I’ve been watching too much mythbusters recently. Anyhow, a recent episode taught me things I’d always wondered about (for no good reason, of course): how to get past a trained guard dog, and how to evade a bloodhound.
with the guard dogs, they tested two things that worked: distracting the dog with raw meat, and distracting the dog with the piss of a bitch in heat (works only on male dogs).
For the bloodhound, they busted a lot of theories, including the old “pepper” trick (although they only tried black pepper, not cayenne or anything hotter). Crossing streams, walking up streams, zigzagging, none of those worked at all. Changing clothes distracted the dog for only a moment. The only thing that did any good was getting to an urban environment.
You can never watch *too* much mythbusters. They have a great way of taking what people seem to just *know* and putting it to the test, but without taking themselves too seriously. As a side note, Adam is a sometimes presence on the group-site metafilter and has been known to engage in just this sort of further discussion. He comes across on-line in just the same way he does on the tube: goofy, bright, interested and fun.
Back when Rockefeller was the VP, a pressman at a local paper discovered that bomb-sniffing dogs just HATE highway flares. One dog woofed at his parked car, so the Secret Service pried open his car and cut the battery cables.
Boy, it’s a good thing that evildoers don’t grind up highway flares, dissolve them in water/alcohol, and spritz the stuff around with spray bottles at likely speach/rally locations. That would be sheer chaos!