I think the upshot, as per the episode, was that remains had been there at one point in time, but had been removed at some point. In other words they seemed to think it was a temporary dump site. I suppose it depends on how much you trust a dog.

Personally I think it’s pure bunk, those dog handlers have their entire paycheck on the line and I don’t know of any independent bodies that have actually verified the results police departments get. They’ve do their own science on that one, that is the people who get paid to train the dogs are the ones saying they’re reliable. I could be wrong, maybe there’s been loads of independent research.

i watched a show on sniffer dogs recently where they hid or had placed and removed (body parts)or(drugs)? to test the dogs and the handlers reliability… Fail Fail Fail.

i put zero credence to that episode. just my opinion.

I think it’s a case of the Police get budgeted X amount to spend on it and they believe it works. The problem is as far as I’m aware there’s not much outside involvement. If there are research centres they’re industry research centres. You know what I mean?
Don’t get me wrong, it appears they do a lot of internal research and lot goes into the training. But it all seems to take place in controlled laboratories, where the dogs before the same task in the same environment. We know dogs can smell things like bodies and drugs etc., we know they can be trained to alert people to the presence of such things. What we don’t know is how many false positives they will give in a real world environment. It seems to me it’s a case of "we’ve confirmed the science in the lab, so if he barks out in the real world and there’s no body, that doesn’t mean it’s not as accurate as we thought, it just means some cavemen buried their dead auntie here in 12800BC". I think it’s a cockeyed way of looking at the results, especially coming from the person who’s livelihood, indeed the very exist of their craft, is based on the credibility of their dogs.

I know it’s easy to poke holes, but the over confidence does not inspire confidence in me.

All that Tahoe stuff was ridiculous.

Especially if you take into consideration the detectives knowing that wanted poster/code work wasn’t even from Zodiac. They knew this.

Dogs are AMAZING, but taking them to some random spot where a body might have been buried 50 years ago is just…dumb. I think they found some maggots or something.