large number of soldiers, injured soldiers, from the battlefield;i don't know how, because he was about 1/10 the size of any of those soldiers, but hedid it. amazingly, he caught a german spy, so the story goes. so he actually managedto attack a german spy, hold onto him, keep him there long enough until somebody camein and helped him out. but the one that he's

really well known for, and is probably realisticallythe main one that he really did, was the fact that he detected a gas attack before anyoneelse. so a mustard gas attack; basically the gas grenades were thrown into their sleepingquarters for his particular unit, very early in the morning, pre-dawn. everybody else wassound asleep, but because of his amazing sense of smell, he actually woke, recognised itas a dangerous substance, and proceeded to awaken everyone else in that unit. so he barkedat them; he even bit them if they wouldn't wake up, until he had the whole unit up andout of there. and as a result they evacuated everyone without any injuries or fatalities.and this is really the reason that he's got so many medals on his jacket today. so hewas very much considered a part of that unit,

as i've already said.but as i also said, it's really their sense of smell. this is why we continue to use themfor hunting, and all the other roles that we've trained them for over history. and i'lljust give you a quick rundown on sense of smell, because i think most of you probablyknow that dogs have a far superior sense of smell to humans, although we're pretty goodcompared to some other animals as well. humans do use all five senses, but we rely very heavilyon sight. so coming here tonight, not sure which way you walked, but you would have beenguiding your way here by people you saw, traffic lights that stopped you, cars coming towardsyou and so on, and that's really how you interact on a day-to-day basis. dogs also use all oftheir senses, including sight, but they rely

most heavily on smell. so they would haveseen all of that as well, but they see it as scent pictures, so they would have seenthe scent of that traffic light, the scent of those cars and the scent of the peoplethat they actually passed. and this is why they're so great at odour detection. if wecompare their olfactory system to ours, you can see it does look quite different. andthe main thing to know is the complementary thing for both of us is, when we inhale anodour, the gaseous molecules go into our nose, into our nasal cavity. they're dissolved inthe mucous membranes, and they bind to an olfactory receptor which sends a signal toour brains, saying 'this smells like something', whatever it might be.the difference, mainly, is that those olfactory

receptors are part of the olfactory cellsin the nasal cavity, and while humans have about five million olfactory cells, dogs,depending on their breed, can have anywhere from 100 -- 300 million olfactory cells, soalready they're superior to us because they have more cells there. the reason they havemore, or one of, is that the area where our cells are contained is about the size of apostage stamp, whereas the area that the dogs' cells are contained is 17 times larger, sothey can actually house more cells and therefore more receptors, and as a result this translatesto the fact that they can smell more compounds than we can. so an average human might beable to detect hundreds of compounds, sometimes thousands if you have a really great senseof smell. dogs can usually detect thousands,

if not tens of thousands, of compounds. sothey have an ability to just detect far more compounds than we can possibly process.the other reason they're so good, and the reason we use them for odour detection, iswhat we call enhanced sensitivity. and i'll use the following analogy to explain this:basically if somebody walked into the room at the moment, say they came into the backof the room. you wouldn't need to turn around before, after a few minutes, you would startto smell the odour of pizza. and i think everyone in this room would probably recognise thatfor what it was -- it smells like pizza, so somebody's got pizza in the room -- who isit? that's not going to happen, but say that was going to. the reason you can smell thatas pizza is because humans process scents

as a mixture, so they just take all the compounds,they put it into a mixture, they send a signal to the brain, sorry, the olfactory receptorsends a signal to the brain saying 'this cumulatively smells like pizza.' what it doesn't tell youbrain is whether it's a pepperoni pizza, a cheese pizza, hawaiian, supreme, whateverit is you've actually got. the difference with the dogs is that they can process that.so instead of just smelling pizza, they're actually smelling the individual ingredients,so they smell the scent of dough, they smell the scent of tomato sauce, cheese, capsicum,onion, pepperoni, whatever you've actually put on the pizza. and this is what we callenhanced sensitivity -- the ability to key in on individual compounds, not just a mixture,and also on top of that to actually not just

key in on them, but to exclude surroundingodours as well. so we tend to exclude surrounding odours to a degree, but they can really narrowdown a particular odour, no matter how many interfering odours are around them. sometimesthere is a limit, but generally they're very, very good at, so that's the reason we usethem for scent detection. in law enforcement we have quite a range,but you may have heard that tother industries are starting to use them quite extensivelyas well, and we'll just go through a few of those. the firearms and explosive dogs andthe currency and drugs dogs; you're probably familiar with these ones; they do tend tobe in the news. you may not have seen them; they often work a little bit behind the scenesat airports and seaports and other areas of

border crossing, but you may also have seenthem -- sometimes they are out visible. the other ones we use a lot are the accelerantdetection canines. these dogs are trained to alert the scent of flammable or ignitableliquids, and so what they're trying to do is locate a source, a potential area wherean accelerant may be present, and that guides the investigators in terms of collecting evidencein an area and then sending that to the lab with the hope that if an accelerant is confirmed,this gives information that it is an intentionally set fire.the other ones we have are illegal wildlife trading, and that's very important in australia,and also a whole range of other contrabands. so you've probably heard you can train a dogto detect almost anything, and it's not far

from the truth. you may have read recentlyin the newspaper about an initiative by the nsw government to train dogs to detect mobilephone contraband, and these were mobile phones that were being illegally brought into prisons,and obviously prisoners are not meant to have access to them, and these dogs, very successfully,were able to find the majority of mobile phones that were illegally housed within that prison.so there's a really broad range of uses, and we continue to expand those uses.the other areas that are starting to really investigate the use of scent detection isthe medical field. so we have what's known as diabetic or hypo alert dogs. these dogsare trained to detect low blood sugar levels, so when the odour from the breath of theirowner is -- sorry, when their owner has a

low blood sugar level, the odour from theirbreath is quite different do when they have a normal blood sugar level, and they can actuallyalert their owner well before the owner would even know that it's dropping.they also have cancer detection dogs. this is a little bit debateable at the moment;we're still very much training in this area and researching, but there are specific cancertypes that give off volatile biomarkers in the dogs ... sorry, i should have the imageup there ... in a person's breath, and they can detect that as well.the conservation canines, we use them to count endangered species in the particular environment,and if you've travelled recently internationally, you'll probably know the daff biosecurityrisk dogs; their names just recently changed.

