by Cat Warren
My father, Charles Warren, who died of cancer in 2005, left me, at the supposedly mature age of forty-nine, in the deepest mourning I have ever experienced. David lost both his parents when he was a teenager; I lost my mother more than a decade before Dad died. But his death still feels near. I can still hear his slow, thoughtful voice. I still want to pick up the phone so that we can talk through the state of the world and our lives. He is woven throughout my life and this book. I am so grateful to my dear stepmother, Agnes Rands-Warren, for making Dad’s last years so happy and being a “best-mother” to me.
Finally, there’s David: my husband, my heart, my dearest friend. I don’t know how to acknowledge him, except to say that I love him, and I promise not to do this again too soon.
Photo Credits
Cover photograph of Solo, seven and a half years old.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
1: The Little Prince of Darkness
Solo, four weeks old, at breeder Joan Andreasen-Webb’s home in Pataskala, Ohio.
(Photo by Sherri Clendenin)
2: Death and the Dog
A statue of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed dog god who protected the deceased in their tombs.
(Photo by Son of Groucho)
3: Nose Knowledge
Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association, rewards a bloodhound for finding him during training.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
4: Birth of the Body Dog
Military and Southwest Research Institute studies showed the value of using dogs. The snapshots of dogs training during the 1960s and 1970s came from researcher Nick Montanarelli.
(Photo montage by David Auerbach)
5: The Shell Game
Durham K9 Sergeant Mike Baker and K9 Officer Danny Gooch work with Danny’s young patrol dog, Rin, using boxes where only one has a drug scent.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
6: Distillations
Human remains can easily disappear in the woods, becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding flora.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
7: A Spare Rib
Solo created new training problems for me. Nancy Hook laughed and called him a jackass.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
8: Comfort Me with Bite Work
Broward County Sheriff K9 officer-in-training Dave Lopez takes a bite from Diesel, a German shepherd learning to work in the water.
(Photo by Steve Sprouse)
9: Into the Swamp
Solo running through undergrowth in the woods during training.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
10: Cleverness And Credulity
Solo is smart and devoted, which means he wants to please and to get his reward. That can be a problem.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
11: All the World’s a Scenario
Setting up realistic scenarios during training is crucial to both the dog’s and the handler’s success.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
12: The Grief of Others
Andy Rebmann and his German shepherd Josie searched for days for the victims of a serial killer or killers along the highways near New Bedford, Massachusetts.
(Photos by Paula Bronstein, Hartford Courant article by Lynne Tuohy)
13: All the Soldiers Gone
In Iraq, German shepherd cadaver dog Strega alerts on a training aid hidden by her owner and handler Kathy Holbert, a civilian contractor from Philippi, West Virginia.
(Photo by Army Staff Sergeant Daniel Yarnall)
14: Running on Water
In Mississippi, Paul Martin helps Gwen Hancock train her Labrador, Ruger, on human remains detection in the water while Cathi Brown observes.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
15: The Perfect Tool
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
16: Grave Work
Lisa Higgins and her cadaver dog Maggie train at the Cobb family cemetery in Tuckaseegee, North Carolina, where research that combines family history, cadaver dogs, ground-penetrating radar, and other methods is being used to locate grave shafts and unmarked graves.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
17: A Second Wind
Sean Kelly, a K9 officer in North Carolina, during a training break with Nero, a former military working dog.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
18: Wag
Solo and Coda at home in Durham, one week after Coda’s arrival.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
© LISSA GOTWALS
CAT WARREN is an associate professor at North Carolina State University, where she teaches science journalism, editing, and reporting. She lives with her husband, David, and two German shepherds, Solo and Coda, in Durham, North Carolina.
www.catwarren.com
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Notes
The source materials for this book include my own training experiences, especially since I started working with Solo in cadaver work in 2004; my observations and participation at numerous search-and-rescue and cadaver-dog seminars and at police and sheriff K9 trainings and seminars; and my experience on searches and deployments. The book depends on personal communications, off-the-record conversations, on-the-record interviews, and lengthy correspondence with dozens of dog handlers and trainers, members of law enforcement, search-and-rescue volunteers and managers, forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, analytical chemists, cognitive scientists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, conservation biologists, medical examiners, military researchers, and historians. In addition, I am grateful for access to the personal archives and training and deployment records of several experienced trainers and handlers. I also depended on literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, academic articles and conference proceedings, military reports and studies, and several dozen books.
