by Cat Warren
• • •
Another object [of this invention] is to provide a method of building construction in which the dangers attendant upon working at elevated levels will be reduced to a minimum.
—United States Patent Office No. 2,715,013, August 9, 1955
It was just three months after the Helle Crafts case, in late April 1987, when Andy used cadaver dogs for the purpose that the U.S. Army and the Southwest Research Institute originally envisioned: a major disaster, the worst in modern Connecticut history.
Twin sixteen-floor concrete buildings under construction in Bridgeport collapsed. L’Ambiance Plaza fell in seconds. Within hours, Andy and Lady, along with four other Connecticut state troopers and their dogs, were on the scene, facing a mountain of broken concrete slabs, twisted steel, and iron rebar. Dogs and men inched across the pitched slabs of concrete. The troopers and workers carried spray paint and flags. The German shepherds would alert, giving the general location of body after body, sometimes on open holes, sometimes at the edge of the pancaked slabs, where scent could escape.
Though it was early on, construction workers and their families were becoming aware that the scene was less a rescue operation than a recovery operation. Twenty-two workers were injured, some badly, but they were the fortunate ones: blown off the edges of the slabs by the force of the collapse as the floors pancaked down. The dogs alerted time after time after time, inhaling concrete dust. Then the cold spring rain started, tamping down the dust and making footing even more treacherous, intensifying the cold glare of the floodlights on the massive rubble pile.
The dogs helped find all twenty-eight victims. Italian-American, African-American, Irish-American workers, their bodies so broken that Andy said he had never seen so much damage on human bodies, before or since. And Andy has seen almost everything that humans, or nature, can do. “It still haunts me,” he said.
L’Ambiance Plaza still angers him. Quick, cheap—and dangerous. It still angers me. In a minor twist of fate, Andy and I realized nearly a quarter century later, when we met face-to-face, that we had probably passed each other on that site. Andy was managing the dog searches for days, until the last body was removed. I was there only one night as a newspaper reporter for the Hartford Courant. All disasters, by nature, are terrible, but it was the worst disaster I had ever covered. I played only a brief role one freezing day and night, tasked with standing by in case more injured victims, or bodies, were recovered. Reporters and investigators came to understand that something had gone disastrously wrong with a construction system hailed as an efficient, economical way to raise a building. After the accident, lift-slab construction was temporarily banned. The ban is no longer in place; nonetheless, lift-slab construction is rarely if ever used in the United States.
That Andy and I didn’t meet during those terrible days in Bridgeport probably didn’t change the course of my life. I doubt I would have decided, at that point in my newspaper career, to start training dogs to do search work. That would wait until I was solidly middle-aged.
The odd connections didn’t end there. As I was finalizing my research on SwRI and its role in dog research, I discovered an unrelated invention of its founder. Tom Slick Jr. filed a patent for “Apparatus for Erecting a Building” in 1948. As the old pen-and-ink drawings filled my computer screen, I saw the original outline of a construction system I had grown to know by heart in the aftermath of L’Ambiance Plaza: its pulleys and jacks and pumps and concrete slabs. Slick had invented lift-slab construction.
Andy said it best: “What a coincidence! He funded the type of dogs that would work to locate victims of a disaster caused by the failure of his invention.”
• • •
Andy, to no working-dog person’s surprise, ended up writing (along with Edward David and forensic anthropologist Marcella Sorg) what is considered the bible of cadaver-dog trainers and handlers: Cadaver Dog Handbook, published in 2000.
“Remember I warned you about being too brain-oriented. The Andy Rebmann book is good, though—he’s the guru,” Nancy Hook told me in an e-mail.
Andy’s wife, Marcia Koenig, a famous volunteer handler and trainer in her own right, helped write and edit and provide illustrations for Cadaver Dog Handbook. She had been doing search-dog work since 1972. Andy introduced her to cadaver-dog work. Marcia became very good at it. She and her German shepherds have deployed to look for missing homicide victims, suicides, lost hikers, dementia patients, and victims of tornadoes and hurricanes. She’s worked in wilderness, in snow, and on water. She and her sable German shepherd, Coyote, spent four days in August 1997 crawling through mud on the island of Guam after Korean Air Flight 801 crashed and tore a ragged hole in the side of the mountain.