these are the guys that you often see runningaround the carousel, sniffing at your luggage. what they're looking for is nothing dangerous;they just want to know if you're carrying an apple or a banana or some nuts or somethingelse that we told you not to bring into australia but that you forgot that you left in yourbag. and it's not the food that they're concerned about; it's really the pest species that couldbe contained within those food products, and it can be really detrimental to our ecosystem.so there's, again, a huge range of other assistance dogs and alert dogs that we have. tonight,however, i'd just like to focus on two. that's what's known as the live scent or trackingdog, and the human remains or cadaver detection dog. that's where most of my work is in, thelatter one there.

so live scent tracking, you're probably familiarwith, because this is the one that's been with the police the longest; it's the onethat on tv you see them present clothing to the dog, it's from a victim or an offender.the dog scents it and then goes off and miraculously finds the person. it's not really that miraculous;they're just doing their job, and the way it actually works is that they're basing iton what's known as a unique odour profile. so whether or not you all knew it, each oneof you has a unique odour profile. maybe you can smell it, maybe you can't. certainly adog would be able to smell that. the reason it's unique is a number of reasons; it's basedon your genetics, but also on cultural influences. so the first thing with your genetics is thatwe all secrete bodily fluids differently -- we

all sweat differently, basically, is whatwe're saying there. on top of that, we all metabolise foods and beverages and other thingsdifferently as well. and we may or may not have some form of a disease, so some of usmight have diabetes, unfortunately some people will have cancer, as i mentioned earlier.as you can imagine, no two people could really secrete bodily fluids, metabolised foods andhave the same disease in the exact same ratio. and so this means naturally you're going tohave a unique profile. but to add on top of that, you all have cultural influences thatjust continue to make it more and more unique. your diet, for example; are you somebody wholoves onion and garlic? and you can certainly smell that the next day, but so can the dogs.are you somebody who has a lot of spices in

you food, for example? even just your toiletries-- what kind of shampoo you use, deodorant, makeup, cologne. all of these things thatwe don't really think about each day that is changing our odour profile. our clothingcan even change it, if we like to wear natural products, such as cotton or wool, and thathas a different odour to synthetic products such as polyesters. so those can change aswell. and then just your living conditions -- are you a smoker, do you live with somebodywho smokes, do you like to burn aromatherapy candles when you have a bath, do you liketo burn incense each day? all of these are giving off odours that are being taken upby your body to a certain degree. so all of those combined means, as you can probablysee, that we can't possibly have two people

with the same odour profile, and that's whatthe scent tracking dogs are actually relying on.so how do they go about tracking? well, here's a schematic to show you the important things.basically, we call it a scent pool or a scent cone. the scent pool is your odour that justnaturally stays with you. so if you were out missing in the woods, you were feeling thirsty,you were feeling weak, you lay down, that scent pool would just hover around you ina fairly small radius or diameter, so it wouldn't really travel far. and these are not greatconditions for the dogs to try and find you in. what is very valuable to them is any degreeof wind, so the smallest amount of wind would change that scent pool into a scent cone,and this is what's very beneficial, because

it disperses the odour, so it gives the dogsa better chance of finding it, but it also forms that cone so that once they pick upthe scent, they can actually key in using their enhanced sensitivity and follow thatback to the point of the cone. and theoretically, that's where you should be, whether or you'realive or deceased. and so that's what the dogs are really relying on, is any kind ofwind in the environment to pick up your scent and then key in on it.the other thing that's really important and often is forgotten and, i think, is equallyimportant, is actually the canine handler. so we think about the dogs just running offand doing these things themselves, and that's really not the case. the handler is integral;he or she is part of the team. the reason

that's important is because of the relationshipthat forms between the handler and the dog. as you all know, dogs can't talk, so the dogcan't tell us 'i've picked up the scent, it's over there, i'm going off, follow me if youfeel like it.' what the dog is trying to tell the owner is, 'i've picked up the scent',but he's going to do that using changing behaviour, and it's going to have very subtle cues thatthe handler needs to be able to recognise. and so that's why that relationship is really,really important -- that the handler can actually recognise those cues, and you'll see someof them later in the video. the other important thing is to remember thatthe dog, like the police officer and like sergeant stubby, is a member of the policeforce, so they are really an integral part

of the team and also of the police community.and before i go on and talk about what we do here, i'd actually just like to share astory with you, and this is just one case example i have too tonight. this is not aforensic case example, i'll warn you straight away, but it is one of my favourite stories,and the reason i tell this story is because at the time, and up until i actually conductedthis case, it wasn't really clear to me just how important that relationship was betweenthe dog and the handler. it also wasn't clear to me that the dogs were really a police officer,a police officer in a dog form. and this case was a really good example, and that's whyi'd like to share it with you. i was in canada at the time; this was wheni was working and consulting for the ontario

provincial police and most of my requestswere to assist with searching or locating buried human remains -- that's where my expertiselay. this particular case, we were asked to locate buried canine remains. this is whyit's not forensic. this was in october 2011, it was the ontario provincial police northbay detachment, and what they asked us was whether we could conduct a search of the frontlawn -- their front lawn, i should say -- to locate a canine known as cloud the second,and i'll just call him cloud from hereon in. so cloud was a live scent tracking dog withthe ontario provincial police, and so i'll just warn you this is a story about a livescent tracking dog, not about using a live scent tracking dog, so there is a difference.and cloud was in fact the victim in this particular

