With names like Bella, Duke and Darwin, detection dogs make headlines on a regular basis for the new sniffing tasks they can accomplish. Dogs that have been trained to pick out bumblebees and COVID-19 infections have both debuted in the past year. And if there’s a limit to what our favorite companions can pick up on, it hasn’t been found yet.
“So far, we haven't found anything that doesn't create that odor,” says Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian at Penn State University who has researched training dogs to smell everything from drugs to cancer to infectious disease.
