. Its all about the ability to hide contraband from a K9 ( I'm in K9..on the good guys side....) And you are right...open air, no way. Enclosed, if done properly, it can work. Otherwise what little studies have been done, it takes the dog twice as long to indicate on hidden people ( cant stop them from breathing) and significantly longer on contraband, and yeah, they will act like they aren't really sure of the source or its volume.
You are also right about the dog separating the odors, which it can do as long as the free radical "O" atom hasn't attached itself through long exposure.
I started this thread knowing if you can get it past a coyote, you can get it past any K9...
Ingwe, I am really interested in what you are finding. I assume you are doing some testing with dogs you know?
From my attempts to fool coyote noses years ago, I concluded that
maybe with the best odor eradication I could come up with at the time, it
might delay full scent recognition for a few seconds. Sometimes the coyote just seemed puzzled at what he was smelling for a second or two, not that he didn't smell something but it was apparently a new scent combo to him. All of that is guess as to what was going on in the coyote's nose and brain, and results were not worth the effort.
You can run more controlled and measurable tests than my fooling around with wild coyotes, close up in bow hunting stands in thick brush.
Most of the testimonials re scent control that I have seen are declarations that the hunter got close to an animal, therefore the animal did not smell the hunter. All that proves is that the hunter got close. There are too many factors and I have gotten close to too many animals to buy that logic. We have no idea what the critter smelled or didn't smell. Tests with a trained dog would be far more definitive, and to the extent that you can reveal, I'm curious what you find as you try different ways to deceive a dog nose.