case. why we were looking for his buried remainsresulted from his final operation. so his final operation involved a fairly notoriousor infamous person in canada known as donald kelly. this was back in 1975, i should mention.donald kelly was currently in prison, he was awaiting trial for a double murder chargeand he managed to overpower a prison guard and flee from prison with a rifle and a stolencar. he was on the run for approximately two weeks, at which point the police decided tocall in cloud and his handler to see whether or not he could in fact pick up kelly's scent.and he was successful in doing this; he actually found the fugitive hiding in a remote wildernesscabin, approximately 140 kilometres from the prison, so he had travelled some distancebut remember he had stolen a vehicle so he

could do that. so the police surrounded thecabin, and unfortunately around that time, the fugitive became aware of their presence.as they approached the cabin, the fugitive fled. and at this point they sent cloud aheadof them; they sent cloud in, and that's typically what they do, to try and hold the fugitiveand see if the fugitive is armed and try and disarm him, basically. as he ran in, the policestarted to fire, because they didn't want kelly to escape again, so they started tofire at the fleeing fugitive as cloud started to run towards him as well. now cloud wassuccessful in grabbing him; he got a hold of his back calf and he held him there untilthe police arrived. unfortunately before they arrived, kelly was armed and he simply turned,he placed his gun to the back of cloud's head,

and he fired. and that was his attempt totry and escape from cloud. now, they were successful in recovering andcapturing the fugitive donald kelly but unfortunately cloud did die at the scene, several momentslater. so he was killed in the line of duty, and as i said this was back in 1975. whati was told, and what became very amazing to me, and this is when i really appreciate whatthey meant to the police was, because he was killed in the line of duty, he was treatedjust as a police officer. he was given a full police burial involving all of the policecommunity, the commissioner, everyone else was there. he was buried in a plywood casketthat was encased in concrete, and he was buried beneath the flagpole on their front lawn.so this was really a very meaningful moment

for the police community, because he was infact the first dog, the first opp dog to die in the line of duty, ever, in their history,so it was a big deal. so as i said, he was buried beneath the flagpole. before i go on,i should show you what cloud looks like, so there's cloud the second. he was a shepherd,and as i said these are the ones you're probably most familiar with, and he has his workingcollar on. now, later on you'll see in the video that they do use working harnesses now,but at the time it was a working collar. what that means is that as soon as you put it onthe dog, they know they're in work mode, so it tells them they're about to start trackingor scenting. this image was taken shortly before his death, and this is cloud with thishandler; at the time it was constable ray

carson, and ray has subsequently retired asa staff sergeant, so he went right through the ranks.okay, as i said, buried beneath the flagpole. obvious question -- why did they need me tofind him? unfortunately, as you can see, this is not a building from the 1970s. this isa fairly recently renovated building -- this is the north bay detachment. there have beennumerous renovations over the years; the flagpole had been repeatedly moved because the entrancehad been repeatedly moved, and unfortunately once the handler had left there were no goodhistorical informational records of where that original flagpole had actually been.so the second question then is, why, after 36 years, did they suddenly want to recoverhis remains? if they hadn't worried about

it now, why was it so important? because thesepremises were being vacate by the police, and they'd actually sold it to developers,and the absolute last thing they wanted was some developer to bring up his remains. asone of the officers said to me on the day, 'we simply don't leave one of our own behind.'and that was really important to them, so they wanted to recover his remains and thenbe able to cremate him so he wasn't moving from burial ground to burial ground. so that'swhy i was called in. now, the first thing i can tell you is thatwe weren't going to use a scent detection dog to find a scent detection dog. they'renot trained to look for human remains. so that was out of the question. instead, wechose to use geophysical equipment. i'll talk

about this a bit more later, but ground penetratingradar you may have heard of, and it's very useful for searching sub-surface, so belowthe soil. so we were called in -- you can just see the police gridding up here -- andwe set up our own grids and we run the radar over it and collect all the data and thenwe sit down and look at it and say okay, where's the most likely place that cloud's actuallyburied? and it just happened that it was this quadrant that he was buried in, so we quicklylocated the area of interest. we did have an excavator there; we normally wouldn't fora forensic investigation but we did for this one, because we knew he was buried in a casketencase in concrete, so this was going to be a heavy gravesite. very quickly, you can seei don't do a lot of digging -- normally i

do, but the police don't always allow me todo digging. so very quickly the police found the plywood casket, and soon also found evidenceof the concrete, so we knew we'd hit it, we knew we had the gravesite. we were able toclear that up -- i did actually dig for this part. we were able to clear around it andrecover the casket and thankfully the excavator was there, because there was absolutely noway we were lifting that concrete-encased casket out of the gravesite. so here it ishere -- hopefully you can get a sense of the size. i'll just show you -- it stood aboutthis stall, and it was probably about this long, so it was quite a big casket, becausehe was also quite a big dog in life. i'm just going to pause on this slide, because i'dactually like to share a bit more of the story

with you.so, as we were standing around thinking, 'how are we going to open this casket that's stillgot concrete around it?' i was actually approached by a young man -- there were probably about30 police officers here that day, but this one wasn't in uniform. and this young manidentified himself to me as the son of ray carson, who was the handler of cloud. andhe said to me, he gave me some really valuable information, and he said ray was now 76 yearsold, he retired as i said as a staff sergeant, and unfortunately he had advanced parkinson'sdisease, so he was not very well. he was in a nursing home, he rarely left the nursinghome, he didn't even go out for christmas or thanksgiving, his son said, but importantlyhe was here that day. he said that he felt

