Gold sniffing dogs*? Could it happen here ... ?

http://www.smh.com.au/world/nose-for-money--labradors-hone-in-on-hidden-fortunes-20120813-244at.html

50Kg of gold under the seat? Wow.

Desperate times.

Love the fact that the smell of money is "more subtle"






*PS. They don't actually say the dogs sniff the gold out, but it sounded good.

 

Thanks for the article, glad you mentioned that dogs couldn't sniff gold - I don't know off that would be possible unless there are residual chemical odours from the manufacturing process.

Paper currency I can understand

Edit: 50kg of gold, from a food store owner? Tax evasion much? That's 2.5 million worth.

 

Why assume he's guilty of anything. He may have just had the smarts to put his life savings into gold when the price was good. But now the gov has it, so I guess we'll never know.

The real criminal here is the gov.

 

I used to train dogs for search and attach work. I never gave thought to training one to sniff out gold or silver.
For this to happen gold and silver would have to give off an odour. I imagine it probably would give off an odour,
no matter how small given it has a chemical make up. Dogs have been shown to identify odours that the the most
advanced sniffing machines had difficulty identifying.

If anyone is interested in trying this you need a dog that is a fanatical retriever of a toy/ball or similar object. Permiate the
toy with the smell of what you are looking for (gold/silver in this case) and the dog now identifies that smell with its toy. It is all a game. all detection
dogs, regardless the substance, are looking for their plaything. When it finds what it is looking for throw in its toy and have a big play with it.
If the dog is bored or not properly engaged it will give up. Keep it exciting and above all else reward the dog like crazy, play the game with it.

 

I'm no expert in canine olfactory response, but I don't buy the story. I think the Italian G-men were tipped off, or they are using the dog story to disguise some other source of info. (i.e. Every car crossing the border is covertly being X-ray/Gamma-scanned.)

If they have measures, then stackers should employ countermeasures.

Clearly passenger air travel is out of the question with scans, but one can still charter a flight which undergoes surprisingly little 'security' scrutiny. Sea travel may also be an option, but Switzerland is unfortunately landlocked.

If he just has to cross a land border at a road crossing, use a less prominent check-point at a hour of day known for having a high volume of traffic. Who wants to be the cop blamed for causing a 50km backlog?

I still don't buy the dog story, but just for the sake of the argument we make the worse case assumption: Gold and silver gives off distinctive odour that trained dogs can detect.

From an inorganic chemistry point of view, I'd say silver is the more vulnerable metal, as gold is extremely unreactive.

With narcotics detection canine units (drug dogs), the weakest link with use of trained dogs is the handler interpreting what the dog is reacting to.

He's an Italian food store owner - surely he has more than a few good-sized salamis handy, or some exotic Italian cheese. The government dog may be open to 'bribery'; yes, I'm talking about the four-legged one.

Even if the dog ignores it, what does a dog handler do when he sees the dog (reacting to gold/silver buried under the carpet) sniffing at a big roll of salami (what handler sees)?

He pulls the dog off.

A more conventional response from those of us who don't run a delicatessen: PAMP-like bullion in Certicards are unlikely to give off the same odour as bare metal.

 

The story may well be sensationalist (as was my poetic license with the topic title!) - they actually only say the dogs sniff out paper money, not PMs (yet another reason not to have fiat eh?) ...

The thing that fascinated me was the fact that people in the EU are trying to preserve their own wealth, yet their jurisdictions forbid them taking it out - it's so similar to previous stories eg Argentina - but this is the EU for goodness sake.

If times got very tight, I bet the cross-border flow of PMs (and other assets) anywhere could be regulated, even here where we might be more complacent, or led to believe our governments are somehow more egalitarian, which I don't believe for one minute.

 

Food store owner? Gold mule perhaps?

 

Its been clear to many, esp. in this century, that the EU was on a serious downward spiral, based upon various factors. One of the factors that was especially clear to me was the migration issue. So the answer to your bewilderment, is to change your perception as to what the EU really is. Max Keiser for instance, is quite outrageous in many things he says, and much that is said in jest is mingled with serious commentary, but he has been prescient on many things. On of the things he said, which I believe could possibly come to pass in the future decades, is that once France is overrun, paratroopers may need to go into Paris in order to rescue the famous paintings, statues, etc, from being destroyed, by those persons who find these cultural treasures offensive. May sound crazy, but remember truth is stranger than fiction.

