What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Pikett’s attorney told the New York Times in 2009 that his client’s work with his dogs could seem mysterious. “The first time I saw it, I couldn’t understand what the dogs were doing.” But, he added, Pikett clearly knew. “He’s been doing it so long, he doesn’t understand why we don’t see it.”

  • • •

  Corruption, wrongdoing, and cheating exist across the human spectrum. People are smart, just like dogs, so they sometimes cut corners to get their reward more quickly. The vast majority of experiments in cheating show that most people, given the choice and opportunity, will cheat a little. (Most people don’t cheat a ton, because cheating a lot makes us feel too guilty. Unless we’re Bernie Madoff.) While we are reasonably tolerant about small levels of cheating, when people use dogs like puppets to create a sideshow, we feel especially duped and betrayed. Those cases end up getting an inordinate amount of attention.

  Every sniffer-dog and trailing-dog genre seems to have a handler who becomes emblematic of that dishonesty. And every one of those handlers was enabled by people who should have been suspicious. In the case of cadaver dogs, federal agencies, prosecutors, law enforcement, and even archaeologists contributed to the corruption. From the beginning of my training with Solo, one name kept getting dropped with an occasional covert glance at me. Sandra M. Anderson of Midland, Michigan. A volunteer cadaver-dog handler. Like me.

  People would ask during training or even searches if I had heard of her. Yes, I had. Almost every cadaver-dog handler has heard of her. Like Pikett, she has harmed the reputation of everyone who works with dogs’ noses. Like Pikett, she is a fine cautionary tale.

  Anderson started with—as a search-and-rescue handler who knew her told me—“a really good dog,” a Doberman-pointer mix named Eagle. Her dog found people. But at some point, Anderson, craving more attention, started to plant bones at crime scenes and at mass graves. Subsequent findings indicated that she was planting false evidence as early as 1999.

  Like Keith Pikett or anyone who gets away with doing something more than a few times, Anderson had enablers, including the FBI, who thought she was wonderful. Gullible law enforcement investigators and archaeologists called her dog’s abilities “mystifying” and “eerie.” That language alone should have been a red flag.

  FBI agents arrested Anderson in April 2002 during a search in the Huron National Forest in northeastern Michigan. Michigan resident Cherita Thomas had disappeared more than two decades before, and police continued the search for her remains. Anderson offered assistance. She was arrested after a crime scene investigator and a cop witnessed her planting bone fragments and bloody carpet fibers in and around a tree stump and in the muck of a drained forest creek.

  The FBI ultimately had to review hundreds of cases that Anderson had worked on in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Michigan, and Panama. The early credulity of everyone from the FBI to anthropologists was matched by the angry pendulum of backlash. In her guilty plea, Anderson admitted that she had planted a bloody saw, a toe, carpet fibers, and bone.

  The net effect of Anderson’s acts was both complex and simple: It made law enforcement even more suspicious of volunteers. That’s understandable but not entirely rational. Healthy skepticism should reign in all work that involves prosecuting someone for a crime. Dogs’ noses should be just one of many tools. They can be great, and they can do things other tools can’t. They aren’t mystical, and they aren’t perfect. They do need to be reliable.

  • • •

  There’s no shortcut to reliability except constant diligent training. After I had put Solo back in the car that discouraging night in the warehouse, I joined Mike Baker at the other end of the hot, dusty building, where he was working with a green handler learning how to “detail,” running his hand up and down near the storage shelves, sketching W patterns in the dusty air, asking the dog to “check up,” “check down,” “check here.” The little Malinois was already panting, hyperventilating. At a certain point, the tired dog paused and started to lock in on a box with his nose, but Mike murmured behind the sweaty handler, “Keep him moving.” A false alert averted.

  Timing is important at any stage, but it’s essential early on. I was learning not to slow and hover but not to move so fast that Solo overlooked something important.

  If the drugs or the gunpowder or the bone is actually there and a handler tries to move on? The dog learns how to “commit,” to plant himself stubbornly and ignore the handler’s prevarications or even a slight jerk on the lead to come off the scent, a pull that a less-evolved working dog might respond to.