doing. so his son actually asked me if i'dbe willing to be talk to ray, which of course respect -- and that's cloud being treatedwith respect, not himself, which we were obviously i was happy to do, and the first thing raysaid to me was 'well, it's been 36 years, what are we really expecting here? we're probablyjust expecting a bunch of bones, right? i know he's not going to look like he did theday we buried him.' and i was going to agree with him, because 36 years is a really longtime, but then i looked over and thought well, we had this immaculately preserved casket,which it shouldn't be -- after 36 years it shouldn't look anything like this, and itwas encased in concrete. as i mentioned, for those of you who don'tknow, north bay's about five hours, six hours

north of toronto in canada. it's a very coldclimate; during summer, the highs are barely over 20; during winter the lows are minus20. so year round it's a fairly cold climate, and this was a deep grave. that helped topreserve the casket. and i said to ray, 'is there anything else you can tell me aboutthe burial? because the casket looks really good, and i want to believe that cloud mightlook equally as good, but that's really going to depend on what's happening inside thatcasket.' and he said 'actually, yeah, i can tell you a few things. i do remember it. onthe day we buried him, we decided to wrap him in his favourite sleeping bag.' so cloudused to sleep in a green, fairly thick woollen sleeping bag every night on his bed, and they'dthought it would be really comforting for

him to be wrapped in this sleeping bag. iguess that meant a lot to them, and probably him -- i'm not sure. and so they said, 'yeah,we wrapped him in this sleep bag and put him in the casket. we also put down plastic, becausewe just didn't feel like we wanted his fur to get all scratched by the wood.' it probablydidn't matter, but it's a really nice thought -- again, it was really comforting for themto think that he was being treated really well. and he was -- he was given a fantasticburial. what was valuable was that information, because what i do know from my expertise indecomposition is that when you wrap a body, it actually helps to slow down decomposition,and in some instances it can even preserve the body by forming a substance known as [adiposea].combined with all the information that i had

and this really great looking casket here,i said to ray 'you know, i'm just going to have a guess -- i think he's going to lookas good as the casket does.' ray was pretty sceptical -- that's fair enough; it had been36 years. but that's what i told him, and he said 'okay, that's what i'll prepare myselffor seeing cloud looking exactly the same.' he said that a bit mocking me, but that'sfine -- he's allowed to do that. so we opened -- sorry, i'll finally get back to the slide-- we opened the casket; you can see on the right hand side, the green sleeping bag. soit was still intact; very little degradation to it, even the zipper, well, it didn't workbut it was still there, which was important. and on the left is the green plastic thatthey had put down, and it had moved a bit

during us moving the casket, but generallyit was all still intact. now the fact that it took three police officersplus myself to lift his remains out of that casket told me immediately that he had notdecomposed, so he was very well preserved, because he basically weighed the same in deathas he did in life, which i'm told for shepherds can be 60, 70 kilos, which is why they usethem for tracking dogs and things like that. so just a warning, the next image may be distressingto some of you, because it's an opening of the sleeping bag. so we did open the sleepingbag, we took off the plastic, and ray was present for this part -- this was really thepart he wanted to be there for. and if you didn't know he was a shepherd beforehand,i think you could have guessed it from this

image. that's how well he was preserved, andi personally have never seen remains as preserved as this particular animal. it was truly phenomenal.i guess the one thing i can say is the best part of my job, if you can really think there'sa good part to it, is the fact that i get to be part of a team that assists in providingresolution to a victim's family -- that's what we do. now, cloud is by no means human,and he was a victim, and ray was his family, and so we provided resolution that day. andeven though it should have been a really sombre mood, everyone was just really happy. it wasa great outcome for us -- it's not a forensic story, but it is one of my favourites becausenot only did i see an amazing thing that day with the preservation, but i also helped inthat resolution, and really that's the best

we can essentially do. so that's the storyof cloud; as i said, i do have another case example later on. just to conclude thoughwhat happened to him, i mentioned they did want to cremate him and they did that. theyput his remains in an urn and that working collar, we actually recovered that, so thatwas well and truly preserved, and they've got that on display on the ontario provincialpolice museum should anyone ever be up that way in canada and want to visit it. again,if it's not really clear to you what he meant to the handler, just to show you again whathe meant to the police, not only did they give him a full burial originally, but uponthe exhumation, they then held another ceremony to honour his memory. it was a special recognitionceremony held in january 2012, 37 years later.

so he was still meaning a lot to the policethen, and because he was the first dog to die in the line of duty for the opp, he'snow recognised as the face of the opp canine unit, so any memorabilia you see if theirs,logos, everything else, it has that picture of cloud that you saw earlier, and again,it just shows you what these dogs really mean in terms of being a member of that policecommunity. now, that's a live scent tracking dog. asi said, most of our work is actually with cadaver detection dogs, and many years ago,they decided to separate the two. at one point, they used to have dogs doing both -- tryingto find human, ah sorry, living and deceased humans. that became a real challenge for thedogs, so now we just train them either as

live scent tracking or as cadaver detectiondogs. now, the reason we use them, or when we do use them, is predominantly for victimrecovery, so we use them for missing persons, usually missing persons that we believe tobe deceased simply based on the amount of time they've been missing. we use them forhomicide investigations where there's evidence that perhaps an attempt was made to concealevidence of a homicide or of a crime, and more and more they're being used for disasters.so you probably know they've been used in natural disasters, such as the japan earthquake,this image here, and the tsunami that followed, as well as man-made disasters. this is animage from 9/11, the world trade centre attacks, and just to give you an idea, they had over1000 live scent and cadaver detection dogs

following the 9/11 attacks, and that was formany weeks after, looking for both living and deceased victims, so it was a huge endeavourthey undertook. as i said, we now train them just to searchand locate human remains, so human remains can be anything, really. it can be a wholebody, or it could be something like a body that's been completely skeletonised, has beenscavenged and scattered and those bones dispersed over a really large area. so it can be quitea broad scenario for the dogs to work with. it can be those clandestine graves i mentioned,which is really difficult because they're trying to detect an odour beneath the soilsurface. and as i said, it can be disaster victims, but the kind of disaster is verybroad. it could be, as you can see, this is