I will not mention any people nor any race (there's no need), but the migration issue was especially serious in this regard:- there is a certain class of persons, who have fled their own country because its a hell-hole compared to the west. But the problem was, when they arrived in the west, they promptly set about in trying to transform their new host country into one which resembled the one they fled. These people are themselves victims of their own upbringing, and so cannot help themselves, for it is all they know. Australia has not been exposed to this problem, to the same degree as EU countries.

Look at it using this analogy. Let Great Britain for example, be represented by a bowl of clear water. And let the hell-hole country be represented by a bowl of red coloured water. And let each drop of water represent an individual human being. If you take an eye dropper, and keep extracting water from the red bowl, and dripping it into the clear bowl (where the red water finds "refuge"), eventually both bowls will look red, and both will be hell holes in which to live. Great Britain now, for example, has many horrific crimes being committed on a frequent basis, which they never had 10 years ago. These were crimes (where people are commonly horribly disfigured) which were common in the hell-hole country, but because people from that country sought refuge in Great Britain, these horrific crimes are now common in Great Britain, whereas previously they never used to exist. Lots of folk the world over, cannot seem to get their heads around this, like its a mystery too difficult to solve.

 

^ I'll confess to partly agreeing with the logic, and partly disagreeing south the underlying xenophobic notion.

Is the west the best?

 

Xenophobia is defined as an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries[1] or as an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.[2] It comes from the Greek words (xenos), meaning "stranger," "foreigner," and (phobos), meaning "fear."[3]

Studies have already been done in this regard, and its been found clearly, that the majority of all folk have NO problem with foreigners who are willing to INTEGRATE.

There are some people, who refuse to integrate into a host country which has accepted them, after they fled the country of their birth. There are two responses to this: (1) to be against the immigration of people who refuse to integrate; (2) to be an advocate for such persons, and to hell with the consequences.

 

Love it. Bringing a dog is the oldest trick in the book - "hey look he's indicating, prob cause right there".

 

(1)! Qs Why was the country you fled from such a hell hole? Why you you want to bring that reason to this new country you think is better and is without this problem?

 

In argentina more than once a week our dogs snif uss dollars in customs. But never i ear of gold or silver. But here is uncomun stack pms.

 

I wonder if they could train the dogs to sniff out stamps? Because we wouldn't wanty any rare stamp collections being secreted out. No... stamp collections could attract a healthy level of annual tax, which could then be divvied out amongst the people.

 

Last i knew of, Australia has 10 currency sniffing dogs.
Probably have a few more now though. I think those figures might of just been for the Afp

 

Silver is just as inert as gold ito chemical reactivity or in this case - UNreactivity

 

+1

Politically correct folk (i.e. those with their heads up their arse) will never accept what you have said, but I agree 100%. Another analogy - perhaps even a better one - is to compare the western host country of 30 to 40 years ago to be a young, healthy human body...
and the third world element who have been migrating there - both legally and illegally - are like cancer cells - being injected into that healthy body - one by one...
(seems as if one is arriving each minute at least)

The healthy body will eventually be crippled by this spreading cancer.... and it will eventually die!
In the case of European countries - their culture and language will eventually become endangered in their own countries ....

Anybody seen the "French" teams at the Olympics? lol - you can win a prize if you can spot a Frenchman in them

 

There was a band in Melbourne in the late 80's -90's called
SPOT THE AUSSIE The Espy every Saturday arvo's

 

@yippee et al.

That's some nice irony there.

The reason many of the european countries even have the culture they do is due to immigration, wars, occupation, etc. It is over time that such culture becomes an integrated part of the country as a whole.

It's a fine line between basic observation and xenophobia. I'm not saying I know, or have a strict opinion on where that line is exactly, but calling immigrants cancerous is probably over that line. Australia is comprised of many immigrants, starting with the criminal types that colonised us, to the european worker migrants, to the asian and indian migrants that are more prevalent now. Is Australia a giant cancer?

 

HINT: The 'cancerous' ones are those who don't integrate into our society and who are overrepresented in our prisons / criminal records.
I remember reading an article about a year or so ago about an African refugee community in Victoria somewhere... something like 85% of them had committed criminal acts multiple times...
90% of them will never work or contribute 1 cent in taxes ... but they certainly will be receiving plenty of our tax dollars each and every month in generous welfare payments.

Go figure.