Oliver Sacks noted in a February 2013 New York Review of Books essay, “There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections.” I agree. However, when I quote someone in direct quotes, those come from extensive notes, tape-recorded conversations, e-mails, or other correspondence. In a few instances, the words were seared into my brain because I’d heard them often and repeated them to my husband, David Auerbach, and to many others. Durham Police K9 Sergeant Mike Baker’s standard advice to handlers, “Be more exciting than pee on a tree,” is just one example.
These endnotes, like the book itself, are not comprehensive and are not meant to be, but represent highlights of the materials used. In some cases, I don’t use people’s names because I was an outside observer at seminars or trainings where handlers and trainers graciously allowed me to take notes and photographs. Although I don’t use names in every instance, I am deeply grateful for the knowledge imparted. I did not use composite characters or composite quotes, nor did I change names or details. In several instances, I don’t identify certain particulars about a search, but I did not in any other way change the facts of any case.
1: The Little Prince of Darkness
Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include Solo’s breeder, Joan Andreasen-Webb; my husband, David Auerbach (who is present in every chapter in some fashion); Nancy Hook of Hook’s K9 Training; and our friend Barb Smalley. Joan exchanged dozens of e-mails with me in those early Solo days, and later noted that she wished she could have lived closer, as she felt somewhat helpless from a distance.
The German shepherd is a controversial breed (many breeds are). For the German shepherd fan, no argument is as heated as the one about whether Americans, especially the American Kennel Club—with its insistence on a distinct and standardized look for particular breeds over other qualities, such as health and working ability—ruined the German shepherd. There is also a “purer” history of the German shepherd that working shepherd lovers tend to equivocate about or simply avoid. That history began with Max Emil Friedrich von Stephanitz (December 30, 1864, to April 22, 1936), a German army officer who developed the German shepherd breed as we know it today; set guidelines for the standard; and was the first president of the S.V., which stands for Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde, or Society for the German Shepherd Dog. His book, The German Shepherd Dog in Word and Picture (Jena, Germany: Anton Kämpfe, 1925), weighs in at 710 pages. As Susan Orlean notes with light irony in her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), Stephanitz had a “Germanic enthusiasm for genetics” (23). Nonetheless, he reportedly only reluctantly turned his registry over to the Nazis, who took up German shepherd breeding with alacrity. Two helpful resources on the topic include Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, by Boria Sax (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2000), and “Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the German Shepherd Dog,” by Aaron Skabelund, Society and Animals 16, no. 4, 2008: 354–371. Working-dog aficionado James R. Engel also provides a great deal of history and context in his web-only book project, The Police Dog: Evolution, History and Service, http://www.angelplace.net/Book/.
The history of the dog sport of Schutzhund is long and complex. It was designed at first to help measure working dogs’ abilities for breeding programs. It’s a three-part sport: obedience, tracking, and protection work. For more on Schutzhund trials in the United States, see http://www.germanshepherddog.com/schutzhund/trial.htm.
For the section on singleton litters, I depended on Patricia McConnell, one of my favorite animal behaviorists, who wrote about her experience with a single pup (also named Solo) in For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006). As she put it in her notes, her experience is simply anecdotal, with little scientific research to back it up. “That doesn’t mean it has no value, but until someone does carefully controlled research on the topic, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions.” She placed her Solo with a single woman, and he was “the light of her life.”
