What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  The dog who came out of the kennel toward Steve was no juvenile but a muscled three-year-old, a rich sable male with copper-colored eyes, probably a mix of German shepherd and Malinois, though it was hard to tell. He was “a dog on a mission,” Steve said. The dog was looking around, checking out everything, including Steve. Steve did the same with him.

  Steve kept the dog’s name. Aaron. Hebrew for “mountain of strength.”

  Despite his age, Aaron was a green mountain. Steve reminds handlers he trains that it takes time and patience and energy to get a dog up to speed, working smoothly, knowing what to do. Now Steve had to adjust his own expectations. DJ had been, as Steve said, “on autopilot.” Aaron wasn’t. During training searches, he wanted to range out two hundred yards, rather than just fifty yards. He wanted to look around to see if he could figure out what to do without using his nose.

  “You have a brand-new dog and you almost expect him to do exactly what the other dog did,” Steve said. “He’s not sure of the game. That’s the hard part. You have to go through that whole process all over again.”

  Yet Aaron had the potential to be an exceptional patrol dog. Steve knew it. It was just a matter of getting time. Steve was still flying across the country and off to Trinidad to train handlers and dogs, and training handlers in Florida, then coming back to Fort Lauderdale to work with Aaron. It wasn’t, Steve admitted, the worst problem to have.

  “I guess I may never get to retire and sit in a rocking chair on my front porch, looking over the hills of somewhere in my imagination. It’s frustrating sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.”

  • • •

  I opened up my file labeled “Very Cool Dog Research” and looked at the studies within to see if any of the researchers had considered the sex of the dog as a factor. Nope.

  —Patricia McConnell, 2009

  We were standing outside yet another abandoned office building, on a hot North Carolina night. Each patrol dog who had gone into the building, each dog who had come out, had given the K9 salute to the nearby shrubbery. One of the dogs had especially noxious urine; as the dogs coated and recoated the holly bushes, the acrid odor wafted back to us.

  The stench inspired the continuing K9 cop conversation about the inherent superiority of male working dogs. I was used to it and could almost ignore it. The law enforcement patrol-dog world is overwhelmingly male and unneutered, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any stray female patrol dog who managed to slip past the gender guards got close scrutiny until she made an error. And she would. Her original error was being female. The next was coming into heat. So when the male dogs got distracted and couldn’t work, whose fault was it?

  I sighed and rolled my eyes as the stereotypes escalated. Testosterone is undeniably a powerful hormone, its production bumped up by the kind of competition playing out in front of the building. The problem was that I, too, had a preference for male German shepherds: Solo was my third. But I have a feminist contrary streak as well. I talked with Mike Baker, and I talked with Nancy Hook. Mike pointed out that one of the toughest dogs on the K9 team had been a female. Females tended to be less distractible than males, he said. Nancy said it depended on the dog, and I should get the pup I liked. She’d approve of any female as long as it was a “bitch from hell.” Nancy would make sure I didn’t put too much obedience in the dog, so she didn’t stare adoringly at me and ignore her work. I thought about the cadaver and tracking dogs I had been reporting on—from Lisa Higgins’s to Kathy Holbert’s to Andy Rebmann’s to Marcia Koenig’s to Jim Suffolk’s to Roy and Suzie Ferguson’s. A mix of sexes, with just as many females as males. Roger Titus, bless him, had used all female bloodhounds but one in his tracking career. That male was an early mistake, Roger said.

  Joan helped nudge me further along the female trail. “I love the way females work,” she wrote me. “Totally different kind of relationship . . . at least, for me. I always found it interesting that Stephanitz also preferred the work ethic of females.”

  Max von Stephanitz—the most sexist of them all, the man who explained that German shepherds would obey the woman of the house only “with reservations”—preferred the work ethic of female shepherds?

  Neither Stephanitz, Mike, Nancy, nor Joan tipped the balance. Solo put his big paw on it. He had grown up a lot in eight years, but I could easily imagine a male adolescent shepherd telling him to shove it when signals got crossed one too many times. One doctoral dissertation showed that more egalitarian relationships and play occur between male and female canines than between same-sex pairs. That made sense. Even socially challenged Solo would ultimately start to show off for female dogs, cavorting goofily, rather than bristling. That was my hope: more romp and less hackle.

