Daily Archives: December 2, 2009

Heather Pringle: Dogs for the Dead

Smell a corpse, not smell like one, Arbuthnot.

B.C.’s own Heather Pringle has a new blog these days, and her recent post on the use of forensic dogs to detect archaeological sites and human remains in particular, in Washington State, is worth a read:

According to the staff at the Institute for Canine Forensics, dogs can smell human remains that are buried as much as nine feet below the surface.  And they can detect remains as old as 2000 years.  ”Human remains have a scent that never,  ever goes away,  especially a bone,  even after it dries out,” one of the institute’s staff members told The Peninsula Daily News.