“That area was so saturated with the smell of decomposition and jet fuel that none of the dogs could alert on anything specific,” Marcia recalled. “Each one looked up at the handler in frustration and basically said, ‘It’s everywhere.’ ” She and Coyote, as well as the other dog teams, were knee-deep in wet clay during the entire search. Despite the challenges, stubborn Coyote helped find bone, tissue, and a femur. Toward the end, when the mud was too deep and Marcia exhausted, Coyote, a wild and crazy dog gone good, laid an object at her feet.
“She was so gentle,” Marcia said. It was a child’s foot, nearly the last thing found on the search. Retrieving wasn’t standard operating procedure for Coyote, but that little foot gave the searchers and the family great comfort.
Across the country dozens of handlers and trainers have trained with Andy, then followed in his footsteps, training their own dogs, and also training other handlers. In law enforcement in the United States, Jim Suffolk started the legacy of body-recovery dogs. Andy kept it going and developed the training system considered the gold standard today.
Andy is in his seventies now, still traveling worldwide with Marcia: to train dogs and handlers, to create better training protocols, to testify in legal cases. He still goes out on both live searches and cadaver searches. He can’t tell me how many searches he has done over his career. I know that before his retirement from the Connecticut State Police in 1990, he used to do at least a hundred searches a year. He doesn’t keep count anymore. What would be the point?
“My next search is the important one.”
5
The Shell Game
. . . the foundation ceremony can be seen as a recognition that building is both an act of memory and also a fresh start.
—Tracy Kidder, House, 1999
Solo stood in Nancy Hook’s training yard, brow wrinkled, staring at five identical white buckets lined up with military precision. One of them had a cadaver “hide” in it—a little bit of something from somebody who died, or from someone kind enough to donate part of himself to Nancy for a moment like this. One canine trainer shared a portion of his rib, removed in a surgery. As he explained to me years later, he didn’t want his own dogs wandering around confused about what they should be indicating on—the rib outside the handler or the ribs inside him.
For this particular exercise, Nancy was using one of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s wisdom teeth, packed with a bit of bloody gauze. Now nearly six months old, Solo was fifty-five pounds of raw bone and sinew. Few juvenile German shepherds are handsome. Only a handful are well adjusted. He was increasingly impervious to pain, whether receiving it or causing it. Despite my nightmares, Solo wasn’t that far outside the shepherd mainstream.
Nancy had given him his first job: to duck his head inside bucket after bucket and figure out which one held the tooth and gauze. This is one method for laying a foundation for a cadaver dog, or any scent-working dog, as it learns to recognize and then signal clearly that it has found what you want it to find. Cadaver, cocaine, gunpowder, heroin. Bed bugs. Some trainers use buckets; others use concrete blocks. More advanced rigs consist of wooden boxes with holes in the top, even springs inside so that a rubber Kong or tennis ball can pop out like a jack-in-the-box for an instant reward. These were early
days for me, before I knew the great varieties of boxes available. Everyone has a favorite system, but bells and whistles aren’t necessary; perfect timing on the part of the handler is.
On the first run, Solo ducked his head into the fourth bucket, which held the bloody tooth, looked up at me, then ducked his head back in. He had no association with that odor, although it smelled intriguingly different than the smells in the first three buckets. Nancy hissed my cue at me, and I fumbled to give him a liver treat. Solo tried to help himself to the tip of my finger along with the treat. Soon enough, he threw himself into the game. As Nancy switched the position of the buckets, he charged from one to the next, jerking me along, tangling us in his lead, pulling his head out of the “hot” bucket, staring at me, griping loudly if I didn’t reward him quickly. His complaints moved up and down the scales, howls of frustration and delight.
