To state the obvious I love all animals not only dogs but when it comes to life and death - there needs to be solid evidence; dogs sniffing can lead that evidence but sniffing along cannot be an evidence.
I know, I know, it sounds so ridiculous but this is happening in real life. People (innocent until proven guilty) are going to prison with zero evidence but dog sniff test. Folks like Carren Corcoran corrupt the precious relationship between humans and dogs; there are millions ways to make money so please don't make money using this bond. You can read the stupidity here (she doesn't understand false positive):
Dogs have been celebrated since antiquity for their ability to sniff a particular odor and lead humans to its source. But the domesticated canine’s transformation into crime-fighting companion emerged much more recently, as U.S. police launched K-9 training programs and a thriving cottage industry of private firms, which often aid law enforcement, emerged. Today, police use dogs to track fugitives and search for missing persons, obtain probable cause (that is, legal justification to get a search warrant), and find substances, particularly illegal drugs. In what are known as scent lineups, agencies use trained canines to match evidence collected at a crime scene to the scent of a suspect or body. Increasingly, testimony from dog handlers has also served as direct evidence of guilt—accepted in lieu of an actual corpse, drug stash, or other physical evidence of a crime.
Yet critics worry that the criminal legal system has embraced a technique profoundly lacking in scientific validation. Dog-sniff evidence has led to wrongful convictions, and studies show human biases skew animal behavior. Almost no published research indicates just what dogs detect or how they do it. Defendants and their lawyers can’t cross-examine a dog, which means the accused cannot scrutinize the evidence or readily confront their accusers, a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
“It’s not enough to say I have this amazing expert with an incredible nose who can distinguish between scents,” says Binyamin Blum, an evidence scholar at the University of California (UC) Hastings College of the Law, who contends such testimony short-circuits the safeguards in place to discriminate between junk science and real science. “You have to explain exactly what their method is.”
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As with the 2004 cold case, the charges against Redwine hinged on Molly’s ability to detect the odor of dead bodies where no human remains could be found. “The best way I can describe it is someone pops popcorn in your house,” Corcoran explained to one Wisconsin jury. “You come in. You can smell the popcorn that’s been popped, but there is no popcorn left.” Suspects could hide a body but, as she saw it, no one could outrun a dog’s nose.
The notion has plausible roots. Behind a dog’s leathery, wet nose lies a cavernous labyrinth of scroll-shaped chambers called ethmoturbinates lined with some 200 million olfactory receptors, encoded by an estimated 2.5 times as many genes as in humans. In recent years, researchers studying canine cognition have shown pet dogs can sniff out minute quantities of odorants, such as the odor of their owner’s T-shirt after it has been worn.
In the best known study on what is sometimes called residual odor—one that Corcoran has cited in court—German researchers placed carpet squares underneath two recently deceased corpses and then presented those squares to three trained Malinois. The 2007 study showed the dogs accurately distinguished those squares from negative controls, though critics contend the findings were muddied by possible contamination and poor experimental design.
But what odors would be left 7 months or more after Dylan’s alleged murder? Although forensic anthropologists have identified hundreds of compounds associated with cadavers, little evidence suggests all dead bodies immediately start to give off a standard, identifiable odor signature. John McGann, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who wrote an influential review paper in Science arguing that poor human olfaction is a myth, says, “Even in cases where you say, ‘OK, a dog can follow a scent trail through the woods and find a person.’ Yes, they can. But what are they smelling? We don’t know. Right? We just literally don’t really know what exactly they’re smelling.”
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