In the current loud and overwrought rumpus about terrorists sneaking explosives onto Airliners in their skivvies we can see one of the great but usually overlooked flaws in the American character. When we face a problem we always seen to gravitate to the most envelope pushing high tech solution. We love gizno’s and the fancier and more expensive the better. Everybody is talking about new and better and far more expensive sniffing machine to spot terrorists hiding explosives on their persons. Who knows if they really work in the field, if we can train TAS schleps to read and understand the data they get from the machines.

What irritates me greatly is that we avoid the clear and obvious answer, the one any child would know and understand. We already have the world’s most sophisticated and discriminating sniffing machine. Yeah, you see where I’m going. We have the DOG. Canis Lupis Vulgarus.

Among the various breeds of dogs I am told that the Beagle is particularly good at sniffing out contraband. Additionally it is a relatively small dog, ever so cute and amiable and hardly likely to frighten women and children. With it’s big dark eyes, floppy ears and perkiness, who could object to getting sniffed by an adorable friendly Beagle? We know that in the USA and UK Beagles are used very successfully by dermatologists to identify skin cancers. The cute mutts when trained, not very hard apparently, have a 100% success rate in smelling targeted malignancies. It is child’s play -- puppy play may be more accurate -- for them.

Ah, but it too simple. There is no big bucks pot of gold at the end of the R &D drama if we mandated every airport have a kennel full of cheerful Beagles who would sniff down passengers and baggage for us. What would it cost us? Not much beyond flea collars and bags of Iam’s dog chow supplemented by whatever human food they can charm out of their handlers and the airport staff and passengers.

Would it work? Damn straight it would work like a charm. The perky mutts would sniff out potential terrorists, they could also nab drug smugglers and folks who violate our food and drug laws by smuggling in meat contraband like real Italian salami, sweet and salty Hunan ham or South African beef jerky.

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