I also found Karen London’s Dog Behavior Blog, on singleton puppies, helpful: http://www.dogbehaviorblog.com/2008/08/singleton-puppi.html, last modified August 2, 2008.
On Solo’s ability to vocalize: I don’t believe he is closely related to the wild dogs of Africa; nonetheless, that species has been classified as among the most social of all canids, a category that includes wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, and dogs. The wild dogs of Africa have one of the most complex vocal repertoires of all the canids.
2: Death and the Dog
Interviews, correspondence, personal communications, and background information for this chapter include archaeologist Haleh Brooks; Dr. Edward David, former deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maine; Brad Dennis, search director for KlaasKids Foundation; Lisa Higgins, cadaver-dog trainer and handler from Louisiana, and a civilian contractor with the FBI on the victim recovery team; Nancy Hook; Paul Martin, anthropology graduate student at the University of Mississippi and cadaver-dog program coordinator for the Western Carolina University Forensic Anthropology Program; Lisa Mayhew, child death investigator/trainer for the North Carolina office of the chief medical examiner; Andrew “Andy” Rebmann, retired Connecticut state trooper and founder of K-9 Specialty Search Associates; and research associate professor Marcella Sorg, Department of Anthropology, University of Maine.
The epigraph for this chapter comes from The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, by Paul Shepard (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995). Shepard, a deep ecologist, wrote of the dog, “It is a borderline animal in so many ways that its marginality has mythic proportions, especially in connection with the geography of chaos” (62).
The book most central to this chapter—indeed, to this entire book—is Cadaver Dog Handbook: Forensic Training and Tactics for the Recovery of Human Remains, by Andrew Rebmann, Edward David, and Marcella Sorg (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000). It is considered the central text for cadaver-dog handlers and trainers. The other book that Nancy Hook mentioned in our first conversation about scenting dogs was William G. Syrotuck’s 102-page book, Scent and the Scenting Dog, first published in 1972 (Rome, NY: Arner Publications). It has been reprinted numerous times and remains one of the classics on nose work.
The section on the history of dogs and death opens with the discovery of the canid skulls (there is some archaeological back-and-forth about whether those skulls represent “the dog”): “Palaeolithic Dog Skulls at the Gravettian Predmostí Site, the Czech Republic,” by Mietje Germonpré, Martina Láznicková-Galetová, and Mikhail V. Sablin, Journal of Archaeological Science 39, no. 1, 2012: 184–202.
Whether Egypt’s god Anubis is a desert dog or a jackal remains unknown, but as Stephanie Cass notes, the figure is “definitely canid and most likely a jackal or a wild dog—or a hybrid of both—but, as in the case of Seth (the god of chaos), with alterations that deliberately smudge the lines of reality.” (“Anubis,” Encyclopedia Mythica Online, http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/anubis.html, last modified January 16, 2004.)
The quote on canes sepulchrales comes from Introduction to the Study of Mortuary Customs Among the North American Indians, by Dr. H. C. Yarrow (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, 1880: 10). It’s one of the few sources available on these dogs, but it comports with what is known about the habits of dogs.
The Zoroastrian sagdid is well known and documented, with numerous sources and research devoted to it, including The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees, by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Mazagon, Bombay, British India Press, 1922), http://www.avesta.org/ritual/rcc.htm, accessed November 2011.
I am especially indebted to Haleh Brooks, an archaeologist now living in Norway, who took a snapshot in the museum of Tehran of a small bronze dog from ancient Persia that looks remarkably like a German shepherd. Her blog post of February 2012, http://halehsworldofarchaeology.blogspot.com/2012/02/dogs-in-ancient-iran.html, was enormously helpful, as has been her correspondence.
British scholar Mary Boyce, who died in 2006, is still considered the world’s foremost authority on Zoroastrianism and wrote extensively on the role of dogs in that religion. One of her easily accessible pieces on the web is “Fauna and Flora: Dog in Zoroastrianism,” an excerpt from Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Animals/dog_zoroastrian.htm, accessed December 13, 2011.
