…Hot Dogs…

Antoine Feuchtwanger, who was a Bavarian sausage peddler, is usually given credit for having invented the first hot dog. His creation first appeared in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States in 1883.

Sausages were Mr. Feuchtwanger' s specialty. They were so hot that Antoine used to let his customers borrow white gloves while they were eating his sausages. Without the gloves, they were too hot to touch. However, many of his customers often forgot to return the gloves and walked away with them, and with them went Antoine's profits.

So, Antoine got the idea of putting the sausages into buns made of bread to avoid using and losing the gloves. Besides that, the people could eat the buns, so Antoine could even raise the price for this newly‑invented food item. That's how the very first hot dog was made. It is certain that his new idea was popular, because many hot dogs have been eaten since then.

A cartoonist in New York whose name was Ted Dorgan is generally believed to have been the first person to invent the term "hot dogs". He used this name for Antoine's new invention. Dorgan used hot dogs as his cartoon characters and even gave them spoken lines of conversation. Now "hot dog" is a term familiar to people all over the world.

Dog detectives : behind the headlines

This week Steve Walters takes a look at the use of sniffer dogs

in crime detection

SNIFFER DOGS are used by police and customs officers all over the world to detect drugs and explosives. Dogs have a far better sense of smell than people because the smell receptors at the top of a dog's nose are 100 times longer than in humans.

Training for a sniffer dog lasts 12 weeks. They are trained in two stages. First, the trainer teaches the dog to recognise a particular drug or explosive. He hides a sample of the drug or explosive inside a rolled‑up newspaper or a rag, which is called a training aid. He places it where the dog can see it and tells the dog to bring the aid back. When it does so, he gives the dog a reward - usually a friendly fight with the trainer or a bone.

The dog soon learns to recog­nise the substance by its smell. The type of training aid is changed regularly but the smell always remains the same. In the second stage, the aid is hidden where the dog cannot see it. Smells such as perfumes, which some smugglers use to hide the smell of the drugs, are also used so that the dog becomes familiar with them­.

Sniffer dogs are trained to detect 12 different types of explosives and four different types of drugs.