reika -- no, sorry, this is dare. apologies.this is one of the opp canines that i worked with -- cadaver dogs that i worked with incanada. and he's searching through rubble following an earthquake. so that's one scenario,but he could equally be tasked with looking for remains in a water environment, such asfollowing a tsunami, which is a completely different environment. and again, as i said,their ability is just to key in on that odour, decomposition odour, amongst all the interferingbackground odours. the one on the right here is bertie; he'swith the nsw police. you'll see him later, i think. and here he's actually tasked withan indoor scene; this is a crime scene, so they can also do crime scenes as well. so,at this point i did want to just show you

a brief video. the first thing i wanted toshow you was how -- this is a fairly short video -- but just show you how they're actuallytrained. so the police are the handlers, and they are also the trainers. i'm just veryprivileged that i get to attend their training, and i'll talk more to you about what we dofrom our training perspective, but if we could just bring up the first video on pause, i'lljust explain what you're going to see. as i said, it's fairly short, but this is thetraining scenario. it's an indoor environment that they use, and the way these dogs aretrained, it's a pretty common police method, is to line up cinder blocks, so they havea series that they run around. within each cinder block they place a metal can, becauseit has no odour, or very minimal odour. we

place our training aids inside that can, avery small amount, 1ml or sometimes less, and then we seal that can and put some holesin the tops so the odour permeates through. what you're going to see is just how theyteach the dogs to actually detect these odours. they ask, or basically they task the dog tofind the odour, so they say 'find it' as they're going along, and you'll see the handler actuallypresent the dog with each can. it's important that they actually spend time on each individualcan, so that they can actually have enough time to detect the odour if it's there, butalso so their brains can process it, because there's lots of different odours; we put alot of distractors in there as well, and so they have to process 'is this the one thati get a reward for, or should i just pass

it by?' the other thing you'll see is thehandler needs time to recognise that change in behaviour and those subtle cues. so thisis bronte who you're going to see here; she works very fast; she's a springer spaniel.she'll go from can to can extremely fast; what her passive alert, and all of their alertsare what we call a passive alert; it means they don't bark, they don't dig, they don'tscratch -- they just freeze. so as soon as they get that odour, they freeze with theirnose pointed in the direction, and that's the best thing for if they found human remains.you don't want them scratching, digging or doing anything else to human remains, so that'swhy they're taught to do that. what you'll notice with bronte -- they all have theirown personalities and that's great and i wish

you could have seen that tonight -- brontewill freeze, except for her tail. her tail will just keep going, because she cannot stopit. so we can probably run it now -- i'll stop talking.[video plays] [laughter]shari forbes: so it was hard to see, i know how hard, because she does keep shaking, butthe handlers recognise those very subtle cues. as you saw, they have a play reward, so ishould have mentioned that earlier. some dogs are trained on a food reward; the cadaverdogs are trained on a play reward, especially the springer spaniels. they have so much energythat they stop working after a few feeds, but they will never stop working if you keepplaying with them, so that's a really big

deal for them.i'll show you a second video just to show you the difference in personalities -- ifwe can just bring it up on pause again and i'll briefly mention it. it's the exact sametraining environment. this one is digger, and you can see he's a shepherd, so most ofthe cadaver dogs in nsw police are springer spaniels, but occasionally there's a differentone and this is an exception. he's equally as good, there's no real difference, and whatyou'll see with him is that he's much slower, so he's not like bronte going in a reallyhurried pace, even though she's great at doing it. he will be a bit more methodical, andagain, he has his own personality which the handler needs to detect. so he does freeze;he doesn't keep his tail wagging. his whole

body freezes. he's a little bit concernedthat maybe you didn't get that he was freezing, so if he feels like maybe you haven't seenit -- you being the handler -- he does a little dance. so he actually moves his paws justto say, 'pretty confident here, what are we all waiting for?' so if we want to play thisone ... [video plays][laughter] shari forbes: so, they all have their ownpersonalities, and i'm really sorry that you couldn't see that tonight, but hopefully youget a sense of it here. and so that's just to show you that this is how the trainingactually works. and the reason i tell you that is basically to explain where we comein. so what do we possibly have to offer the

police? because they've already got all ofthis covered and they are by far the experts in terms of terms of cadaver dogs and cadaverdetection dogs. what we help out with is the training aids. so if you think about an explosiveor a drug dog, they will actually be able to get access to drugs and explosives, getthe one of interest, present it as a training aid, and train the dog on it so they can goand find the real thing. obviously, with humans and cadaver dogs, we can't do that. it's notrealistic that we would ever be able to present the dog with a cadaver or with human remains.so we have a bunch of training aids that we try and use and basically we're trying tomake up the whole. so we have human tissue; there's a lot of ethical and legal paperworkrequired for the police to have access to

this. so it is difficult for them to acquireit, but sometimes they can do it. most of the time they simply use blood, sothey'll just donate their own blood, i'll donate blood, whoever they can get will donateblood. again, with the appropriate paperwork and ethical and legal requirement, they mightbe able to get corpse blood as well, but that's very rare. we can help them out with decompositionfluid from our research. occasionally we can also give them grave soil, so if we conducta victim recovery of a gravesite, we won't touch the remains -- they'll be recoveredand taken back to the morgue, but we will collect a sample of soil at the bottom becauseit actually traps the decomposition odour at the bottom and they can use that as a trainingaid. the same for clothing and through the