  It’s not mystifying. It’s not eerie. It is a beautiful sight, a dog trusting his nose, ignoring his handler’s efforts to get him to unstick himself from the flypaper scent that he’s stuck to. The dog who ignores the handler’s gaze, which is irrelevant to the task at hand. This is what real faith should look like—hard and unwavering. This is what the co-evolution of a working dog and handler should look like. The dog’s commitment to the truth in the face of your moving away. That’s real teamwork—the dog pointing his nose or paw or entire body at the scent, telling his handler, You bloody idiot! It’s here!

  11

  All the World’s a Scenario

  This wide and universal theatre

  Presents more woeful pageants than the scene

  Wherein we play in.

  —Duke Senior, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7, The Forest

  Roy Ferguson, a tall hound of a Tennessean, arrived at the dress rehearsal decked out in a fluorescent orange sweatshirt and a tan vest covered with flaps and pockets, gadgets and badges. He looked like an ideal Boy Scout troop leader: geeky and capable of goofy humor, yet stern enough to keep high jinks at bay, and with a handy tool to fix any problem. He stood inside the wood line on a misty winter morning, briefing a laconic dog handler from Florida. A young pit bull terrier, dark brindle with ghostly amber eyes, stood at the handler’s side, her sheriff K9 vest providing the only bulk on her slender body.

  We were seventy-five yards down a gravel logging road in Georgia that wound into the woods and disappeared. The kind of road that someone might drive down at night when he’s panicked and looking for a place away from traffic and homes to dispose of a body.

  An eighteen-month-old toddler was missing, Roy told Benjamen Ortiz, the handler. The child was reportedly dismembered and buried. Law enforcement had discovered a possible grave site down the trail behind them. “Work your dog in the area, come out, and tell me what you’ve found.”

  Ben nodded and released June Bug. She bounced down the trail like a gazelle, beelined to a mound of freshly dug humus, sniffed long and carefully, went to another mound, eyeballed Ben, and snatched something off the ground. Good reflexes are critical in this work.

  “Get back to work,” Ben snarled softly. June Bug skittered sideways and levitated over a log, still munching the mysterious delicacy. It gave her enough sustenance to settle down to work. Ben stood back and watched without speaking. She moved on and so did he, quartering back into the woods.

  Five minutes later, though it always seems longer, Ben reported back to Roy. Nothing, he told Roy. No alerts. Both men’s faces were blank. Roy thanked Ben formally; Ben shrugged, snapped on June Bug’s leash, and led her back to his SUV. Her whip-thin tail was tucked between her legs.

  Roy kept his own face a blank until the pair had disappeared down the trail. Then he smiled broadly. “I like the way that dog works.” He also meant he liked the way the handler worked this homicide scenario. Ben wasn’t suckered into finding human remains that weren’t there. Neither was his dog.

  Roy, a Sevierville optician, and his wife, Suzie—who looks every bit as much the ideal scout leader as Roy does—were training handlers in Eatonton, Georgia, the hometown of Uncle Remus’s creator, Joel Chandler Harris. So it was entirely appropriate that the two of them, with glee and seriousness of purpose, had mustered the equivalent of a tar baby with those mounds of dirt. Handlers, anticipating that cadave
r material must be planted somewhere, got stuck in their own narrative imagination, talking first themselves and then their dogs into thinking the mounds were graves.

  Too many trainings, my own included, proceed in the same fashion: I get to a training site, be it a mildewed house in foreclosure, a harvested cotton field, or an empty, dusty warehouse. Another handler or trainer plants the aids—teeth, a bone, bloody bandages—because it seems pointless to arrive somewhere and not put out training aids. In the missing-toddler scenario, that seeming pointlessness was pushed further. A number of handlers had driven or flown hundreds of miles to attend a National Search Dog Alliance seminar that was almost but not quite in the middle of nowhere. It seemed irrational to come all that way and search for nothing.

