MwM: Sulimov Dog

I'm bored and feeling a bit uninspired, but feel like uploading stuff, so...

The Sulimov Dog. Probably one of the cooler canine experiments out there.

To help counter act some of the terrorist bombings that have happened in Russia over the past few years, one Russian airliner, Aeroflot, sought to develop a perfectly honed canine bomb sniffer.

Dog breeder Klim Sulimov was the man they turned to. He wanted to build his canine sniffer from the ground up, starting with the Golden Jackal. Why? Jackals have the best noses in the whole canine world. The way he explained it was "You can sneak up on a wolf, and you can sneak up on a coyote, but you can never sneak up on a jackal, because it has already sniffed you."

First, he hybridized dog-reared Golden Jackals with Siberian Huskies, but even the hybrids were not very trainable. Then he added several other breeds such as Lapponian Herder and Fox Terrier (to improve trainability).

The program on National Geographic Channel showed Aeroflot putting the dogs to work. Sulimov says these dogs are better to use than German Shepherds because they take initiative (i.e. the handler doesn't have to tell the dog to 'search', they just go to work on their own). In the program, one of the dogs alerted the handlers to a bag that contained a trace of an accelerant that was smaller than a grain of sand.

Watch out Bloodhounds!

And if you think it would be cool to get one of them, don't start looking. The breed is the property of Sulimov, the Russian government, and Aeroloft.

Sources :
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I heard somewhere that you could use markers on watercolor paper. While I think the results could be better, I still think the medium combo has potential. My only beef with it is that blending colors is much more difficult (and sometimes not doable at all).

Sorry about my lame attempt on a background coloring. I guess I've got nothing on the Sparkledog crowd.

Micron and Prisma Marker on a Watercolor Moleskine.