> Maybe you should have started with that, rather than anecdotal evidence.
Oh dear. You mean I didn't approach this topic with the care it deserved?
> High school students...
Good for them! I only glanced at it, but it looks interesting.
> Dogs can be trained to find a bar magnet...
I read this. Right away, I can tell you the authors didn't take nearly enough care to eliminate the dogs' olfactory sense from the data, and the proof of that is that the dogs couldn't locate the jars containing food. Dogs should easily have been able perform that task, as anyone who operates a sniffer dog will confirm. The fact that these dogs couldn't do it means something is wrong, and I'd bet money that the problem was that the jars were handled in such a way that they all smelled of food.
To be fair, this would be quite hard to get right. Dogs have a sense of smell that can seem downright supernatural. When I was in high school, Denver PD had a bloodhound named Yogi who tracked down the body of a murdered child who had been transported ten miles by car. Yes, by car [1]. In training exercises, Yogi was able to track things that had been sunk thirty feet underwater at a local reservoir.
That craziness obviously presents an enormous challenge when designing a study on another hypothetical dog sense, and while this study went to some length to address it, something clearly slipped through the cracks such that the study's "food" arm (which was intended to serve as a control arm) was rendered useless. It also makes me strongly suspect that the magnets were also handled in such a way that there was some olfactory indication of which jars contained them. The paper doesn't tell us how the preparers handled the magnets and their containers, and there's no indication that they took measures to either prevent the transfer of any odor from the magnets to the jars, or somehow ensure that the odor was transferred equally to all jars.
My skepticism notwithstanding, I'm fascinated by the concept of magnetoreception in animals, especially birds, and I think it definitely deserves extensive study.
Police claimed that Yogi could smell whether a car carrying the victim had driven along the highway or down the exiat ramp, 4 days later. Supposedly the car exhaust blows your body cells out of the car and somehow into the ground but stays within a range of a few dozen feet.
It doesn't pas the sniff test. Something else was going on, maybe a tip-off and the dog was cover for it.
I've heard some conspiracy theories in my time, but that's surely one of the lamest.
This was a search for a child who may still have been alive, and a suspect still at large. The cops were begging for tip-offs. Why in the fuck would they waste days or even hours with a fake search in order to "cover" for anything? Yogi worked out in the open, and he had an audience. Civilians were involved in the search, and in fact the body was actually found by a group of students who were assisting. People were able to watch the dog repeatedly lose the scent, backtrack, and pick it back up, working his way up into the canyon. That would be one hell of a dirty, dishonest performance by Yogi's handler, who by the way is still active in the K9 community.
Nobody knows exactly how Yogi did it, but given that dogs are to known smell at parts-per-trillion levels, and that there are many ways the killer's scent could be transferred to his own car tires, I don't think it requires an excess of credulity to take the police at their word.
Oh dear. You mean I didn't approach this topic with the care it deserved?
> High school students...
Good for them! I only glanced at it, but it looks interesting.
> Dogs can be trained to find a bar magnet...
I read this. Right away, I can tell you the authors didn't take nearly enough care to eliminate the dogs' olfactory sense from the data, and the proof of that is that the dogs couldn't locate the jars containing food. Dogs should easily have been able perform that task, as anyone who operates a sniffer dog will confirm. The fact that these dogs couldn't do it means something is wrong, and I'd bet money that the problem was that the jars were handled in such a way that they all smelled of food.
To be fair, this would be quite hard to get right. Dogs have a sense of smell that can seem downright supernatural. When I was in high school, Denver PD had a bloodhound named Yogi who tracked down the body of a murdered child who had been transported ten miles by car. Yes, by car [1]. In training exercises, Yogi was able to track things that had been sunk thirty feet underwater at a local reservoir.
That craziness obviously presents an enormous challenge when designing a study on another hypothetical dog sense, and while this study went to some length to address it, something clearly slipped through the cracks such that the study's "food" arm (which was intended to serve as a control arm) was rendered useless. It also makes me strongly suspect that the magnets were also handled in such a way that there was some olfactory indication of which jars contained them. The paper doesn't tell us how the preparers handled the magnets and their containers, and there's no indication that they took measures to either prevent the transfer of any odor from the magnets to the jars, or somehow ensure that the odor was transferred equally to all jars.
My skepticism notwithstanding, I'm fascinated by the concept of magnetoreception in animals, especially birds, and I think it definitely deserves extensive study.
1 - Look up the Alie Berrelez murder case.