  The toddler problem was only the first in a long day of Suzie and Roy toying with handlers’ minds and challenging their dogs. To start the morning with an elaborate negative scenario may have seemed cruel, but training should make an occasional effort to simulate reality. More than nine times out of ten, Andy Rebmann estimates, nothing is found on actual searches. Police are following vague leads, unreliable jailhouse-snitch testimony, or simply the need to rule out areas. Clearing areas—being able to say, “We don’t think the missing person is here”—matters.

  The wonderful thing about scenarios is that one doesn’t need to invent them. Life itself provides the best material, although re-creating life takes an enormous amount of work, resourcefulness, and, oddly, imagination. Roy and Suzie’s mentor, Art Wolff, a Roane County sheriff detective and K9 trainer, developed many of these scenarios for their search-and-rescue team. Many others have benefited from the care and thought that went into these training exercises.

  The toddler scenario that Ben and June Bug did so well on was adapted from a 2007 Tennessee Valley case. Police had found a fresh grave and called Tennessee Special Response Team-A. Roy went to the scene with his German shepherd, Cherokee. Cherokee ignored the grave, but police excavated anyway. I can understand their need to know. They found a dead pit bull. That might not have been the end of the story if it had been a larger grave or if Cherokee had alerted. Murderers have sometimes used a dead animal on top of a human victim to mislead investigators.

  The scene created that day in Georgia was “just” a training, but that’s why setting up realistic scenarios is crucial. Often handlers, like lovers—as fair Rosalind points out in As You Like It—can “desire too much of a good thing.”

  It’s not only handlers who let their wishing and wanting lead them into trouble. Their dogs, especially if they aren’t conditioned to defeat, can want that good thing just as much. False alerts can have devastating consequences in real life—fruitless days of excavation for law enforcement or charges that prove false.

  A grave scenario is especially suggestive. Arpad Vass, whose main laboratories were just an hour down the road from where Roy and Suzie live, noted that our minds have a genius for finding and interpreting anomalies in the landscape. Dogs react in turn, because they, too, excel at finding anomalies and at sensing our reaction. It’s not just handlers and their dogs who do this. Geophysicists, botanists, geologists—all of them can look and see what might be a hump, or vegetation that’s different, or a suggestive change in the soil—and build an entire grim but fictitious narrative around them.

  The negative that June Bug trained on wasn’t an entirely blank area, as I realized after watching a few dogs work. Roy and Suzie had scattered odiferous horse-hoof clippings to distract the dogs and irritate the handlers. That was what the dog had munched on while exploring the site. While June Bug had correctly indicated by not indicating, she was a slightly bad dog for grazing on the clippings. Still, she was better than most. Other dogs snagged the horse hooves, but their handlers got increasingly stuck in the narrative tar, committing themselves more and more to a false story as their dogs hesitated and sniffed around the tempting piles of dirt. Several of the dogs alerted on one of the two fake graves. The one that had a generous shot of dead-mouse juice poured across the top.

  Mouse juice was Roy and Suzie’s serendipitous discovery on a cross-country drive with some bagged and frozen mice in an ice chest that they were planning to use as a training distraction. It got hot. The ice melted, the bag broke, the mice swam. “Holy cats!” Suzie said, her eyes wide with the memory of opening the chest. That’s the strongest language I heard her use. The smell must have been staggering.

  Roy said, “Cool!” The liquid was even better than the original. He poured it on a mound of dirt. Dozens of blowflies arrived immediately. Mouse juice became another essential element for the elaborate set. Later, Roy and Suzie shared their recipe. I didn’t need to write it down. I would remember. Put dead mice in a Mason jar. Add water. Wait a couple of weeks. Liberally pour the libation wherever you want a dog distracted.

  It’s a sting operation. Done right, as it was in Georgia, it should be reasonably humiliating. As Roy explained to chagrined handlers in their debriefing, slightly buried animal carcass is even better. “Roadkill is phenomenal!” Roy declared. He was beaming. This is a man who, with his wife and partner, experiments on how many hours it takes before dogs alert on fresh blood, or whether incinerated placenta attracts cadaver dogs as much as wet placenta does.