Nancy’s chestnut eyes narrowed as she watched Solo and me perform a bad rendition of the funky chicken with some leash bondage added. I could hear my heart forcing blood through my head. It should have been simple. I was to move just ahead of Solo, using a loose lead, past each bucket, not hesitating, not rushing. With a gracious hand gesture, I was to present the bucket to him. Check here (dog’s head dips into the bucket), check here (dog’s head dips in the next bucket), check here (dog’s head dips and stays). Good dog! Treat! Classic operant conditioning. Solo would start linking cadaver smell with a reward.
Nancy let me keep the treats in my handy belly pack, but it was turning out to be one more thing to manage besides the lead, the dog, the buckets. Oh, and my ego. I was terrible at this. Solo surged from one bucket to the next, skipping one that didn’t seem interesting, doubling back, yanking us silly, then yowling when he got a whiff of scent and changed his mind. He was cheating, energetic, and out of control. Nancy loved it. She chuckled and crooned, “Good boy, good boy” to him while she hissed sotto voce to me, “Reward him, reward him.”
I was near tears. I didn’t fully understand then, but Solo was in what working-dog trainers call “drive” mode, as essential to keeping a dog running as gas in a car’s tank. That revved-up state of mind would be essential to the work ahead. I saw it as “bad dog” mode; it wasn’t what I was used to. Zev had walked quietly and steadily at my side in a perfect heel. He got depressed and shut down if I scowled at him. Even Megan, though she cared not a whit whether I approved of what she did, was obedience-trained. Their good behavior was a reflection on me. I had tenure. I was a teacher of dogs and humans.
Solo was brutally rebooting my canine worldview. According to Nancy, I had my first working dog. As far as she was concerned, any male dog who was interesting or worthwhile was a “macho jackass.” Any good female was a “bitch from hell.” These were compliments. Sweet, compliant dogs were boring, and Nancy wanted nothing to do with them. Solo was making me miserable while achieving comparative perfection in Nancy’s eyes. I could feel her already skeptical assessment of my potential nosedive. I was not a bitch from hell. I was trying my best to be compliant, but I couldn’t even coordinate my limbs.
“That’s it,” Nancy instructed when she heard Solo yodeling at me for about the third time because he wasn’t getting rewarded. “There’s his alert!”
If I hadn’t been so frustrated, I would have marked this as a special moment in a working dog’s life, like Solo getting his tribal name—“Whines with Brio.” The behavior of an alert, or what some in the sniffer-dog business call a “final indication,” is supposed to be something that comes naturally to the dog yet is distinctive. For most narcotics dogs, the alert means sitting with a focused stare at the spot where the drug smell is coming from. A few drug dogs still dig and scratch, though that “aggressive alert” is disappearing, seen as old-school. Bomb dogs never used it, for obvious reasons. Nancy and I talked: Solo’s distinctive whine combined with a sit might become his trained alert to tell me he had not only found the material we were looking for, he was committing himself to that spot. More important, I could say on a search, “This is what Solo does when he detects the odor of human remains. He sits and sings a cappella.”
That moment wasn’t in our immediate future. If it ever came. This laying of the scent foundation and formulating an alert were the first baby steps on the long road to mastery.
It wasn’t just the scent that Solo needed to recognize. He needed to be willing to go anywhere to find it. That meant turning his natural drive into environmental toughness. I was slowly starting to understand why working-dog trainers liked dogs who were pains in the rear, who destroyed crates, who tore up the insides of cars, who challenged everything, who tried to jam three toys in their mouths at once. The first time I met West Virginia working-dog breeder and trainer Kathy Holbert, she was in the yard offhandedly throwing a dog’s rubber Kong. It landed repeatedly in the middle of a heavy brush pile that looked like a funeral pyre, the kind of awkward toss that makes most people curse. Only Kathy was doing it on purpose, and the young shepherd was diving into the rough limbs, making them part like water. Kathy was developing the dog’s nose and drive.
