Bloundhounds as Detectives: Dogs, Slum Stench and Late-Victorian Murder Investigation

This article explores the nineteenth-century origins of the sniffer dog in one of the most notorious homicide investigations in British history, focusing on Scotland Yard's attempts to use the reputed olfactory powers of pure-bred English bloodhounds in the hunt for London's East End serial murderer Jack the Ripper in 1888. This episode has been historiographically overlooked in part because the dogs were never actually deployed. However, the failure to unleash dogs on the Ripper's trail turns out to be critically significant, opening up a space through which the historical contingencies and social meanings of dog-breeding and training practices can be explored and scrutinized. As a crime-solving tool, utilized for the purpose of investigating metropolitan crime, canine detection posed distinct problems. Proponents of bloodhound detection had to contend with various cultural, material and practical challenges, in order to guarantee the canines as reliable hunters in an environment that was contaminated by slum odour.