coroner's court or through a morgue and onlywith the permission of a family can they sometimes get clothing that the family no longer wantsback, and that has been in contact with decomposed remains. again, it traps the odour and thedogs can use that as a training aid. and thankfully we are able to get bone because of teachingresources. so we like to believe that all of this combined makes up the real thing,but we don't really know. and that's pretty much where we come into it, and why we havethis collaboration. there's a lot of issues associated with thetraining aids, and the police worldwide have a lot of questions about them. the first questionis, is one type of sample really sufficient? so as i said, most of the time they just haveblood. if they just train them on blood, can

they really expect the dogs to go out andfind bone? do those two products actually have the same scent? that's what they don'tknow, and that's what we're working on chemically profiling. the other question -- do they mimicthe complete odour profile? so as i said, we try and combine all these and say 'we thinkthat's what a real body would look like', but from an odour perspective, is that true?do any of these actually have the complete volatile profile that decomposed remains wouldhave? the big question is what are the dogs actuallydetecting? as i've already said, they can't talk. the dogs can't tell us what they'redetecting. what we suspect is it's not a lot of compounds, but just a few key compoundsthey're really honing in on. and the other

question we often get from police is how longcan they detect the scent? so police always get asked about cold cases -- can the dogsgo out and try and find remains that have been missing for 30 years. and their answeris, 'i don't know. we can give it a shot!' but from a chemical point of view, is therestill any odour even coming off the remains at that point? and if so, how diluted is it,how likely is it that the dogs will actually be able to find them? so in order to do thiskind of research -- finally into the death and decomposition; i left it towards the end.we have to study decomposition odour; we can only answer these questions if we know whatdecomposed remains truly smell like. and i should mention, i think everyone's thinking'we already know what decomposition odour

smells like -- it smells bad.' and it certainlydoes, if you've ever smelled road kill or something else decomposing. but the importantthing to know is that we what we associate as decomposition is not what the dogs do.so we smell really small molecules -- hydrogen sulphide, rotten egg gas, methane, thingsthat you smell at a landfill for example. that's what we say is decomposition. that'snot what the dogs detect; they ignore those compounds, because they're also present insewage, in landfill and in all these other things that would really confuse them. theyfocus on larger compounds known as volatile organic compounds. so you might be wonderinghow do we do this research. like the police, we don't have access to human remains fordecomposition research, and so we use the

next best thing. forensically it has beenshown that the domestic pig carcass is a pretty good analogue for human decomposition. there'sa number of reasons, the main one being that they lack heavy fur, so like us they haveskin and fine hair. and the other important one is that they're omnivores. now of course,we don't share the same diet as a pig, but because they're omnivores, they share thesame bacteria in their stomach and in their gut as we do. and it's that bacteria thatactually initiates decomposition, so if we're going to model human decomposition, we needto have the right starting point. and that's why we use them. how do we actually go aboutconducting this research? well, this is my site, and it's quite fortuitous that my sitelooks similar to somewhere you may actually

consider dumping a body -- because it is avery remote wilderness or forested area, and so while most people wouldn't really likethis site, it's actually perfect for what we do, because we are trying to mimic a realscenario when we do this research. on the left is our weather station; we haveto monitor the environment variables constantly because they impact decomposition. what you'relooking at -- these cages, now, again, realistically human remains would not be caged. scavengerswould have access to them and could disperse them over a large area, but for our purposeswe do have to cage them so that we can continue to monitor the decomposition odour, and thedecomposition process. so when we're ready, just a warning, the next images are of decomposition.we place pig carcasses out in these cages,

and then we just watch. so decomposition isa continual process, but we do define stages where visually it changes. the first stageis fresh, and macroscopically there's very little change. this is immediately after death.the next stage, macroscopically, there is a lot of change. this is otherwise known asbloat; the bacteria are starting to work in the stomach and the gut at this point, andthey're forming gases which have nowhere to go. so as a result, they blow up the body;they distend the torso and the remains, and obviously that's where the name comes from.it's also the point whereby we start to smell decomposition, but the dogs can actually smellit before here, back in the fresh stage. the next stage is quite active, hence thename 'active decay'. and this is the point

whereby the insects start to really join theparty, i guess you could say. and they also start to work on the tissues. they lay eggs,which form or hatch into maggots. the maggots will ingest the tissue and liquefy it, andeverything just starts to degrade and break down, and you can see to what extent that'shappening because -- it may not be clear, but there's actually frothing of the liquidthere. that's how much they're actually active at this stage. the odour is very distinctat this point, but again what we smell and what the dogs smell is quite different.advanced decay is the next stage, and then dry remains. and this is typical in australia,particularly sydney, because we have quite a warm client. so the tissue tends to dryout and mummify. we get some bone exposure;

if we're really lucky, we get a lot of boneexposure, known as skeletisation, and at this point the bones are disarticulated and maystart to disperse within the environment. so as i said, we sit back and we watch. weactually monitor their visual process, but we also chemically measure that odour acrossof these stages. i get a really good question all the time -- it's a fairly obvious one,but i like it because everybody says to me 'how do you trap odour? you can't even seeit -- how do you know that you've actually got a sample when you're out in the field?'so just to show you, this is how we trap it. we place a hood over the remains; we allowit to accumulate for a while. we place a tube on a vent in the top and attach a pump -- thisis really similar to environmental air sampling,

incidentally -- and then we just draw thatgas onto that tube and we can cap it and bring it back to the lab. so we can be certain thatthe odour is actually on that tube. we bring it back -- i won't bore you too much withthis. we place it into this instrument here; it flushes all the gas off, puts it in thisinstrument here, and basically what this does is identify each individual compound. so rememberi said that dogs identify individual compounds, not a mixture of odours the way we do. andthat's really beneficial because we can identify and sometimes quantify what those compoundsactually are. so we've been working on this for a numberof years -- i've been in canada for a while and then i've been back here for a year, andwhat we've found so far is that decomposition

