“There are animals that see a lot more colours than we do,” said Adee Schoon, an independent Dutch biologist who has been working with scent detection by animals for the past three decades. “If you take that analogy and use it with dogs, you can see that we are definitely odour-blind compared to dogs.”
Most dogs can navigate the scent world in ways we cannot fathom, but it takes special individuals and a lot of training to become detection dogs. Schoon used to work with detection dogs in forensics, in particular rape cases for the Dutch police, to identify rapists by their semen. She says to think of detection dogs as highly trained specialists who recognised scents in the way humans recognise people’s faces.
Agostino PetroniBoth Paco and Ellis were able to reliably spot an infected plant and freeze beside it (Credit: Agostino Petroni)
However, training a new dog is not easy and can take some time. According to Serena Donnini, a dog trainer for ENCI and the coordinator of the Xylella Detection Dogs experimental programme, there are some dog breeds, such as the springer spaniel, German shepherd, cocker spaniel, and Labrador, that, thanks to their larger nose and chest space, are more likely to become good super smellers and work longer shifts in a self-directed way, often pursuing a scent for hours. But that’s not enough, Donnini says, because a dog’s personality is important too: to pass all the exams to become a detection dogs, the animals must love to play and eat.
“This is important in order to develop a reward system,” Donnini says. The more a dog loves to catch a ball, and the more they become obsessed with it, the more likely they’ll look for it. “Until we have something that the dog wants so strongly that he would almost be willing to kill to get it, we can’t move forward to train him.”
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