Cadaver Dogs: The Sherlock Bones of the K-9 Police

Their powerful sense of smell.
One of the dog’s natural trait is its astounding sense of smell. In fact, a dog’s sense of smell is 100 times accurate and stronger than any human. Thus, there is a particular classification of working dogs whose noses and their keen sense of smell have been developed to do an important role in crime forensics. These dogs are called cadaver dogs. A cadaver dog is a classification of a search and rescue canine who are further categorized as ‘airscenting’ or trailing dogs.
Cadaver dogs are specially trained canines to trace and follow the scent of a decomposing human flesh. Although their task was not a pretty thing to do and not the ordinary canine task of search and rescue, their job was vital not only to the families of a crime’s victims but pretty much helpful to the justice system that need a body to prove a crime. These dogs deal on the detection of scent of decomposing bodies above the soil and ground. The same principle in a canine’s search and knowhow of where he last buried his bone.
Breed and training.
Although breed is not a factor for being a cadaver dog, but a well-built dog is needed to endure long hours of search and trailing. Training for a cadaver dog starts at the age range from 9 to 18 months. Training can take up from 4 to 18 months to complete allowing the dog to properly mature and develop their aptitude and skills in their sense of smell. Aside from searching and locating cadavers on crime related assignments, they are also trained on various types of assignments such as disaster response and rescue.
Smell and Fetch!
It is said that the task of a cadaver dog can be the biggest challenge in a forensic investigation. Finding a corpse that may have been hidden on piles of dirt, soil and other rubbles is always a difficult place to be especially for humans. But canines whose role was to seek for the scent of a decomposing body the task was just an ordinary play of seeking an object given some point of scent their handler would give them to seek about. It is basically an ordinary game of ‘Fetch!’ to them no matter how stinky the object of the game was. In order to give due credits to a few of these cadaver dogs whose immense contribution in bringing and finding justice to the bodies they’ve found. In human remains detection, a canine’s nose knows best and can be relied upon in helping solve forensic cases.

It is amazing what a dog can be taught to do, and will willingly do. I remember either watching a program on television, or maybe it was in a book that I read, and it involved the cadaver dog helping to find a body that had been hidden after a murder.
They also used these dogs (if I remember right) to help search for bodies in the rubble after the9/11 attack of the planes flying into the twin towers and bringing them down.
At first they used the regular search and rescue dogs, hoping to find people how might still be surviving under all of therubble and concrete; but then it eventually became a job for the cadaver dogs.
I think that all of the dogs who are trained to help the law enforcement officers are a great help. The dogs who sniff out bombs, or even help locate drugs, are also very important and an asset to the police force.

I once read about cadaver dogs successfully beating someone who set out to deliberately fool them - I have not been able to find it again and I worry it was an exaggeration so if anyone else knows of this and has a link I would really appreciate it.

A man planned murder and took cadaver dogs into consideration in thinking about disposing of the body. So he dug a deep pit, placed the body in it, half filled it, placed a large amount of waste meat from a processing plant in the pit, filled it and laid concrete over it. He dug similar pits with more rotting meat.

The dogs indicated and the concrete was dug though and the rotting waste meat found at which point the police thought they had indicated on the rotting meat and tried to move them on - but the dogs went back and the handlers insisted the pit be checked further - which revealed the body.

If this is true then not even pounds of other meat will shield the scent of human death and these dogs truly are amazing.