bomb vs narcotic dogs - are training methods the same? - Page 1

Obviously the dog would be searching for different items/scents but are the training methods similar? Can a bomb dog be retrained for narcotics? Or do both?

Yes, in most cases EOD and Narcotics detection training is very close to the same. In EOD passive alert is a must! Narcotics can be active or passive. There are many different ideas, trends, and trainers thus many variations for training scent recognition, but scent recognition and alert to the recognition leading to reward is the key. We all want to get paid when we do good work, even our dogs!
I train with many types aids including; scent/scratch boxes, Herstik wall, and many many real life situations, but like I said many trainers equal many ideas. They will all include; scent recognition, alert, and reward in some form.
I have a Mal girl that is both EOD and narcotics trained, passive alert. She is 7 years old now and has worked with me for a while. I have trained dogs to alert on EOD and narcotics but I really don't train this in a single dog anymore. I have been lucky! I now realize, for myself, that when my EOD dog alerts, I want to know the EOD danger for sure and not that it may be Meth. As well, when my narcotics dog alerts I want to know it is narcotics and not EOD, but you can train one dog to do both. I have tested a couple of dogs at both passive and active alert together, same dog. Passive for EOD and active for Narcotics. It appears dogs are capable of these actions for sure, just I'm not ready to bet my life or your life on it yet!

I'm sure many highly qualified scent detection trainers will respond to your question and give you much more knowledge and insight than I.

I wish you and your dog the greatest of fun and sucess in training. Gotta Have Fun!!

Yes and no,

Training a Narc dog for explosives for EOD is a no no without extinguishing the alert for Narc. The difference between Narc and EOD.... if the dog misses the dope,
the dog misses the dope. If a dog misses a bomb, people die.

In the police world, a dog does not do both. They can do man trailing, tracking, articles, bite work etc... but not the 2 together for the reasons stated by pallenhund.
You don't know what exactly your dog is alerting on, and for court it is better to have one or the other.

Melissa

Thanks Pallenhund and Melissa for the detailed and very helpful answers. I am buying a dog that has already been trained for bomb but ultimately didn't qualify because she's too over the top. So.......sounds like she wouldn't be suited for narcotics either. I wanted to understand the training this dog has already been through and find her work that she is more suited for. The conversation about bomb vs narcotics also came up today with a friend so thought I'd ask the experts.

If you gave her some time off and extinguished any alert she already has, then she would probably be ok.
By extinguishing I mean setting up odors and correcting for alert behavior, repeat.. You would need to proof
proof proof before ever calling her training finished. Basically unlearning, and it can be done but I would generally
only suggest to someone with experience.

Melissa