by Cat Warren
Solo had already moved on. Having expelled his ya-yas, he put his nose down in the creek bed, then slowed to a crawl and cricked his long expressive tail. He was working. That tail set showed that he wasn’t smelling animal, which makes the kink defensive, held higher above his back. Nor was it his human-remains scent crick, where he holds his tail lower and parallel to his back but with an odd piggy curl at the end. No, that was a live human scent tail. He surged out of the creek to the other side, and I could see now where a small portion of the cliff, created by the sandy sediments washed down from roads and construction projects, had collapsed on the far bank of the creek. The sedge grass there was bruised and broken.
I knew the police K9 hadn’t made it that far, so neither had the police. Deer, raccoon, beaver, and fox—the only herbivores and mesopredators that manage to survive in these polluted woody swamps—don’t create that much of a mess. It must have been a human.
Solo is neither trained nor encouraged to do live trailing, except when I tell him to go find David in the house or yard. Solo’s job is to hit the edge of the cone of cadaver scent and then define its parameters, spooling back and forth until he comes down the cone to its tip: ideally, the source of the scent. But in a swamp and woods this size, it could take some time until he hit scent. If he hit scent. So it wasn’t stupid to have Solo start his work from where the suspect most likely fled, the point last seen.
Solo didn’t care where I started him. He was playing his favorite game. He didn’t realize, though, that his favorite game had escalated. He was looking for an entire body, one that probably had been out for four days in a warm, wet environment. Its scent cone might be huge. We were early in our work. Solo hadn’t found a whole body before; nor had he been exposed to one, even in training.
If the body were here, it should be easy for Solo to find. He was used to looking for parts per million—a tooth here, a bloody cloth there. While Solo and I had worked on many acres at Nancy’s farm, and I had watched him pick up scent from training aids a couple of hundred yards away, I had no way of knowing what he might do in this case. Just a year before this search, Solo trained on a large cardboard box that contained both dirt and a blanket that had lingered beneath a body for some time. The scent overwhelmed him: It’s here, no, it’s there, no, it’s everywhere. He wandered around in the miasma, drunk and giddy. He finally stopped and stood in the middle of the funkiest spot, puzzled. What am I supposed to do with this?
At least one experienced trainer and handler thinks that a version of this dizzy-dog reaction can also happen over great distances and discombobulate the dog and the handler. Deborah Palman, a retired Maine game warden who broke the gender barrier, becoming that state’s first female game warden in 1978, looks exactly like what I think a retired game warden should look like: She has close-cropped gray hair, a quiet, competent demeanor, and a sly sense of humor. She doesn’t posture. She doesn’t brag on herself or her dogs. Yet if I got lost in Maine, I’d give great odds of being found, alive or dead, by Deborah and one of her dogs. Her work has taken her across the vast distances of Maine, from swamps filled with moose, to hills filled with moose, to fields filled with moose—and bear. She even trained fish-detection dogs to keep track of anglers who break fishing regulations.
Deborah and her German shepherds have located more than twenty missing people, some alive, most dead. As a result of working hundreds and hundreds of searches in a wilderness state with varied terrain, and because of working in a team, flanking on searches, reading reports, and training dogs, Deborah has thought a lot about human-remains scent and even live human scent: where that scent can move, how far away, and where the dogs can detect it. How scent can loft over trees and small hills and then come down and get caught or pile up against a hedgerow or an opening “like debris in a stream.” Over more than a mile sometimes.
“My young dog, she’s very quick to pull the trigger on her indication. She comes into a big pool of scent, she goes wham.” Deborah mimics her high-drive female, Quinn, with a squeaky voice: “ ‘It’s here! I haven’t really found it, but it’s here.’ ”
There can often be, Deborah said, “a big discontinuity” between where the scent is and where the body is. Where scent disperses can confuse the hunt for both live and dead people. On one case in New Hampshire where Deborah just wouldn’t quit, they recorded a dozen alerts from different dogs. Hundreds of volunteers had searched for ten days to cover the territory, receiving scattered reports from people across a mountain valley where they smelled something at various times of day. Deborah’s own dog had behaved strangely earlier that day. But Deborah saw the deceased victim only by accident, while she was going up a different trail she hadn’t covered in order to find a leash she’d dropped earlier that day. “We’re riding on the ATV to get into town, and being a game warden, I can’t help looking into the woods, and I spot her body off in the woods down the trail. Finding her was dumb luck.”
