DetectingWales.com

I know that dogs can be trained to smell out drugs,explosives,weapons and even cancer with a sense of thats 10,000s more sensitive than humans...Silver is very distinct in smell when cleaning and i woinder if a dog trained to look for areas of silver on beaches...The one thing i learnt on beaches after storms had lowered the height.,Was that gold ,silver and bronze came out of black sand and on edge of gullies..With a limited time to find the glory patches..Every time we came down to the beach in the winter ,the landscape of the beach was different and good sniffer dog that can locate silver would be usefull...i am getting lazy as my grandson is no longer interested in digging my holes. :) :)..

No I agree, not as daft as it sounds. They use dogs and pigs to sniff out truffles that are underground umm?
I bet it's possible and as you say the dog can dig it up too....I like your thinking lol ;)

My Schnauzer can sniff out anything disgusting from half a mile. Any ideas how to train him to think silver and gold are edible.
In the right hands I think it might work. One down side. He doesn't dig.


Val

Yes, it is as daft as it sounds. Silver and gold are inanimate objects that have no intrinsic odour of their own.
Odour can be induced by cleaning but that is a by product of the chemicals used and not of the material being cleaned.
On their own neither gold or silver can be detected by any odour.

Of course metal has a natural odour ??? ::) Go smell some rust lol. Whether difference metals have there own individual scent is another thing so we may not be able to get a "discriminating" pooch and dogs not only have a far more developed sense of smell than humans but they can smell individual components of a scent.
If you ask Taff if something is silver, he'll smell it and give you a pretty good answer.

Thats a by product of the metal not the metal.

But neither gold or silver give off any free atoms that could be called odour or scent. so have no individual components that could be released.
Believe me, its been tried before.
Oxidising silver may, and I say may, give off a small odour but on a beach, that would be totally negated by the smell of the sand and decaying vegetable materials around.
Gold does not oxidise and does not give off any scent or reactant free radicals.

Masked by the sand ??? I can see you have never worked with drug or explosives dogs, you can try and mask smells to your hearts content but they will find it :-\

well if you need a dog to find silver your obviously not using your detector properly  ::) ;) :D

using dogs to sniff out silver and gold ?  I think you lot been sniffing something ;D

I might get myself a Pointer ;)

classic  :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Lets see if a bloodhound will only smell sand and decaying vegetable materials....more like the person what walked the beach the day before, I watched a program on this dog.

I have seen dogs used to sniff out drugs, explosives and ( wait for it ) money! Paper money, that is.   :o

There was once a program on tv with dogs finding mines and unexploded ordnance at depths of around 2 meters i think the dogs used were the Belgian Shepards. Ps how many Duracell does a dog take

I think if you unscrew a Dachshund it takes 4 D batteries ;D

Thanks to Geoff I can now supply a dog with a set new 4 d batteries(comes with fitting gloves)will swap for used etrac.

Chill out guys!

Goldpanner have you never heard of a GOLDEN RETRIEVER?  :P

(you missed that one val)

 :D ;D :D ;D Love it ;)

i remember reading in either treasure hunting or the searcher a number of years back about this.someone had trained their dog to sniff out silver,the dog would start to dig then the owner would detect the spot locate and retreive the item.i thought it was a wind up at the time but they never published anything to say that it was.

Like me your smell for a easier way of detecting has gone Mr Goldpanner ,but you know silver corrodes in the ground and it has very distinctive smell when you pick silver out of the black sand of a beach..We humans can recognise that and a good trained dog would easily pick out ....H

It was in the April issue! No, joking aside, you are right it was in one of the mags some years ago. I think it was in the letters section and the guy was serious about it. I have an open mind on this one.