Researchers at Texas Tech University are partnering with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to help train detection dogs for the protection of the public. 

Nathaniel Hall, Ph.D., is an associate professor in companion animal science at Texas Tech and serves as the director of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Laboratory. His research relies solely on the dog’s ability to sense and detect danger. 

Partnering with local animal shelters in Lubbock, Hall’s program adopts long-term dogs that have been in the shelter anywhere from one to six years. These dogs are then assessed, trained, and studied, and often adopted out into a loving home. 

Generally, the trained dogs go to working homes or organizations that can utilize their skill sets. Some examples of this include government entities, conservation in agriculture, and working homes like farms and ranches.

Dogs that go to organizations for conservation in agriculture and working homes are used to detect invasive species in crops and for screening imported equipment, Hall said. They specialize in identifying several things, such as plant pathogens, invasive species, and infectious crops. 

“One thing these [working] dogs are trained to detect is powdery mildew, which affects grape crops,” Hall said. “This can be quite expensive and require a lot of fungicide to treat.” 

Hall said these dogs can help producers be more efficient by safeguarding their crops.

Government agencies that adopt these dogs use their skills to detect explosives and other security threats. Research on the detection of up to 20 different kinds of explosives is the primary focus of Hall’s olfactory analysis. ​In order to ensure the conducted research is carried into the field, Hall partners with other facilities to test his work with other dogs.

“We bring [our work] out to facilities that currently have operational detection dogs and see if it applies there,” Hall said. “We then try to make it as a more broad, generalizable knowledge across all organizations that train explosives dogs and improve performance.” 

This research is conducted by an olfactometer, a device that delivers odors to the dogs through small ports. 

“[The dogs] hold their nose and little odor port, search a bunch of different odor ports, and if they find their target, they hold their nose in there,” Hall said. “There’s a little infrared beam that measures how long they hold their nose in, so it’s a completely computer-driven automated training.”

Teaming up with government agencies such as Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, has allowed Hall to focus on training dogs to protect the public.

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