Hurley, a 5-and-a-half-year-old German shepherd, heard the command "seek" and promptly yanked his police handler toward the small car parked in front of him.

With his tail up, the eager hound stuck his nose into everything inside the car, sniffing for all he was worth. When he found something suspicious, he stopped and sat perfectly still, just as he has been trained to do.

In the trunk of the car, Hurley's handler found a "bomb".

The device in this case was just a dummy, a training aid that was put in the trunk to test the dog's ability to sniff out explosives.

But during the Olympics and Paralympics, Hurley and his 203 four-legged colleagues will be searching for the real thing at sports venues, hotels and hospitals.

Just like the world's top athletes, Hurley and his canine pals are currently going through their final training routines ahead of this summer's Games. Yesterday, at the Beijing People's Police College, they put on their first public show for the media.

As 204 German shepherds, Rottweilers, Labradors, golden retrievers and springer spaniels paraded onto the training ground, reporters could have been forgiven for thinking they were at a dog show.

But these were no pampered pooches: They are the finest sniffer dogs from around the country, chosen for their outstanding performance in bomb detection, Ding Xingjian, deputy director of the criminal investigation department of the Beijing public security bureau, said.

"On average, they have been working as sniffer dogs for three to four years," he said.

"Several of them are worth 100,000 yuan ($14,600)."

The dogs and their handlers arrived in Beijing a month ago, to begin training and to allow the dogs time to get used to the local weather, Ding said.

Tang Shusheng, from the police dog training center in Kunming, Yunnan province, said real explosives, filled with a variety of materials such as gunpowder and Semtex, are being used to train the dogs.