The victim was lying just off a walking trail in a shady glen. Deborah said it was an enormous lesson for her—once she’d gone back and studied maps and reports and thought about her dog’s behavior over the days of searching, and even that of the other search dogs. “Your dog’s going to go crazy, looking and looking and looking and not finding it,” she warned handlers at a seminar.
So you have to know how to read your dog. And the wind. And the temperatures over days. And the water and terrain. Everything, really. Finally, it can come down to something like chance. Like dropping a leash.
Deborah paused. “So, who made me put the leash there?”
• • •
In North Carolina, Solo, I, and the investigators were past the wood line and down in the swamp. As far as I could see was waist-high neon-green poison ivy. Hundreds and thousands of immature Toxicodendron radicans, with leaves the size of a toddler’s hand, waving in the breeze. Growing together closely enough that I knew I couldn’t weave among those open palms without their touching me. Solo was demonstrating the inevitability of getting tagged. I could barely see him, about a hundred feet away, as he created a lively conga line of poison ivy. He plowed through, harvesting the oils so they would rub off on me next time I touched him. Over the last decade, poison ivy in this region has been getting bigger, growing faster, and becoming more poisonous. Poison ivy loves global warming. Here, in the open swamp, it didn’t have the opportunity to train itself into the hairy ropes one sees on trees, but there was something more disturbing about these tender ivy infants. I had to remind myself that, as noxious as I find it, it’s a native plant that feeds the locals: Songbirds from the catbird to the Carolina wren, honeybees, deer, and muskrat benefit from its tiny blooms, leaves, and berries.
That sea of poison ivy could also be hiding a body: someone who had run from the police at night in a downpour without a flashlight. He wouldn’t have thought about poison ivy; the dark and rain would have hidden its identity. His body could be out there in the middle of it. It wasn’t convenient, but I didn’t have much choice: I pulled down my long sleeves, buttoned them, raised my arms above the ivy, and followed the leader. The two investigators followed us through the bog. Their loafers were getting wet, but I heard no complaints.
We had cleared a section of the swamp when I suggested a temporary halt to cool the pooch. Solo had quartered back and forth gamely, no longer on a trail, simply trying to catch the edge of a scent cone as he’d been trained. Nada. On the bright side, none of us had drowned or hurt ourselves. We’d been out for only twenty minutes or so, but it was eighty degrees. Solo, dashing around in his double-fur coat, was not quite hyperventilating but close to it. He was in great physical condition; nonetheless, a scenting or tracking dog on the job can tire much more quickly than a dog out for a walk—a scenting dog isn’t just breathing, but is deliberately pulling more air in, and sending that air in a different direction once it’s in his nose, to identify the scent. A sniffing dog breathes in between 140 to 200 times a minute, compared to a dog out for a stroll
, breathing at thirty times a minute. Solo, being Solo, was running and sniffing.
We weren’t lost, but a certain aimlessness hovered on the edges. Time to regroup. Solo found a patch of muddy swamp and flopped, glassy-eyed, head flung up, dark lips pulled back to capture more oxygen. I poured him fresh water from my backpack—no need for him to get a mega-dose of oil, chemicals, and pesticides from the storm water dumped during the last rains.
We three humans reoriented ourselves, eyeing the map, squinting, pointing to various landmarks on it, finding the corresponding creek beds and electrical towers around us, figuring out the closest street, which way the suspect might have fled. Our conversation assumed a certain rationality on the part of the suspect, and that wasn’t a given. On the other hand, if he knew the area at all, it was likely that he’d moved in the direction he told his girlfriend he thought he was moving. The water had receded greatly; I could see higher-water mud markings all around. Nonetheless, it was difficult to know exactly how high it had been that night or even where it had flooded.
