3/3/03

AU RESEARCH KEEPS BOMB-SNIFFING DOGS ON HIGH ALERT

AUBURN -- Canine nutrition research conducted at Auburn University in the late 1990s is helping ensure the safety of airline passengers every time a jetliner takes flight these days.

Those highly skilled bomb-sniffing dogs that have become part of the scenery at the nation's busiest airports since 9-11 stay in peak condition, in part, by feasting daily on a high-performance dog food that sharpens their ability to detect explosives.

The food was developed based on research by scientists in AU's colleges of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine.

Principal researcher Keith Cummins, a professor of animal science at AU and an Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station researcher in animal nutrition, said the study showed that dogs' already amazingly keen sense of smell -- up to 10 million times more sensitive than humans' -- is even more finely tuned and intense when the highly saturated coconut oil found in most commercial dog foods is replaced by highly unsaturated corn oil.

In man and beast, Cummins says the sense of smell is activated when odor molecules in the air vaporize, reach the nose, dissolve in the nasal cavity's mucous membrane and are carried by the mucous to the olfactory receptors, which number roughly 40 million in humans, compared to 2 billion in dogs.

The AU research showed that in dogs on a diet high in unsaturated fat, the odor molecules reach the receptors more quickly and more efficiently than in the saturated fat-fed dogs.

"We found that unsaturated fat is metabolized faster and sustains physical exertion longer than saturated fat," Cummins said. "Both before and after periods of intense exercise, the dogs on the unsaturated-fat diet were more alert and their senses of smell significantly more sensitive than those on the saturated-fat diet."

Cummins' study caught the attention of the chief veterinarian at the U.S. Department of Defense's Military Working Dog School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, the only site in the nation that certifies dogs for airport bomb-detection duty.

Based on the AU study's findings, the dog food that the bomb-sniffers are fed was reformulated to replace the saturated fat with unsaturated.

Said Cummins, "It's just Auburn's little contribution to the war on terrorism."

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mar03:AU-dogs

CONTACT: Keith Cummins, 334/844-1510.