In addition, urea nitrate and hydrogen peroxide-primary components of improvised explosive devices-have joined the training regimen. Ingredients from the basic chemical families of explosives-such as powders, commercial dynamite, TNT, water gel and RDX, a component of the plastic explosives C4 and Semtex-are placed in random cans.
MSA’s dogs begin building their vocabulary of suspicious odors working with rows of more than 100 identical cans laid out in a grid. Instinctively, it says tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.” It’s the handler who says tomato sauce, or, as it happens, bomb. “When you walk into a kitchen where someone is cooking spaghetti sauce, your nose says aha, spaghetti sauce. Roberts likes to use the spaghetti sauce analogy. It deconstructs an odor into its components, picking out just the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect. Strictly speaking, the dog doesn’t smell the bomb. Merry and Zane Roberts, MSA’s lead canine trainer, work their way along the line of luggage pieces, checking for the chemical vapors-or “volatiles”-that come off their undersides and metal frames. MSA also furnishes dogs for what it will only describe as “a government agency referred to by three initials for use in Middle East conflict zones.” It currently fields 160 teams working mostly in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago and Dallas-the dogs always work in tandem with the same handler, usually for eight or nine years. In the shrouded world of bomb dog education, MSA is one of the elite academies.
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Dogs don’t need to be taught how to smell, of course, but they do need to be taught where to smell-along the seams of a suitcase, say, or underneath a pallet where the vapors that are heavier than air settle. The luggage pieces joined bicycles, suitcases, shrink-wrapped pallets, car-shaped cutouts and concrete blocks on the campus of MSA’s Bomb Dog U.
This is where MSA Security trains what are known in the security trade as explosive detection canines, or EDCs. They’re lined up against the back wall of a large hangar on a country road outside Hartford, Connecticut. When I first meet a likable young Labrador named Merry, she is clearing her nostrils with nine or ten sharp snorts before she snuffles along a row of luggage pieces, all different makes and models.
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