The section on the role of dogs in early Western civilization and monotheistic religions has a number of sources, but the article by historian Sophia Menache at the University of Haifa, “Dogs: God’s Worst Enemies?” Society & Animals Journal of Human-Animal Studies 5, no. 1, 1997: 23–44, was most helpful, as was the article “Guardians of the Corpse Ways,” by amateur historian Robert N. Trubshaw, Mercian Mysteries no. 20, August 1994, http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogfl.htm, last modified November 2008.
Scamp, “The Grim Reaper Dog,” was featured in newspapers and television stories across the United States and Great Britain, including Extraordinary Animals on Animal Planet, which originally aired May 31, 2011, http://www.thepetnetwork.tv/videos/extraordinary-animals-the-grim-reaper-dog/, accessed November 2011.
Numbers for “black dog syndrome” are difficult to come by—many shelter managers say it’s a problem, but a few people call it an urban legend. On black dogs at shelters, see, for example, “Black Dogs Face a Hard Choice at Shelter,” by Deb Hipp, The Bark 35, March/April 2006, and “Black Dog Bias?” by Craig Nakano, Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/fe
atures/la-hm-black6-2008dec06,0,6461430.story, accessed November 2011.
Tales of discovering bodies while walking one’s dog abound in the mainstream media. Lauren Kornberg was interviewed for The Madeleine Brand Show: “Hollywood Severed Head: Dog Walker Recounts Grim Discovery,” 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio (January 19, 2012), http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/01/19/22180/lauren-kornberg-hollywood-human-head-severed, accessed March 2012; Fish, the dog, was featured in “Pet Dog’s Discovery of Decaying Hand Leads Police to Body in Mission,” by Naxiely Lopez, The Monitor, http://www.themonitor.com/articles/mission-53721-human-carrying.html#_jmp0_, last modified August 12, 2011.
There is a limited but increasing academic literature on canine, coyote, and bear predation on human remains. Here is a brief sampling of the articles and textbook chapters devoted to the subject: “Canid Modification of Human Remains: Implications for Time-Since-Death Estimations,” by P. Wiley and L. M. Snyder, Journal of Forensic Sciences 34, no. 4, 1989: 894–901; “Canid Scavenging/Disarticulation Sequence of Human Remains in the Pacific Northwest,” by William D. Haglund, Donald T. Reay, and Daris R. Swindler, Journal of Forensic Sciences 34, no. 3, 1989: 587–606; “Dogs and Coyotes: Postmortem Involvement with Human Remains,” by William D. Haglund, in Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains, edited by William D. Haglund and Marcella H. Sorg (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1997): 367–381; Skeletal Manifestations of Bear Scavenging, by E. Ann Carson, Vincent H. Stefan, and Joseph F. Powell, Journal of Forensic Sciences 45, no. 3, 2000: 515–526; “Taphonomy of Child-Sized Remains: A Study of Scattering and Scavenging in Virginia, USA,” by Robert Morton and Wayne Lord, Journal of Forensic Sciences 51, no. 3, 2006: 475–479.
Archaeologists may have underestimated dogs’ roles at digs, misreading dog activity as human activity: “Analogic Reasoning, Ethnoarchaeology, and the Impact of Canines on the Archaeological Record,” by Lawrence A. Kuznar and Robert Jeske, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 16, 2006: 37–46; and “Identifying the Involvement of Multiple Carnivore Taxa with Archaeological Bone Assemblages,” by Marie M. Selvaggio and J. Wilder, Journal of Archaeological Science 28, no. 5, 2001: 465–470. Even something as simple as the joy of digging pits in the ground may have been misinterpreted: “Canine Digging Behavior and Archaeological Implications,” by Robert J. Jeske and Lawrence A. Kuznar, Journal of Field Archaeology 28, nos. 3–4, 2001: 383–394.