Ask Dognosis: How Do You Look After the Dogs?

In our first Ask Dognosis, we answered your questions about the dogs' noses. The rest of what you ask is about the dogs themselves, how they live and whether all this is fair to them, so this one is all about life in the pack.

Is This Safe for the Dogs?

It's the question we hear most, and it's a fair one to ask of anyone who works with animals. We draw a clear line between what we do and animal testing in cosmetics or pharmaceuticals: our dogs are collaborators, and nothing is ever done to them. They sniff breath samples in short sessions, and because they're trained with positive reinforcement alone, every find ends in a reward.

Sniffing takes up about 30 minutes of a dog's day. The rest is spent on sunrise and sunset walks, hours of play with each other in our grassy yard and the occasional swim, with a dedicated caretaker team looking after their feeding, exercise and wellbeing. Every dog has a distinct personality, so our K9 team maps out an individual progression plan for each of them. We're open about how the dogs live, and we welcome animal-rights groups and dog lovers as allies.

Can the Dogs Catch Cancer From the Masks?

No. Cancer isn't contagious, so it can't pass from a person to a dog through breath, or through a mask someone has breathed into. What the dogs pick up is a smell: the volatile organic compounds a person breathes out, which are chemical byproducts of the body's metabolism. The dogs don't handle the masks either. Each sealed mask sits on a tray beneath a port in SniffSpace, a slider opens just long enough for the dog to sniff the air above it, and then it closes again while suction clears the port.

Where Do the Dogs Come From?

Our dogs are adopted from reputable, ethical breeders and from shelters, and the pack is now 14 dogs strong. Shelter dogs hold their own here, and one of the strongest noses in our published study belongs to an indie and Labrador mix adopted from a shelter.

What Happens When a Dog Retires?

When a dog is ready to step back from sniffing, they go on to a quieter life at home. Jessie retired early and went home with someone on our team, and she has since become our go-to dog for events, because she is simply brilliant with people. She stole the show at our Curious Wednesdays evening at Kadhaigal Books in September, and more recently she spent about a week with the team at Edge City India in Goa, where she discovered she is a beach girl.

Do the Dogs Need to Be a Special Breed?

Beagles and Labradors are famous for their noses, and the seven dogs in our Journal of Clinical Oncology study were four Beagles, a Labrador, an indie and Labrador mix and a Dutch Shepherd and Belgian Malinois mix. Even so, a breed is really just a spread of personality traits, and what matters is the individual dog: their temperament, how readily they learn and how much they love to sniff. As our co-founder Akash Kulgod puts it, independent dogs that enjoy sniffing for its own sake tend to do best.

Will a Dog Come to My Home to Sniff Me?

The dogs stay at our lab in Bengaluru, and your breath travels to them. A trained specialist visits you at home, you breathe into a sterile mask for about ten minutes, and the sealed mask goes to our lab, where several trained dogs assess it in a controlled setting. Once sealed in a bag, a mask can keep its scent for up to three months, so a sample can travel hundreds of kilometres and still be read. You can find out more about how the Breath Test works.

Have a question about the dogs, the science or the Dognosis Breath Test? Ask us in the comments or DMs on Instagram, and it might be answered in the next Ask Dognosis. And if you'd like to be among the first to take the Breath Test when we launch, join the waitlist.