The Sniffing Third: Ethnographic Explorations in Detection Dog Training

For over a century, the colorful past of detection dog training for different purposes of health, security, and conservation has included teaching them a vast variety of inherently meaningless scents from human illnesses, plant and animal species to narcotics and explosives. Despite detection dogs have been bound to work, and moreover to workers as members of canine teams, for a long time, the sociology of work has just scratched the surface on this topic. What we’ve probably sidelined are the material nuances that make canine teams’ training for detection work meaningful for professionals as a multispecies interaction. In addition, the literature on routine relations in work, organizations, and management focus mainly on human relations. In the presentation, I aim to fill this gap by underlining collaborative aspects of detection that exceeds species limits and how field researcher’s connoisseurship of dog training may contribute to it. My analysis draws from ethnographic materials generated from the European course for canine team instructors in the field of product scent. By emphasizing relations between eurozone state officials and their detection dogs in becoming instructors for future canine teams, I attempt to describe how subjective and objective learning goals are played out. Theoretically, I utilize the framework of sociology of meaningful work with Arnold Arluke’s and Clinton Sanders’s thoughts on dirty work while extending them towards Michel Serres’s insights on senses and parasites.