COBI Police K-9 Unit Set 1572

COBI's Police K-9 Unit is built from 90 blocks and contains a police car and two figures: an officer with handcuffs and a dog. Part of the Action Town range and compatible with other brick brands.

The dog is the equipment

A police dog is not a mascot, and what it does is genuinely difficult to replace with a machine.

A dog's nose has something in the order of 220 million scent receptors against a human's five million, and the part of its brain that processes smell is proportionally forty times larger. It can separate one scent from a mixture the way a person picks a single voice out of a crowded room — which is why dogs find people, not just substances.

For tracking that matters more than sensitivity. A person walking leaves skin cells and disturbed vegetation, and the scent degrades over time at a predictable rate. A trained dog reads the difference between an older and a fresher part of the trail and works out which way the person went. No instrument does that.

Handler and dog are trained as a pair and usually stay together for the dog's whole working life, which is why police forces treat the pairing rather than the animal as the unit.

In the COBI range

Part of Action Town, COBI's contemporary civilian range. Sets 1544, 1547, 1548 and 1565 are other police sets, and 26628 and 26630 are police helicopters.

Specifications

Pieces: 90 · Figures: 2, an officer and a dog · Series: Action Town