  How, though, could I assess which female puppy to get?

  Of course, I fell back on research. I found a great deal of work on “whorls”—those mathematically inevitable spots where hairs converge and then wheel one way or the other. Cowlicks. Temple Grandin’s early work in cattle-hair whorls showed that the direction and position of the hair swirls on a steer’s forehead helped predict whether he was calm or fearful.

  Australian veterinary researcher Lisa Tomkins went to town based on that work. She assessed 115 future guide dogs, looking at their whorls and their paw preferences. Then she followed their progress. Puppies who preferred to use their right paws over their left were twice as likely to pass guide-dog school. Puppies with counterclockwise chest-fur whorls were more than twice as likely to succeed than those with clockwise chest whorls. Tomkins and her fellow researchers noted that it appeared to be linked with the whole left-brain/right-brain crossover. I already knew Solo preferred to use his right paw to snake toys out from under the sideboard if he couldn’t use his mouth. I looked at his chest with some trepidation; at first all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of fur, but as I parted the fur and moved farther down his chest, just before he leaped up, frustrated by my nonsense, I saw one small cowlick moving in reverse. Thank God.

  I could hardly wait to tell Mike and Steve how they could save police K9 units time and money on shipping dogs in from Europe to assess. As a first order of business, all they had to do was obtain full frontals of potential patrol dogs’ chests and hope that the brokers didn’t know enough about the research to flip some photos to ensure that all the dogs had counterclockwise patterns. Oh, and Mike and Steve could ask the brokers if they wouldn’t mind giving the dogs Kongs filled with frozen treats to see which paw a dog used to hold down the Kong and remove the treats. It was even possible that a female or two might pass that test.

  I could envision my and David’s arrival at Kathy Holbert’s hilltop kennel. I would have my checklist in one hand, a food-stuffed Kong in the other. Here’s what we need: one female German shepherd puppy with a counterclockwise chest whorl and another ideally on her right elbow, and a strong right-paw preference. Along with everything else: high drive, high sociability, great health. And a sense of humor. Hope that’s not too tall an order?

  • • •

  The pups were born in early September, before the leaves of the huge sycamores started to turn yellow in the mountains of Barbour County, West Virginia. Their father was such a dark sable that anyone would have called him black, though he had traces of dark velvet brown on his chest and belly. My lookism returned momentarily, although I tried to tamp it down. He was stunning. I had already fallen for the pup’s mother, Kathy’s trailing and article-search dog, Reza. She made everything look easy. She’d toted around toys until she realized she was in labor: Whoops. Excuse me. Got to deliver some pups. She would go back to the toys soon enough, bringing them to the pups to play with. She fell into the category of “fun mom.”

  I watched the three female pups emerge on Facebook, via messages and photos, with Danny holding up each one for Kathy’s camera, three moles getting their first mug shot. One had a drifting trace of umbilical cord still attached. She held both pink paws up, almost as though trying to
protect her homely squinty face from the camera’s unforgiving lens. I couldn’t tell if she was pushing her right paw out more than her left. Two females were behemoths right out of the womb, both more than a pound. The third female, black like one of her sisters, was half their size. Nine ounces. Kathy named her “Little Bit.”

  We assume puppies learn all sorts of things from their mothers. But do they learn by watching and then imitating, or is it instinctive, like a mama cat leading a kitten to the litter box or a mare leading a colt to water? Nancy suggested that Solo could teach the pup a thing or two. Of course, not all teaching is good teaching. I’m pretty sure Megan’s raucous behavior encouraged Solo to bark when the UPS man arrived, but she could simply be infecting the air with bad-dog vibes, ramping up Solo’s arousal level.

  Older dogs aren’t immune from teaching. Steve Sprouse discovered that Aaron had a few issues with water: He hated the hose, the sprinkler, and the swimming pool. His life as a stud dog clearly hadn’t been halcyon. Probably someone had used water to discipline him, or to separate him from females after breeding. But patrol dogs need to tolerate water in Florida; they’re surrounded by it. Steve watched Aaron watch Casey, their female shepherd, run into the sprinkler after her toys. Aaron liked Casey a lot. Soon Aaron was diving after his toys as well. Though it was a good first step, it wasn’t all wonderful emulation. DJ has a bad habit of spinning in his kennel when he’s hyper. Now Aaron spins in his kennel.