I realized we should have started the search from the opposite side of the swamp. Solo might have been following a human trail at the beginning of the search, but there was a distinct possibility that we had been searching upwind of the victim. That wasn’t good. We should have started the search downwind. My temporary paramilitary obedience to my police escorts had undermined what good sense I had. With that sense of dread, my feeling of being a know-nothing newbie reemerged. But soldiering on at this point was best. I picked up Solo’s water bowl, flipped out the remaining ropes of saliva and water, and hitched the daypack onto my sweaty back.
It felt longer but was probably only five minutes later when I saw Solo slow from his steady lope. He lifted his head. He had started hitting positives as he sampled the air. He threw his head higher, to gather in more news from the rafts of air. We were coming out of the swamp, approaching a copse of trees and heavy brush. Solo angled toward it and slowed even more. He lifted both front feet off the ground in a rearing motion, bearlike, almost bipedal. He looked as though he were trying to climb an invisible mountain or break free of a lead keeping him anchored. He approached the edge of the trees, the sycamores, elm, and sweet gum. With his tail tensed into a tight curl, he moved toward a couple of trunks and peered with suspicion up into the branches. I knew that curl. Solo was in cadaver scent.
Although I suspected this particular victim was not in a tree, I felt a flash of pride about Solo’s skepticism. Dogs far too frequently search the ground obsessively, as though it is the source of all scent. One of our standard trainings involves hanging material in trees and bushes, forcing Solo’s nose up. Dead people are found in trees more frequently than one might imagine, in suicides and homicides, in massive floods. Even in death, the world is three-dimensional, not just a flat plane.
I felt a bit dizzy. I knew it was my adrenaline surging. This wasn’t training, and what Solo was smelling wasn’t swamp gas. The cops were well behind us. I wasn’t sure where. I’d been too intent on Solo.
Solo kept following his nose, and I kept following Solo. We were now into the shade of the trees on the far side of the swamp. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that Solo had stopped. He was just standing there. A body lay in the shady copse in front of him. The victim was thirty feet from me, less than ten feet from the dog, simultaneously ashen, because of the dried mud, and dark. Facedown, shirtless, mired in mud. I smelled nothing. But the trees and bushes had helped concentrate scent for Solo.
Solo looked back at me. What next?
I fumbled as I dragged the tug toy out of my pocket, feeling it catch and then give. I let my voice escalate, making it merrier with each enunciation. Good boy. Good boy. Good boy! What a good boy! Good fish! Yeah!
Solo was happy to come toward me and get his reward as I backed up. Then he and I were swinging together like two planets spinning in a mud orbit, held together by the rope of a tug toy. I pulled him farther and farther away from the body trapped in the silt. I called over my shoulder, as loudly and matter-of-factly as I could, “Found him.”
Over Solo’s happy growls, I could hear the investigators’ faint, surprised voices. They sounded far away, but one of them repeated himself so I heard his mantra more clearly as they ran toward us. “You’re kidding. You’re kidding. You’re kidding.”
Solo’s work was done. I let him keep the tug toy. He had earned it. I hitched him up, and we turned and walked away from the canopy of trees, back into the sun and the iridescent green of the marsh.
10
Cleverness and Credulity
Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.
—Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 2005
Clever Hans, a smart German draft horse at the turn of the twentieth century, drew crowds with his amazing responses to numerical problems. He would paw the ground to enumerate sums and differences. His owner, a math teacher with a white beard that flowed as munificently as his horse’s tail, would ask him, “If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?”
“Der Kluge Hans” would tap his hoof, answering correctly, and the audience would burst into amazed applause.
