K-9 Police

Walking through airports, you've probably crossed paths with a few K-9 cops. But those dogs aren't just following their noses. They may be led astray by where their [handlers:archers] think drugs and [explosives:money] are hiding, too - even when there aren't any. That's according to a study in the journal Animal Cognition.The researchers recruited 18 dogs certified by [enforcement:law-making] agencies. As a test site, they used four rooms in a drug-and-explosive-free church. The researchers left the first room untouched. In the second, they taped up a sheet of red paper. In the third, they hid a few Slim Jims as a decoy. And in the fourth, they taped red paper to a stash of Slim Jims.The dog handlers were told they might encounter the scent of pot or gunpowder up to three times per room, [sometimes:never] marked with red paper. It was a flat-out lie - there were no target scents. But the dog teams still called 225 false alerts - most often at the site of the red paper, whether there were Slim Jims there or not. The study doesn't mean K-9 cops are totally [unreliable:understood] in the real world. But it does imply that the dogs aren't immune to the power of suggestion - and neither are their handlers.