ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the project within the National Police of The Netherlands and focuses on the training method used for “Digital Storage Device Dogs.” Canines have previously shown to be an effective tool in locating obscured digital storage devices in the United States and United Kingdom. The dogs were trained on the basis of the back-chaining principle, where the dogs are first taught to indicate, then to detect, next to search and to discriminate. Micro-sized pieces of Kong were used as the target odor to teach the dog the specific concept of the training. In detection dog training, odor imprinting is used to describe the initial training stage where the dog learns to associate a particular odor with a reward. The odor recognition tests were designed to confirm that whether the dogs recognized their target odors as a criterion for continuing to the next training phase. House search evaluations were run twice where Dogs A and C participated.
