• Forum server maintanace Friday night.(around 7PM Centeral time)
    Website will be off line for a short while.

    You may need to log out, log back in after we're back online.

Canine Metal Detector!

well apparently you taught your lil dog to SCUBA..so maybe teaching him to sniff out gold isnt such a stretch?:lol:
 
My question is how much scent does gold have ? I would guess the vapor pressure of a gold nugget or ring is so low that even a dog couldn't pick it up.
Update - vapor pressure of elemental gold is .000237 Pa at 1064.58 degrees C (!). I think we can assume that in solid form the vapor pressure is essentially zero. How the dog would detect gold is beyond me.
 
Last edited:
I surely wouldn't find the capability impossible for a canine. After all they can detect the smallest amounts of drugs or explosives. They can follow the scent of a human with just the slightest whiff of their clothes. They find valuable Truffles in the ground like a magnet. I wouldn't doubt for a minute that if trained properly they could find practically anything that emits a scent.
 
I agree Tom, but I gotta go with Doug on this one..he researched "Vapor Pressure" something I didnt even know about. But~~~ if a metal were to give any kind of electro-magnetic fields then I think detection by Fido could be possible. Anyway, just a fun one for thought....I guess I'll reley on the MD for now :D
 
my dogs would eat any gold they found...and Im not sure Id want it after that:lol:
 
To hedge my earlier reply a little - I don't believe gold itself would have any odor detectable to a dog. It's possible that gold-bearing ore might have some substance in it that a dog could smell. Vapor pressure is the ability of a substance to vaporize and release molecules to the air. Gasoline has a very high vapor pressure. Liquid mercury also has a significant vapor pressure.
 
you could get a dog... or you could get a metal detector... hard decision.:duh:
 
Man I wish I had come up with this idea! Just imagine a whole pack of dogs trained to go out, sniff out the gold, dig it up, and bring it back to you!! All for the low low price of $16,500 per animal. (that's what it costs on average to raise and care for a dog over it's lifespan now) If the dog only found 2 lbs of gold over it's lifetime you'd be rich in no time at all!*

:tumble::spin::tumble::spin::tumble:







*please note my avatar
 
Not so far "Fetched"

In a past life I had quite a bit of contact with police canines so I read this post with a lot of interest ... I know that sterling has a unique odor but never realized that gold does as well .... the bottom line is, if there is a scent then a dog can be trained to detect it ... realize of course that some dogs are better suited for sniffing than others .... I pulled the following from a website that gives a fair explanation of what a dog is capable of. Now, I don't think that I would go to the expense of having a dog trained for this kind of work, but if I happened to be a qualified trainer and had a retired detector dog, I might consider cross training to try it out if I happened to live in an area that could be productive.

How Dogs Smell

Smell is the dog’s dominant sense, so much so that a huge part of its brain is devoted to analyzing odors. Dogs have two giant olfactory bulbs attached to the brain which decode every smell they encounter. The bulbs weigh around 60 grams, four times as much as human olfactory bulbs. Given that a canine brain is one tenth of the size of a human one, that means the canine brain has forty times as much of its brain devoted to smell as we do.
Little wonder then that a dog’s sense of smell is reckoned to be 100,000 times better than a humans. In tests dogs have been able to pick up chemical solutions that form one or two parts in a trillion. That is the equivalent of smelling one bad apple in two billion barrels.

The source of the dog’s exceptional ability to smell is its wet snout. The moist leathery surface of the snout acts like velcro catching even the tiniest molecules of smells, then dissolving them so that the dog’s internal, smell receptor cells can analyze them properly. To keep his nose wet a dog must produce a constant supply of mucus through its nasal cavities. Scientists reckon the average dog produces a pint of this mucus every day.

What Dogs Can Smell

Dogs really can smell fear. If a dog goes into a room where a frightened dog has just left, he will appear anxious and agitated. This isn’t, as many would claim, some kind of ESP type response. It’s caused by a scent, an alarm pheromone, which is produced by the anal glands of frightened dogs.

Dogs can detect odors that are up to 40 feet underground. They have been used to detect leaky gas pipes. They can also smell insects embedded in the ground or in woodwork. In the United States dogs are used to sniff out termite infestations. Dogs can also pick up the faintest whiff of other creatures.
In Guam, the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services use specially trained Jack Russells to sniff out brown tree snakes in the loading bays of airplanes.

Dogs can smell human fingerprints that are a week old.

Dogs’ noses are so sensitive that they can even smell electricity. While conducting an experiment, a researcher found that a dog could smell which of two compartments contained an electric current. He concluded this was because the charge resulted in the release of tiny amounts of ozone which the dog could detect.

Dogs can tell from the smell of a cow’s urine whether it is in oestrus, or heat. Farmers train them to do this so they know the best time to introduce a bull for breeding.

Dogs react in different ways to different smells. In tests, for example, it has been found that dogs relax when the aroma of lavender is fed into their environment. Camomile also makes dogs calmer.
Rosemary and peppermint, on the other hand, makes dogs more excited.

As far as dogs are concerned, all humans have a unique smell. They can pick people out according to body and other odors they project. Scientists think the only way a dog wouldn’t be able to tell two people apart would be if they were identical twins on identical diets. The twins would also have to remain silent.

As a result of this, dogs can track human smells over long distances. Scientists think they can pick up on the difference in odors from different footprints to work out which direction their prey is headed. They can do this twenty minutes after a person has passed by even though the footprints are made a single second apart.

Scientists who tested four German Shepherds discovered they track footprints by dividing the job into three phases. During the first, search phase they move quickly, sniffing 10-20 times each breath. Once they have detected the smell they enter the deciding phase where they sniff at between two and five specific footprints. They do this for a longer period, slowing down as they do so. Finally, once the direction has been established, the tracking phase begin with the dog once more moving quickly.

Sick Sense: How Dogs Smell Illness
Dogs can detect cancer in humans.
Scientists think that simply by sniffing samples of human’s breath, dogs can detect lung, breast and other cancers with an accuracy rate of between 88 and 97 percent. The accuracy rate of a multi-million-pound hospital scanner is between 85 and 90 per cent.
Dogs can also be trained to alert people with heart conditions they are about to suffer a seizure.

Dogs can also anticipate in advance when a person is going to have an epileptic fit.
A Canadian study found that dogs who lived with children prone to epileptic episodes behaved unusually in advance of the attacks.
Some dogs would lick the child’s face or act protectively. One dog even guided a young girl away from a set of stairs shortly before she had an attack. The dogs’ warnings came as early as five hours before the first symptoms of the epileptic episode were visible.
A separate study involving six dogs found that they could be trained to accurately warn owners who were about to suffer fits.
Health authorities around the world are now training “seizure alert” or “seizure response” dogs, some of which can predict fits, and all of which will respond in an appropriate way when an owner does have a fit. Some will be trained to stay with and guard the owner, and some even to press a button on a phone which dials the emergency services.

It remains a mystery how they are able to pick up on epilepsy in this way. Some think they pick up on tiny behavioral or scent cues. Others are convinced it is a reaction to electrical activity in the body. But the fact that dogs also respond to psychological seizures, which are non-epileptic and don’t display abnormal electrical activity, casts doubt on this.
 
Back
Top Bottom