The energy had to be there first. If you had that in a dog, you could work with it. As canine trainer Lisa Lit explained to a group of search-and-rescue handlers about building drive, “Let them explode, then rechannel it.”
First comes the energy, then the expertise. Cognitive scientists have intensively studied the notion of human expertise. We watch playful children start out banging incoherently on the piano. That’s a start, but it’s the structured, guided practice and play with constant feedback over an extended period of time that can turn random notes on a keyboard first into “Doe, a deer, a female deer” and ultimately into Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight.” That is, if a parental figure doesn’t ruin the sound of music by haranguing the child to practice. Along the way, a number of the motor behaviors for playing the piano become automatic, so the child doesn’t have to think about them. The fingers start to fly by themselves up and down the ivories as body memory pulls them along.
The notion of expertise applied to dogs and other animals is scientifically controversial. Working-dog trainers have no doubt that it exists, and they aren’t worried about whether the learning curves mimic humans’, as long as the dogs learn, keep learning, and layer that knowledge.
The beginning of the process was what Nancy was teaching me and Solo: “What the heck is that smell?” That early stage is important. Once that scent is second nature, add some distractions: some of Nancy’s chickens, perhaps. A clumsy handler like me. I might teach a juvenile Solo to teeter on a low balance beam in the backyard and to keep his paws on the board. I wouldn’t comfort him if he fell off and yelped; I would urge him back in a happy, relaxed voice until he could walk along the beam with a sure paw and confident grin.
William “Deak” Helton calls the entire emerging research arena of working dogs “canine ergonomics”—the study of the relationship between the working dog and her environment. The working dog learns the gymnastics of the body, mind—and nose. In due time, a good disaster dog should be able to crawl and balance herself purposefully over the rubble of a collapsed building, all while using her nose, then signaling to the handler what she has found. That dexterity, that multitasking, is what Deak Helton calls “canine expertise.” And Deak is a believer in the concept. “Although canine experts cannot verbalize their knowledge, this in no way implies they do not have it,” he wrote.
There’s resistance to the notion that dogs can be experts, among both cognitive psychologists and people who feel it gives any animal too much credit. “I think a major problem is the bogeyman of anthropomorphism,” Deak said. Yet we can train people to do things that other people can’t do without training. “If you asked me to do a backflip and discovered I could not do it now—untrained, unconditioned—would you conclude people cannot backflip?” Watch gold-medal gymnast Gabby Douglas, the “Flying Squirrel,” at the 2012 Olympics and try to imagine her first gymnastics lesson at the
age of six.
At the same time Nancy was teaching me how to train Solo’s nose, I needed to teach him skills that would complement that nose: how to tolerate electric fences, how to swim in rivers, how to push through heavy brush, how to climb over and into and under and through. How to ignore distractions, like Whiskey, Nancy’s big brindle East European shepherd—Solo’s nemesis—who snarled next to the cyclone fence, suggesting that the upstart come try him out.
When it comes to dogs doing detection work, Deak said, people tend to forget it takes time to develop skills. Dogs, like humans, need a chance to learn before their capabilities are dismissed. I was going to give Solo a chance, even if he wasn’t giving my fingers much of one.
Science aside, experienced working-dog trainers are clear about the order of things. You lay the foundation first. The analogy with building a house is perfectly apt. If you don’t get that right, nothing you put on top will hold. You’ll have a shaky, unreliable dog. A dog who can’t keep his eyes on the prize.
• • •
Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
For the moment, Solo was staring fixedly at the buckets, ignoring me. Whatever fun thing was happening, it was coming from those buckets. Solo loved the buckets. That could change. While this kind of foundation work is essential to future stability, it can be boring for both you and the dog. Especially if you forget that it’s supposed to be fun, which is easy for an overly invested handler (like me) to do. That’s when a little magic can come in handy. One day, without Solo being along for the ride, I got to participate in a magic show and learn from a master trainer how to keep foundation work interesting for both handlers and dogs.