Detector Dog Categories are BS

I often hear about dogs that are “narcotics dogs” or “explosives dogs.” I want to address this and provide a bit of context. First off, categories like “narcotics” and “explosives” are for our convenience and do not in any way describe the chemicals or their odor. To put it bluntly, “narcotic” is not an odor category. If you are training a dog to find cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, you have trained a dog to find three specific narcotics, but you do not have a general “narcotics” dog. You have a dog that can find (assuming this was done well) cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin. That’s it. The same exact argument could be made for explosives. I’ll go one step further and say you could easily train a dog to find both cocaine and TNT. What would you call that dog? I’d call it a dog that can detect both cocaine and TNT. Period. While this seems pretty basic, I’m always surprised when I hear people making essentially the argument that they have a (insert category here) dog. I’m calling BS.

The exception to this rule is in live-find and human remains detection dogs. This is a different situation and I want to acknowlege that. These dogs are trained to generalize on all human scent (either live or deceased/decomposed). There are specific ways this is done, and I would argue that they are essentially specific-purpose dogs that find just one thing.

My larger point remains.