Table 2.

EDC team performance interview themes and exemplar quotations.

Interview Themes	Exemplar Quotations
EDC team composition	Quote 3. Well, you never have a thing as just a dog. So, there’s a problem with this. It took us years to get non-dog people to think about, “Well I got my dog, the dogs are over here, we’re good.” It’s like, “No, you don’t have anything.” If you have a dog and you don’t have a qualified team, you don’t have anything. You have something that’s eating dog food. So, every dog is different, every handler is different. You have to ensure that the handler is properly qualified. He really knows what he’s doing with the dog. And then you’ve got to put the dog and the handler together and run assessments against that team. Once you say, “Okay, this team is qualified”, then you can say you have something. But until you get to that step, you don’t have anything. Or you have something, but you don’t know what you have.
Physical fitness and energy	Quote 4. Now, I’m not asking for a spaz, but I want to see some energy and some physical ability. Yeah, so the perception of physical fitness, I guess. If I see these dogs that are just kind of coming in and just very lazily approaching the search, although I’ve seen them be successful from time to time, that doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in me if I were forming an opinion about a dog or a team. I guess that’s energy slash drive slash physical conditioning.
Effective searching	Quote 5. Well, I think you’re seeing the drive of the dog. Is the dog actively searching? Is the dog searching in a systematic pattern? Is the dog searching productively? Unfortunately, it’s dictated often by the environment, but is the dog panting so you know that it’s not actively searching? Is the dog distracted by other things within the environment? I think all of those things would be important.
	Quote 6. I want to see a dog that can work an entire problem and not find anything, and then come back in and still be searching the same way. There’s no drop in their ability to want to go to work, do another search.
	Quote 7. Probably the one that stands out the most is active sniffing behavior. I’ve seen a lot of dogs over the years and all that, there’s nuances and differences between them, but the basic is, that the dog has to have active sniffing behavior. Sometimes just by watching the dog, you can see whether or not the dog has drive for the task.
	Quote 8. So, if it’s a desk, an office desk, if you will, there’s a lot of drawers, cabinets, whatever the case may be, the dog has to make sure that they’re sniffing all those drawer seams or cabinet door seams and all that to make sure that that’s where the odor’s going to be coming out of. The handler has to be observant in making sure the dog is hitting those productive areas. If he doesn’t, that’s where the handler has to come in and actually present with his hands, or her hands, those productive areas, those door seams or drawer seams or whatever the case may be to make sure the dog is actively sniffing in those areas and having the best opportunity to find that explosive odor in this case.
	Quote 9. If I’m looking for large hides, like you’re looking for 50-pound explosives in the trunk of a vehicle, dogs can be moving pretty quickly, and they can be sort of air searching and questing. If you’re looking for explosives that are hidden in laptops, the dog can’t be running real fast. He has to be deep down, he has to be moving at a slower pace, he has to be at a high rate of inhalation. I mean a very detailed search for that target, and I can tell that the dog is fully investigating each target of opportunity. If he runs by a suitcase, and this depends on the size of the target zone, if you’re trying to clear packages in an airport and they’re running on a conveyor belt and the dog is walking along just sniffing bags as they go by, he’s not going to find something that’s really hidden well, unless he just lucks into it. Now, big stinky hide that’s been permeating through the containers, he can catch that going by. So, the search that I want to see in the dog needs to be relative to the target that we’re seeking.
Interaction with handler	Quote 10. They can be high drive and fast, but I like to see a dog that will take direction easily and work away from the handler very well, but still doesn’t rely on the handler. So, either on or off lead, it doesn’t change the way they work, you shouldn’t see a change. They shouldn’t be relying on the handler at all is one of the things that I look for. They shouldn’t check back in too much with the handler. So, if I’m watching a dog work, I don’t particularly like when they keep checking back in with the handler, or back to people looking for those cues.
Handler requirements	Quote 11. It’s incumbent upon the individual handlers to ensure that they know their individual dogs. Not only in terms of how they respond necessarily to odor, but also the effectiveness of their dogs’ searching abilities. In other words, are there other factors that are leading these dogs to either perform well or perform poorly. So, are they tired? Have they been broken? Have they been fed? Have they been exercised? All those things go into it. And if the dog is lackadaisical and not showing any sort of interest at all in the searching activity, is there something medically wrong with the dog? That sort of thing. So, all those factors build into the dog’s ability to perform the searching task... The idea being the handlers, especially in these repetitive tasks, the handlers know what the clues are that the dog is interested in the search.