We know why Hans could do this, partly thanks to German psychologist Oskar Pfungst’s lengthy report in 1907: He was stomping his foot until he got a subtle, albeit often unconscious, cue from his trainer or his audience. Pfungst’s report went further, though. The folie à trois had escalated over time; the feedback loop between horse, handler, and crowd grew with Hans’s fame. So did his owner’s increasingly delusional faith in the horse. When Hans erred in his foot-stomping answers, his handler stopped noticing.
Pfungst wrote, “One day it came to pass that the horse even understood French, and the old gentleman, whose apostolic exterior had always exerted a high degree of suggestion upon his admirers, in turn fell captive to the spell of retroactive mass-suggestion. He no longer was uneasy concerning the most glaring kinds of failure.”
When I first read about Clever Hans and his deluded owner and audience, I viewed the whole affair as a turn-of-the-last-century anachronism. But Clever Hans returned to haunt me during Solo’s training. Early on, I thought the story was about the horse, not the human, and about Solo, not me. Now I know better. People use animals for a variety of faith-based practices. Once you start to load expectations on a horse’s back, you realize it can hold all sorts of ideologies and theories. The Darwinians saw in Hans clear evidence of the similarity between the human and the animal mind. Cartesians argued that Hans was a mere brute. Hans, of course, was neither genius nor brute, but a smart and devoted horse.
Solo is clever and devoted as well. Which means he’s fully capable of a dog version of lying. It’s my job as his handler to prevent him from doing that. I don’t always perform perfectly. Here is one example from Solo’s training, but it’s not the only one.
We were in an abandoned warehouse in Durham several years ago. A patrol-dog handler had obligingly put out some training hides for Solo. They had “cooked,” as one says about all sorts of scent training material (not just cadaver), for about a half hour. Long enough, on that warm North Carolina night, to send out scent, which I then sent Solo to find. The other handler was idling behind the two of us, monitoring us but not closely. Solo hurtled through the building, accelerating madly, trying to dig his claws into the slick concrete for extra purchase.
His head twisted, he flipped almost in midair, flew back toward a garbage can, and came in for a deep sniff, working scent hard. Classic. I caught up with him and slowed to a stop, admiring his technique. Solo eyed me, and I stood there, stupidly meeting his gaze. He then went into his down alert, staring at me happily. It felt wrong. I looked back at the other handler, who had tuned in a few seconds too late and gave a quick head shake. Nope. No cadaver hide there.
My bad timing, when I slowed down and stared at Solo, helped trigger a false alert. I unc
onsciously encouraged him to do what he shouldn’t have done. Even a microsecond’s hesitation makes a difference at certain stages of training. Solo’s behavior could become chronic if encouraged. I had made a sloppy beginner’s error. The only mistake I didn’t make at the garbage can was rewarding him for his minor perfidy. I broke his gaze and repeated the command: “Go find your fish.” My voice probably had an edge, although it shouldn’t have. Solo moved on to find a couple of hides that were really there.
“That’s why we call it training,” Mike Baker said after I had put Solo in the car, chagrined. He was slightly irked at me for allowing Solo to con me and at the other handler for not preventing the con.
The adaptive advantages of our two species co-evolving are obvious. Yet those same connections become a real disadvantage when you want a dog’s nose to be an independent and disinterested witness.
False alerts have to be dealt with honestly, or they become the elephant in the training room or on search scenes. Like alcoholism, they are more common than acknowledged. A few handlers swear that their dogs never, ever false-alert and that something must have been there, even if it was just residual scent. That comforting circular story—there must have been something there, because I trust my dog, who is perfect and would never, ever misrepresent—can come back to bite you in the butt. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls it “bullshit.” Bullshit, Frankfurt notes in his famous essay, is more insidious than a lie. While someone may not realize she’s bullshitting, and while the bullshit isn’t always false, it creates a broader problem: a general indifference to facts. We see this in politics all the time—and in the dog world, which is different but similar. That’s why Frankfurt argues that bullshitting is more corrosive than lying. The liar, unlike the bullshitter, is aware that he’s positioning himself against what he thinks is the truth. Lying takes a bit of effort, a slight respect for the truth that is out there, somewhere.