The science of odorology is different from regular scent work because it can be used to identify someone who was at the scene of a crime. How it works is that scent is collected at a crime scene and stored in a glass jar.

The dog is given the scent from the jar and must identify the person who is in a lineup that matches the scent from the jar. Although it sounds easy, it takes 24 months of training for the dog to be qualified to help solve crime cases. In training the dogs must learn to identify two scents from the same person. This is done through a series of complex tasks where they must identify the target scent from five different human odors. The human odors may be traces of scent collected from an object that someone touched or from the person directly.

Although the dogs can successfully work on criminal cases after training, they continue to be trained for the rest of their career. When working a criminal case, two dogs are used to confirm each other’s results.

Sophie Marchal, Olivier Bregeras, Didier Puaux, Rémi Gervais, Barbara Ferry. Rigorous Training of Dogs Leads to High Accuracy in Human Scent Matching-To-Sample Performance. PLOS ONE, 2016; 11 (2): e0146963 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0146963

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CNRS. (2016, February 12). Forensic odorology scientifically validated. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 16, 2016 from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160212102429.htm