Pork Cadaver Dogs?

 Now I don't know about you .....

Billy Was Very Good At Pointing To The Spot.

.... but I am a fan of real crime TV shows. Not the UK versions but the US ones.

I cite for example, Bloodline Detectives, Cold Justice (with the admirable Kelly Sieglar), The Murder Tapes, Murder on CCTV, Killer Couples and Murder in the Heartland, as examples of the shows, but there are a number of others of similar ilk. 

Now a regular feature of most of these shows is the use of cadaver dogs, and indeed they are used in most Western countries these days in both Police Investigative work and indeed as part of disaster rescue teams, so we tend to just take these dogs for granted.

But something I read in the UK press made me realise that I had never thought about how these dogs are trained ..... I had assumed that any rotting dead meat would do the trick, but then I realised that if Pork and Rabbit dead meat smelt differently, then if you trained a dog on that type of dead animal, they might just end up searching and reacting to where rabbits had been killed or died.

The article mentioned that at Porton Down laboratory, one of the UK's leading science and defence technology campuses, in Wiltshire, England, Home Office Research scientists wanted to train the UK's cadaver dogs, by using amputated limbs donated by consenting patients (who weren't going to bury them? What do people do with their amputated limbs??). 

They explained that such studies "are vital to evolving our capabilities" .... I am assuming that he meant 'our dogs capabilities', and not improving the scientists nasal capabilities. Still, this suggests that dogs are better trained on human dead parts. I have no idea how the cadaver dogs are trained in the rest of the Western world.

But I recall in a real life murder show, a US scientist had a cadaver farm, where animal or human body parts (I can't be sure), but I think it was buried volunteer human parts/bodies (the bones were later collected and given a proper funeral), in order to aid forensic studies on how bodies rotted/decomposed under different abandonment circumstances. That may have also been used to train some US cadaver drugs.

Still, the Porton Down request sounds like a sensible idea, but probably wont happen.