odour is extremely complex, so there are hundredsof chemical compounds within the decomposition odour. we know though that the dogs don'tlocate all of those compounds. what we've found so far is that there are several keycompounds which are consistently present, and we believe, but have not proven, thatsome of these are consistent compounds; they're there throughout the different decompositionstages, they're there in different environments -- we've found them in canada, we've foundthem here in australia, our colleagues in belgium have found them, so they're showingup in different environments. and we think that perhaps these might be the ones thatthe dogs are actually alerting to, because we know they can find remains in differentstages, but we still need to test that. so

that's where we're at at the moment, tryingto determine whether those are the compounds of interest, and also whether they're presentin the natural training aids. so we can confirm to the police that yep, you're on the righttrack, you're absolutely using the right training aids, and that's something that they wantto know -- it's not just for our benefit that we're doing this.the long-term goal of our research, and i can't answer this one just yet, but just togive you the future of our research, is to try and provide a more accurate training aid.ideally it would be great if the police didn't have to deal with bio hazardous material,so it would be great if we could make a synthetic product for them that we knew had the exactright compounds on it that they could present

to the dogs, and be assured that the dogswould then detect decomposed remains in the field. and really that's our long-term goal;we're not there yet, it will take many years for us to do that, but it is to try and enhancetheir accuracy and the response of the cadaver dogs.now, just in closing i am going to present a case example. as i said, i wanted to showyou one more footage of the dogs because you didn't get to see them in person tonight.this is bronte again, so the tail wagger, and this is another example of training. soyou saw them set up in a very confined, closed space, which is great for when they're learning,but we have to teach them, or the police have to teach them, how to search in a realisticscenario. so if we put it on pause, you'll

see this is meant to be a crime scene, sothis is a mock crime scene house. it's set up to look like just any kind of bedroom,basically, and what we've done is put a very small again, less than 1ml, drop of blood,in an area that an investigator would not be able to find. so this is not uncommon -- thatthe dogs, because they're trained on blood, might be sent into a crime scene to find whatwe call latent blood, and that's blood that's not visible to the naked eye, and they'remuch better at doing it than any of the forensic techniques we have like luminol and otherthings for locating blood. so here you're going to see, it's off theleash, so this time there's no guidance by the handler. you'll see bronte go in, she'llrun around and do her own search, she will

pick up the scent, but as i said we put itin a really difficult area so she won't be able to get it straight away. you'll see herreally struggling to find where the cone is -- where the point of that source is. eventuallyshe gives up, she reorients, she instantly recognises that she's at the source, and you'llsee her alert. she actually alerts for a longer period of time, and then you'll see the rewardby the handler. so if we could just start the video ...[video plays] shari forbes: i know -- it wasn't very fairof us to put it there, was it? [laughter]shari forbes: tail never stops. [laughter]shari forbes: you can see how long they can

hold that -- and they can hold that positivealert for a really long time. they're actually trained to hold it there. after a while they'llget a little bit antsy, they'll start looking over their shoulder to see if everyone's leftthe room and somebody's forgotten to reward them, but they can actually hold that fora long period of time because realistically the handler may not be with them when they'redoing a search and it may be a little while before they actually catch up. so that's prettyimportant. okay so in closing -- sorry to keep you here,i'll just give you one more case example. this is a forensic scenario, and one thati wanted to share with you again because we did use the dogs with this one. this was againwith the ontario provincial police in canada,

and this was back in july 2011. the policerequested a search of a residential home and we were informed that there was a possiblemale victim buried under concrete in the basement. the victim had been kidnapped -- in fact,two victims had been kidnapped, but one had been released after a ransom was paid by hisfamily. so one of them was released, one was not and the other one had been missing forsix months. the kidnap victim who was released, he wasour witness and he said that at the time, the last time he saw the other victim, hewas tied up and so badly beaten he was pretty sure he was dead. so that was the informationwe had, and why we were going into this particular area. now i talked earlier about gpr, andwe use gpr again here. it's important to know

that we always use a series of different tools.the dog's not the only tool we use for searching or recovering remains. and with concrete,you can imagine, it's really difficult for dogs to scent through concrete, so that wasnot our first option, but it was going to help us later on as you'll see. our firstoption was gpr; this just shows you what it does. basically, it's a radar -- we send asignal into the ground, we receive the signal. if it detects an anomaly, it tells us thatby changing its signal in the shape of a hyperbola. so unlike what you see on csi, it doesn't'give us a body outline, it sadly doesn't give us an image of the victim, but it gives usthis hyperbola, so this tells us that there is a disturbance; that there's something differentin the characteristics in that area. now,

it could just be a tree root or a rock, andit's up to the experts to actually tell the difference.this was the house that we were asked to search, and originally the police had searched thishouse but they'd only searched the outside. the reason they'd searched it is because twosuspects were identified and they were the tenants of this particular house. the witnessalso confirmed that this was the house that he'd been held for a period of a week beforehe was released. the ground penetrating radar's on the right;as i said, they used it to conduct an outdoor search; they didn't find anything. the landlordhad approved that first search, and six months later when he noticed that even though they'dpaid, the tenants had paid for a year lease,

and they seemed to have stopped inhabitingthe house about three months earlier, and this was really suspicious. he contacted thepolice and we decided to go back in and search the whole house. for those of you who've livedin north america or even seen a north american house, they all have basements -- that's justpart of their design. and if you look at this red circle here, this was the window at theceiling of the basement; if you looked into it, you were looking down into the basement,so it is usually sub-surface area. okay, so we went in, this is what the basementlooked like. it was just being used by the landlord as a storage facility. and he gaveus permission to remove all of his belongings and also to pull up the carpeting, althoughit hadn't really been laid; it was just rugs

