It's more plausible, imo, than your belief that Grime deliberately encouraged false alerts. Such a suggestion makes no sense.
I think you may very well have that wrong and I think you need a cite to back up your accusation.
HOW THE CLEVER HANS EFFECT LEADS TO ERRORS IN CANINE SCENT DETECTIONIn a 2011 study by Lisa Lit et al., 18 experienced professional law enforcement canine detection teams completed searches under various conditions, but there was no target odor at all. Further, all handlers were misinformed; they were told that the searches might contain up to three target scents and that markers indicating the position of the scent would be present in two conditions. Additionally, to distract the dogs, experimenters hid sausages and a tennis ball, giving handlers no information about those conditions, but marking the location of the distraction with a piece of red paper.
Handlers were grouped according to the following 4 conditions:
(1)No food/toy distraction or marking (no influence)
(2)Marking tape, no food/toy distraction (handler influence)
(3)Unmarked food/toy distraction (dog influence)
(4)Marked food/toy (combined human and dog influence)
In this experiment, the dogs were trained to “alert” by sitting, barking, and both sitting and barking when the target odor was found. Upon observing the alert behavior, the handler would inform the proctor, who recorded the location.
Teams false alerted 225 times, despite the fact that there was no target odor when the dog offered their ‘‘alert’’ behavior in the absence of odor.
There were fewer false alerts in unmarked areas.
The results suggest that handler beliefs affected the performance of their dog, and that the paper markers were more likely to cause false alerts (from human interference) than olfactory distraction by sausages (dog influence).
https://spring2020.iaabcjournal.org/the-clever-hans-effect-scent-detection/
