Are dogs sensitive to star anise's smell?

Question

I have just read (in Polish) a 1985 crime novel, by Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug. It seems, that it wasn't translated to English. Its original title is Honningkrukken.
There's a tiny end-story note that main character took a bottle of liquid star anise (Illicium verum) and, when running away from dogs hunting him, he spread this spice around his path.
The narrator explained, that every dog is extremely sensitive to the smell of star anise. The desire to sniff any item, that smells like star anise, is so strong, according to book author, that every dog, even hunting one, will drop their hunting or prey and immediately stop at that place.
I'm an extreme newbie to this area, but that sounds like an absurd to me. Mentioned book is filled with similar mistakes and strange theories, so I'd like to verify this one.
The novel was generally very poorly written and is full of obvious mistakes or obviously incorrect assumptions, so above may be a complete mistake that I'd like to clarify.

PeterJ · Accepted Answer

While not an especially scientific test I often cook using generous amounts of star anise and have never noticed our dog taking any particular notice of it. Since reading your question on one occasion I left a small amount of warm broth with quite a large amount of star anise and on other occasion left a small bowl with a whole star anise steeping in warm water near him but just out of reach. On both occasions apart from the initial interest in what I was doing he didn't seem to pay any particular attention to them and certainly wasn't trying to get at the bowls.

I read with interest Dalton's comment about using it to train dogs for scent detection for amateur competitions. Something similar I found at Training for detection play which seems to be aimed at being accessible to everyone says the following in recommending a particular scent kit:

The kit contains 3 scents.  Birch, Anise, and Clove.  They are very distinctive essential oil scents, and the dogs take to them quickly.  The watertight box also contains scent holders (Q-tips) 3 eye droppers and a single aluminium scent holder.  This is the quickest way to get the proper scents, and the cheapest.

While star anise and anise are different they do share a strong and distinctive scent that I find easy to detect with my less sensitive human nose. I'd guess that dogs don't have any natural affinity with star anise; it's simply a cheap and affordable scent to train them with and something likely to be easily distinguished in most environments.

Are dogs sensitive to star anise's smell?

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