thrown down. so we pulled everything up. assoon as we did that, we found an area of interest. now, it's not a body outline, but it actuallylooks pretty good, and this was really suspicious to us, because the landlord confirmed he'dbought the house new, and he'd never done any renovations to the concrete in that area,and he'd never had a tenant who'd requested a renovation to the concrete, so there wasno understanding as to why this concrete was new compared to the surrounding concrete thatwas old. one thing to tell you is that the police,unless they can designate it as a crime scene, have to repair or pay to replace any damagethey do to a structure. so the obvious question would have been like, why didn't we just pullit up? but the answer was that the police

didn't want to do damage until they confirmedthis was a crime scene. so that's where we got called in with the gpr, to actually conductour search. we did that; you remember with cloud, we had to make up our own grid. witha concrete, a gpr that we use through concrete, it's much smaller, and we have our own gridand we essentially just run it over, collect the data, and as i said, we process it allat the end. so we collected 31 grids, not just the area of interest but the whole basement.it took us about nine hours, so it's not a fast process, but the area of interest isgrid three, which is right under the stairs, if you can see it.now if we transpose this onto the gpr data, just keep your eye on this particular areahere. so this is grid three, where the circle

is. what the gpr does is takes depth slices,so every two and a half centimetres it gives us a signal. and what we're looking for isa change in that area compared to the surrounding area. so initially there wasn't much change;there was a minor change, because the concrete was different to the surrounding concrete.but it was once we got through the concrete to this particular area here that we wereparticularly interested. this was beneath the concrete and it was the soil underneath.and hopefully you can see that it does look quite different to the surrounding area -- it'squite blue. it also looks similar to that area down the bottom, which is blue, thatwe later found was a leaking pipe. so again, the police were sort of like 'well, we'renot convinced. if you're telling us that's

a leaking pipe, why isn't this a leaking pipe?'and that was a good question -- it could be. so gpr can only go so far. at this point wehad to call in the dogs, and thankfully we always bring them anyway, so they were alreadythere. so the next thing we had to do was try and basically allow that odour to permeatefrom underneath the concrete. so the police said, 'if the dogs alert, that's enough evidencefor us that there is a disturbance here and that disturbance smells like decomposition.'so that's what they were asking for. so then we essentially just drilled two holesthrough the concrete; they were happy to repair that damage should this not be a crime scene,and we sent in reika -- and this is reika; she's with the ontario provincial police again,one of the cadaver dogs, so it was like bronte's

search. basically we all left the basement.the canine handler just put her at the top of the stairs, put her harness on her, asyou can see, took her leash off, put her down the stairs, closed the door, and we all ranaround to that window on the outside that you saw earlier to see if she alerted.[laughter] shari forbes: she didn't take long; it wasless than two minutes. she did do her thorough, methodical search -- she's very good at that-- but within i think probably even less than a minute, she'd keyed in on that scent andshe alerted right over one of those holes. that was good enough for the police -- theyhad a disturbance and they had one that smelled like decomposition. and as i said to you,they don't usually detect sewage, so we could

rule out leaking pipes and other issues likethat. so at that point they pulled up the concrete. you can see it was about 10-15 centimetresdeep, and we found what had caused our anomaly. it was like a leaking pipe; there was a largeamount of water there, but that was a result of the digging of the grave, because theyhad actually hit the groundwater table. so if you remember, this basement is alreadyabout seven feet deep below the surface, and then the grave was below that again, so thiswas quite a deep burial. as you'll see in the next image, it was actually about fourfeet before we found evidence of the remains, and about five and a half feet to the baseof the grave, so we're talking 12 feet below the ground. so not surprising they hit thegroundwater table; the grave flooded, and

that's what gave us the anomaly with the gpr,but the dog could still detect the odour through that flooding and through the water, and that'swhy they gave an alert. a warning -- the next image may be considereddistressing to some of you, and feel free to look away, but this was what we found.so it was the victim; you can see how deep the grave was, because that's a long-handledshovel on the side. just to give you an orientation here, the head is on the left; the feet areon the right. the victim was wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and he still had hishands tied in front of him. his legs had also been hog tied, so he's facing down and they'repulled up and behind him, which is why you can see them sticking up out of the grave.what was amazing, and you're probably starting

to think this happens all the time but it'sjust these two cases, was how well preserved he was, again. it's the same idea; it wasreally cold environment, he was actually buried in january, middle of winter in canada. itwas a really deep grave; nothing could get in there to work on the decomposition. hehad plastic wrapped around him, so it was really just the internal decomposition thatwas working there. and so he was really well preserved. and the bonus of that was thatwe did get a dna profile, even after six months decomposition. the forensic scientist did,i should say. we identified him and confirmed that he was the kidnapped victim. he was areal estate agent known as tony han. the coroner was able to determine cause of death; he diedof a heart attack, which they believed was

resulting from detention-related stress; inother words, he'd been beaten to death. unfortunately you can never prove that a heart attack isnot natural, so the people who were charged with this were charged with kidnapping andmanslaughter as opposed to first degree murder, and in addition to those two suspects, theyidentified five others who were involved in this kidnapping. as of july this year, sixof them had received jail sentences of between two and 11 years, which is really not thatmuch. unfortunately the main offender is still at large, so there is a warrant out for hisarrest in canada, but they believe he has fled back to china where he has family, andit is unlikely that he's ever going to face those charges in canada. but as i said earlier,we do our job and really that's to provide

resolution to the victim's family, and wewere able to do that in this case. so we recovered tony's remains and they could give him a properburial. and in doing so they could also start the mourning process, and that's really theultimate goal there. so that's just an example of one of those.as i said, i apologise, i've kept you way over time tonight so i will conclude there.i'd like to thank everyone for coming; i'd like to thank the nsw police force dog unitwho unfortunately couldn't be here. i'd really like to thank bronte, chloe, digger and bertie,because they're the dogs i get to work with, and all of the wonderful handlers who helpwith our research and, in closing, just thanking you for being here tonight.[applause]