  During the debriefing, a couple of handlers tried to make excuses. Roy and Suzie nodded sympathetically, listened carefully, then gently dissuaded them. Even if the dogs were getting chewy treats at bedtime, they shouldn’t snack on the job. That’s one reason many working-dog handlers wean their dogs off food rewards, although some breeds and some dogs will still work harder for food than toys. Toys can be just as distracting. I’ve been at patrol dog trainings that included rooms filled with tennis balls in one corner and illegal drugs in another, driving the toy-crazy dogs nuts.

  Food, though, unlike purposefully placed dog toys, tends to be almost everywhere on searches, especially at disaster scenes. If a dog is too drawn to food, that can divert precious resources and time. Art Wolff was searching overseas after an earthquake, and one of the dogs on the scene alerted on a spot in a collapsed building. Rescue teams brought in the heavy equipment and started moving the collapsed material. After several hours, they uncovered the refrigerator with rotting food the dog was alerting on. The dog was sent home.

  The hoof-and-mouse humiliation was only the beginning that day. Before the sun set in Georgia, Roy and Suzie had played with the minds of a number of handlers in a number of different ways—telling them to stay within a crime-taped area when the wind was bringing the scent of the remains from where they were hidden outside the yellow tape. Roy warned the handlers before they sent their dogs that bear trails were in the area. Bears are notorious for carting off pieces of people.

  The dogs kept throwing their heads wistfully toward the scent and getting called back. “She’s pulled him off three times,” Roy muttered sotto voce, watching one handler urge her dog to come back and search within the confines of the yellow tape, as Roy, playing the role of local law enforcement, had directed them to. One handsome golden retriever, called back a couple of times, finally ran away, ignoring his handler’s calls, wagging his tail so furiously underneath a mountain laurel tumbling over the creek bank that the handler asked Roy—standing by sternly, clipboard in hand—permission to search that area. Roy nodded and tried not to show his relief. Please. The dog had found the garbage bag of rich cadaver material stowed under the undercut. What a good bad dog.

  That disobedient golden acted just like Suzie’s dog, Schatzie, and a teammate’s dog did when they were called to try to recover remains from a Russian mob double homicide in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Handlers were asked to search one area, but the dogs were interested in going elsewhere—where the scent was. Their dogs’ unwillingness to stay within the confines of the search area helped the police recover several human parts from an undercut creek bed.

  “When your canine shows interest, you really have to trust your dog, you really do,” Roy told the
handlers in Georgia after they had all worked the scenario. “You’ve got to follow your dog. Your dog is out there trying to do a job. You say, ‘Excuse me, is there any reason I can’t search this?’ ” Then he switched roles from bad cop to good cop because Roy is a sweet man and can play bad cop only so long. “That’s a difficult case to work,” he admitted.

  The scenarios that Roy and Suzie presented that day in Georgia highlight how hard it is to fight human nature. If there are thick briars, officials who have set unrealistic boundaries, or steep rocky slopes, why struggle too strenuously? If your preconceptions tell you that material must be in one area, why go to another? It’s one reason you want to bring good dogs in—they’re willing to go into hard-to-get-at places. Crime tape and poison ivy mean nothing to them. They’re following scent.

  The yellow-tape scenario reminded me of the old joke about the cop finding a drunk man crawling on his hands and knees under a street lamp, looking for his wallet. The cop asks him if he’s sure he dropped it there, and the drunk says it’s more likely he dropped it across the street. “But the light’s better here.”

  The drunk didn’t have a dog with him.

  • • •

  Dogs can’t do it all, though. There comes a point where people need not just to “trust their dogs”—as useful and true as the phrase is—but to use and trust their own human brains. Scientists don’t know exactly what makes humans’ frontal lobes more functional for certain tasks than dogs’ frontal lobes, but being able to read Shakespeare isn’t the only difference.