  Most cognitive psychologists would ascribe Aaron’s behavior to something other than imitative behavior. To mimic behavior after witnessing it was thought to be distinctly human. While we call it “aping” or “copycat” in a denigrating manner, watching someone do something and then trying to do it yourself isn’t a low-level cognitive act. It’s part of what makes the machinery of human culture chug along. The old joke about a new bride’s brisket applies: Sylvia makes her mother’s perfect brisket recipe by cutting off the ends of the roast, the way her mother always did. She asks her mother why, and her mother tells her that’s the way her mother did it. Sylvia finally asks her grandmother. Because, her grandmother informs her, the pan she has is so small, the only way the brisket fits is with its ends cut off. This is what it means to be human.

  Ascribing imitation only to humans is starting to change, one peer-reviewed article at a time. Dogs aren’t leading the experimental way, but they are part of a diverse animal pack, joining corvids, meerkats, marmosets, and elephants. Little research has been done on “social learning” or “imitation” or “observational learning” in working dogs, though that, too, is starting to change. As Deak Helton already pointed out, it’s harder for scientists to get access to working dogs. Only one small published research study shows what many handlers believe is the case—working dogs learn from observing other dogs. The 1999 study from South Africa used two litters of German shepherd pups: One litter got to watch their mother, a drug-detection dog, at her job. That’s all they were allowed to do—watch but not participate. The other litter didn’t get to see their mother work. When the pups were six months old, 85 percent of the pups who had observed their mother at work passed an aptitude test for narcotics. Fewer than 20 percent of the non-observing pups passed.

  More good news for Solo and the new pup was that dominant animals generally do better than submissive ones at being good demonstrators, solving problems, and learning new tasks. I’m not saying that, just because it works for lemurs and chimps and domestic hens and mice, it should work for German shepherds, but that’s not such a leap. Decades ago, my brother Mark and I watched two dogs at the beach. One of Dad’s Irish setters couldn’t climb a steep sandy cliff. She’d tried and fallen. Tarn, my first German shepherd, ran up the cliff and then stood and stared down at her. She whined. Tarn came down and went back up, slowly this time. Dad’s setter watched, tried to follow, and failed. Tarn came down a third time, went to her heels, and barked loudly. She shot up the cliff. It’s just an anecdote. It might only demonstrate Tarn’s instinctive herding behavior. I choose to believe both that Tarn was demonstrating what to do, and that Dad’s dog was doing her best to imitate him. Or avoid him.

  David and I watched the videos that Kathy posted of the four puppies—three females and a male—as they started negotiating the PVC-pipe ladders, culverts, and barrels she had set up for them in the play yard. We tried not to fall in love with any pup in particular. Videos don’t tell the story; nor do photos or even e-mail. That would be like picking a pup off Dogmatch.com: fantastical and engaging and perfect without having to make a commitment or know more.

  The two big females—one black, the other black and tan and similar to her mother in looks—showed signs of handsome adulthood. I avoided gazing directly at Little Bit’s face. With her wide milky-blue eyes, midnight fur, and chunky yet delicate nose, she looked like a plush Japanese anime puppy. I wasn’t afraid she would turn me into stone but into mush.

  I also had been small and cute; people had patted me on the head a great deal because they could. I didn’t have the evolutionary advantage of sharp puppy teeth to keep them from the top of my head. Little Bit brought out the protective “aww” in people, not the awe I ultimately wanted.

  When their mother wasn’t there, one or two of the puppies would try something, and then another one would try. Let’s go climbing. Let’s break out of this barrel. Let’s slip and slide through this metal culvert and bite each other. I’m not a cognitive psychologist. All I knew, watching the videos, was that their constant play and experimentation together, even what appeared to be occasional, perhaps accidental cooperation, was additive and exponential. They were raggedy, impulsive, enthusiastic, distractible. Their coordination wasn’t quite as smooth as a rugby team’s, but you could see hints of what their future might hold: an entire pack of puppies, tails wagging, diving into dense underbrush and climbing over rubble to search.

