Geoff Knupfer

I mean, we were looking at ground penetrating radar in the 1980s and it was a great lumbering process and very slow and very painstaking.

It's far more

advanced now, because this came primarily from the military looking for non-metallic ordnance, you know, plastic landmines and the like, and the oil industry, where they're doing survey work as well.

So these technologies certainly have developed, not because of what we've done, but because of what others have done.

You know, canine search, cadaver search, that process has been developed and is developing now.

Where we, in the 1980s, we would just let a dog and dog handler roam around aimlessly.

You know, it is now contained, it is precise.

You know, we operate on, I say we, the commission, operate on 20 by 20 meter grids.

and lines run across the that so that one meter apart so the the dog is searching you know there are probe holes every minute meter and the dog is searching carefully now there may be multiple dogs so you're not just relying on one dog

that might be having a bad day.

You know, I mean, that's an important aspect of all this.

The other thing is that canine search, which is probably as good as it gets, I think, in terms of, you know, if you talk to people, they say that the dog's scenting is better than any machine.

And I think that's true, but the dog has got to know what it's looking for.

And you've got to get a dog, I repeat just what I said a few months ago, you've got to get a dog on a good day.

You don't want the dog having a bad hair day.

So I think what's happening now is that...

In the early days, the dogs were responding to the active scent of decay.

When you end up with just skeletal remains, what's there for the dog?

And so they're now talking about training dogs to look for bone, the scent of bone decay, which apparently can be different from soft tissue decay.

So these are the processes that are developing and changing over the years.