A Nose for Cargo: Canine screening may become cargo security’s best friend

Cascading benefits

The speed of the canines’ noses is the chief advantage of these programs, but this speed leads to other, more subtle benefits.

John Peery, COO and executive vice president at California-based forwarding group Mercury Air Cargo, and a client of GK9PG, said the labor savings alone are worth committing to a canine program. “We don’t double- or triple-handle our cargo anymore,” he said, especially when e-commerce is involved, with its large plastic bags filled with a variety of different items.

“We can’t screen it as one piece” using X-ray equipment, Peery explained. “We’d have to break the cargo down, put it piece by piece through an X-ray machine, verify the contents and then re-stack it.” But because dogs can examine a load at the skid level, he said, it’s more cost-effective. As a result, Mercury has been able to reduce its screening staff from 33 to about 17 people, even though it will soon be expanding from three cargo facilities to five in the Los Angeles area.

This, in turn, can translate into later cut-off times for when airlines need pre-screened freight tendered for loading, said Shipco’s Ekstroem. “We are then allowed to build the freight into unitized cargo. We can deliver it later, by 3 p.m., instead of noon.”

Secondly, he added, “if we unitize the cargo, then the chance of the freight being damaged is much less. Likewise, there’s less of a chance of freight losing its connection at a transit point. It’s faster and it’s less of a headache, which encourages us to screen even more.”

Lastly, with dogs, there is less left to human interpretation. “If the dog finds something, it reacts,” usually by sitting next to the source of the detected odor, Ekstroem said. “Whereas with automated screening you have to interpret a small blurry picture on an X-ray and say ‘What are we looking at?’ or you may have to send it out for experts to evaluate the picture. It’s being watched by a human eye and it’s only as good as the eye that looks at it.”