  At first Little Bit couldn’t climb over obstacles as easily as the larger pups. In one video, Kathy chuckled quietly as five-week-old Little Bit growled in frustration, flinging herself repeatedly at a broad plywood teeter-totter, a wobble board, until she finally scrabbled on, using her back feet and belly to propel herself like a turtle. Then she ran off to play games by herself, sliding around in a big metal culvert, grabbing her own tail, going in circles inside the circle. I showed David the videos of her and told him sternly not to get attached and to look at all the strengths of the two big handsome females. It had been easier with Solo; there hadn’t been a choice.

  In the end, Kathy made the choice for us. She called me when the pups were eight weeks old. She had spent all day evaluating them—one of the big females I had yearned for early on was “neck and neck” with Little Bit in hunting tests. By the end of the day, it was clear to Kathy that Little Bit hunted longer and harder for her toy than any of the other pups. It was behavior that one needed in a cadaver dog. Little Bit would disappear in the dark down the road, worrying Kathy, and then come back toting a lost ball in her mouth. She found her mother’s blue ball in the snow before her mother did, and grabbed it, the whites of her eyes showing against her black fur as her mother turned sideways to try to snatch it. No dice. Little Bit was independent and contrary. She would be a pain in the butt and a joy to train. A plush toy with razor-sharp teeth and a brain.

  David smiled broadly when I got off the phone. Early evaluation isn’t destiny, but it helped our confirmation bias.

  Kathy told me that she and Danny had a five-minute “pity party,” as Kathy called it. This pup had stubbornly squiggled her way into their hearts. Then Kathy stopped calling her Little Bit and started calling her Coda.

  • • •

  We pushed hard on the toll roads, driving from West Virginia back to North Carolina to beat the setting November sun. I stewed most of the way home, certain Solo would kill our precious sleeping cargo with one big paw and a bite. So much for Little Bit. I went back and forth on arrangements, micromanaging the details of their meeting, dreading the tragic ou
tcome. We decided that I would drop David at the house, he’d exercise Solo thoroughly, and then he’d bring him to an empty ball field a mile from the house, where Coda and I would meet them. Megan was on an extended playdate with our good friend Barb Smalley and her dog, to keep introductions simple.

  We were punchy with exhaustion, sore, hungry—too old for this nonsense. Dusk was settling in on the ball field and surrounding woods as I opened the back door of the Camry. I left Coda in her crate and stepped away. Solo leaped from the Civic, greeted me exuberantly, and went over to sniff boulders and lift his leg. I had to call him over to the Camry. He briefly sniffed Coda through the wire grate, then returned to the more enticing urine on the rocks. Obviously not car possessive. While he was distracted, I carried tiny Coda out onto the field, set her down, and backed a few steps away. David had Solo’s red ball. I had treats. Coda barked sharply five or six times at the approaching monster, then ran back to stand between my legs. I heartlessly backed up a bit more. Solo sniffed her, hackles up, tail high and wagging, then low and wagging. The hackles came down, and he opened his mouth and grinned. He stretched his big body nonchalantly, luxuriously, over the black puppy, whose outline was starting to blur into the dusk. She sat up underneath him, barely skimming his belly, one ear flopped over like a bang, one already straight and cone-shaped. Solo flipped toward David, levitating his back legs in a delicate pas de deux, leaving Coda untrammeled. She no longer looked cowed, but curious. Solo stared at David. You’re the one with the ball. So let’s play.

  Acknowledgments

  Solo won’t appreciate being acknowledged, but he is the genesis of this book. For several years, I rejected the idea of writing about cadaver-dog work, although I had done one brief feature story early in Solo’s training. I kept insisting, when friends asked, that I was too busy living it, that the act of capturing the work in words would actually ruin the joy, steal its soul, and fuse two worlds I wanted to keep separate. That was the closest to superstition I ever got, except when I had to fly. I worried I might inadvertently expose secrets of the working-dog temple I’d been allowed to enter, and alienate the people I respected. But I kept falling further in love with Solo, the work we were doing, and the people we trained with. I realized, despite my protestations, that I wanted to capture Solo in all his scary, funky, funny uniqueness, and remember critical moments of the wild new ride he had taken me on. When Solo turned six, I turned to David and said, “I want to write about him.” It was almost that simple. I love first steps. I also don’t want to forget. Inevitably, one does.