Neutral Odour Is Only Neutral Until It Isn’t

Neutral odour is something I’m asked about regularly: what is it, why do we use it, and should everyone be using one?

A neutral odour allows us to teach a dog the detection process without using its eventual target odour.

In a commercial programme, we may not yet know what the dog will ultimately be required to detect. If I train a dog on narcotics but the market requires an explosives detection dog, I may have wasted a significant amount of training.

The genuine target material may also be unavailable, difficult to obtain, or something we cannot legally or safely train with during the early stages.

A neutral odour allows us to teach the dog how to search, locate odour and indicate without making that early commitment.

But what actually makes an odour neutral?

Neutral depends on the environment

An odour is neutral only if the dog is unlikely to encounter it during its eventual work.

We could teach an odour and later attempt to extinguish it, but is that completely reliable?

I would rather avoid putting something into the dog that I may later have to take out, particularly when there is a possibility that the dog could remember it and respond to it years later.

Kong was the first neutral odour I used, back in 2010.

The dogs came from Norwegian People’s Aid and had originally been intended for mine detection.

For those dogs, Kong was genuinely neutral. Whether they were working in Afghanistan, searching Balkan fields where many of these dogs had originally been deployed, or working along the Ethiopian-Eritrean border, they were extremely unlikely to encounter Kong during an operational search.

Even if they did, we were working alongside counter-IED and bomb-disposal assets capable of investigating whatever was in front of us. We weren’t closing a major public event because the dog had responded to a misplaced toy.

Move the same odour into a different environment and it may no longer be neutral.

When we searched freight vehicles in Calais for concealed people, we had no control over what those vehicles were carrying. We therefore had to be extremely careful about the odours used during training.

We couldn’t afford to stop and investigate every shipment containing something the dog had previously been taught to find but which had nothing to do with our operational target.

What happens after the indication?

The suitability of an odour also depends on what you are looking for and what happens immediately after the dog indicates.

Years ago, dogs were commonly trained to locate pieces of tennis ball. Some people undoubtedly still use them.

In some roles, that may cause very little difficulty.

If a narcotics dog indicates on a drawer, the handler can open it and investigate. They may find a bag of cannabis or cocaine, or they may find a tennis ball.

The indication can be resolved immediately. No harm, no foul.

Now apply the same idea to explosives detection.

The dog indicates, but the handler cannot simply open the item to see what is inside. The response has to be confirmed and escalated through the appropriate procedures, potentially resulting in an area being cleared and cordoned while further resources investigate.

Imagine doing that at Wimbledon because your dog has been trained to find tennis balls.

I was the canine manager at Wimbledon this year.

There were quite a few tennis balls.

That doesn’t mean toys can never be used as search odours. It means their suitability depends entirely on the dog’s future role, working environment and the consequences of an indication.

Does a sport scentwork dog need a neutral odour?

For most sport scentwork teams, probably not.

If you already know which odours will be used in your chosen discipline, you can train directly on those target odours.

In NNA that may be gun oil, while Scentwork UK uses gun oil, clove, truffle oil and, at a later stage, Kong.

At the moment, Gaia is working on a neutral odour that I am trialling.

I still haven’t decided whether I ultimately want her to be a sport scentwork dog or a working detection dog. At this stage, that doesn’t really matter.

The foundations I’m teaching at this stage are the same regardless of which direction I eventually take her. What I don’t want to do is commit her to a target odour now that may be completely irrelevant to whatever job I eventually want her to do.

For me, that is exactly where a neutral odour earns its place.

Commercial training odours

There are also commercially available products that can be used for this kind of foundation work.

Examples include KONG, which has long been used as a neutral training odour in some detection programmes, ScentLogix Search Behaviour / Neutral Scent, NOTA — Novel Odor Training Aid, and TraceOdor™.

They are not all the same thing, and they approach the problem in different ways. KONG, for example, is a commercially available toy rather than a purpose-made detection training odour. NOTA and TraceOdor are specifically manufactured training aids.

But the underlying reason for using any of them can be similar: giving the dog something to detect while we establish the process without necessarily committing the dog to its eventual operational target.

And that brings us back to the important point.

Neutrality comes from context.

What will the dog eventually search for?

Where will it work?

What else is likely to be present?

And what happens immediately after the dog indicates?

Answer those questions first.

Then decide whether you need a neutral odour at all.

Tom Moir ScentMasters UK