What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Some of the saddest cases are those of lonely people whose remains are found in houses or apartments with dogs who have inevitably eaten their deceased owners: “Case Report: Canine Scavenging of Human Remains in an Indoor Setting,” by Dawnie Wolfe Steadman and Heather Worne, Forensic Science International 173, 2007: 78–82.

  3: Nose Knowledge

  This chapter includes material from interviews with K9 legal expert Terry Fleck; director emeritus of the International Forensic Research Institute at Florida International University Kenneth Furton; cognitive psychologist William S. “Deak” Helton at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand; Marcia Koenig, of K9 Specialty Search Associates; Nicholas “Nick” Montanarelli, who worked for numerous government agencies during his career, including the U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory; associate professor of animal behavior and sensory physiology and medicine at Auburn University Laurence “Larry” Myers; retired Maine game warden and owner of Maine K-9 Services Deborah Palman; Andy Rebmann; retired neurosurgeon George Stevenson, who took up the grizzly brain after his retirement; and Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association.

  This chapter benefited from my observation of Roger Titus training bloodhound handlers. I have watched dozens of training sessions with patrol dogs from the Durham Police Department K9 unit and the Durham Sheriff K9 unit, among many other law enforcement agencies, mostly in North Carolina.

  Also critical to this chapter were Marcia Koenig’s unpublished papers; Andy Rebmann’s news clip book with cases involving him, his dogs, and law enforcement handlers he trained going back to the early 1970s; and Nick Montanarelli’s snapshots of some of the early military training and research with dogs during the 1960s and ’70s.

  Books critical to this chapter include Cadaver Dog Handbook and Deak Helton’s edited collection, Canine Ergonomics: The Science of Working Dogs (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009). Leon Whitney—veterinarian, breeder of bloodhounds, and enthusiastic proponent of stuffing purebred dogs and exhibiting them at the Yale Peabody Museum—authored the classic Bloodhounds and How to Train Them (New York: Orange Judd Publishing Co., 1947). The book by recently deceased K9 trainer Tracy Bowling, Police K9 Tracking: A Guide for Training & Deploying the Police Tracking Dog (K9 Publishing, 2010), was also helpful. For understanding more about humans’ sense of smell, Avery Gilbert’s What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (New York: Crown Publishing, 2008) was a guide. Although I don’t agree with a few of John Bradshaw’s conclusions about dog cognition, his book Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet (New York, Basic Books, 2011) is chock-full of wonderful history and science.

  The article on the shrew breakthrough was “Fossil Evidence on Origin of the Mammalian Brain,” by Timothy B. Rowe, Thomas E. Macrini, and Zhe-Xi Luo, Science 332 (2011): 955–957. Animal Planet’s overtouting of the bloodhound’s nose can be found on its website under “Top 10 Animal Skills,” http://animal.discovery.com/tv/a-list/creature-countdowns/skills/skills-09.html, accessed November 2011.

  Frank C. Craighead Jr. and his identical twin, John, are credited with helping save the grizzly bear from extinction with their twelve-year study of radio-collared grizzlies around Yellowstone. As the New York Times noted in its obituary of Frank Craighead, he and his brother had to go the extra (vertical) mile in their research: “They and the students who worked with them did pull-ups and other calisthenics to build strength in case they had to climb a tree to elude a grizzly.” The paper that shows up with a certain promiscuity is “Grizzly Bear Ranges and Movement as Determined by Radiotracking,” by Frank C. Craighead Jr., Third International Conference on Bears, Paper 10, 1976: 97–109.

  As noted, even Nobel Prize winner Linda B. Buck has a hard time getting specific about what humans can detect. Her quote comes from “Olfactory Receptors and Odor Coding in Mammals,” Nutrition Reviews 62, no. 11, 2004: 184–188. There’s extensive literature on physicians’ evaluation of “effluvia”: see, for instance, “Advances in Electronic-Nose Technologies Developed for Biomedical Applications,” by Alphus D. Wilson and Manuela Baietto, Sensors 11, 2011: 1,105–1,176. On Larry Sunshine, odor mitigation expert, see “On PATH Trains, Noses Wrinkle at a Moldy Mystery,” New York Times, June 7, 2011: A22. The quote on patchouli comes from Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (New York: Viking Adult, 2008), 283–284.

  The idea that trained noses are better than untrained noses isn’t an epiphany to anyone in the sniffer-dog world, nor is it a surprise to enologists or perfumers. However, the chocolate-tracking study—“Mechanisms of Scent-tracking in Humans,” by Jess Porter, Brent Craven, Rehan M. Khan, Shao-Ju Chang, Irene Kang, Benjamin Judkewitz, Jason Volpe, Gary Settles, and Noam Sobel, Nature Neuroscience 10, no. 1, 2007: 27–29—probably got extensive mainstream media attention because it was also an article about chocolate. The water-taste study was designed to test the popular belief that the visually impaired have a better sense of smell than others. The study, “Smell and Taste Function in the Visually Impaired,” by Richard S. Smith, Richard L. Doty, Gary K. Burlingame, and Donald A. McKeown, Perception & Psychophysics 54, no. 5, 1993: 649–655, showed that the best performers were not the visually impaired but the trained and sighted employees of the Philadelphia Water Department who served on water-quality panels.

  The ever-growing listing of scent-discrimination tasks for dogs comes from both studies and media reports. The majority of these sniffer tasks don’t have peer-reviewed, scientifically controlled studies associated with them.

  The best history of police dogs is Police Dogs in North America, by Samuel G. Chapman (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1990). Marcia Koenig’s unpublished paper, “History of Search Dogs in the United States” (1989, updated in 2009), was helpful as well.

  The scent-discrimination studies that look at how dogs are able to differentiate between identical twins will probably continue to develop and be challenged. The first person to test the hypothesis and find dogs lacking was Hans Kalmus, in “The Discrimination by the Nose of the Dog of Individual Human Odours and in Particular the Odours of Twins,” British Journal of Animal Behavior 3, no. 1, 1955: 25–31. Kalmus did note that the dogs used for the study varied greatly “in intelligence, perseverance and the degree to which they had been trained.” Czech scientists Ludvik Pinc, Ludĕk Bartoš, Alice Reslová, and Radim Kotrba came up with a very different result in “Dogs Discriminate Identical Twins,” PloS ONE 6, no. 6, 2011: 1–4, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020704, accessed November 2011.

  The quote about dogs’ receptor cells comes from Stanley Coren’s book, How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind (New York: Free Press, 2004), 55.

  The report that Lester Shubin’s quotes are included in is “25 Years of Criminal Justice Research,” National Institute of Justice, Report No. 151287, December 1994.

  The section on bloodhounds contains material from numerous scholarly and trainer sources, including historian John Campbell’s fascinating work “The Seminoles, the ‘Bloodhound War,’ and Abolitionism, 1796–1865,” The Journal of Southern History 62, no. 2, 2006: 259–302; and Christina Chia’s “Rethinking the Slave Hunt: On the Trail of Humans and Dogs in American Slavery,” American Studies Association, 2008. Deborah Palman’s quote about bloodhounds comes from her web piece, Negative Searching, http://emainehosting.com/mesard/Articles/Negative%20Searching.htm.

  You can see Walt Disney’s 1930 cartoon The Chain Gang on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=803r5DzEqb4.

  4: Birth of the Body Dog

  Interviews and correspondence critical to this chapter include those with Edward David; Joan Johnston, wife of military researcher William H. Johnston; Marcia Koenig; Nick Montanarelli; Deborah Palman; James J. Polonis, former Southwest Research Institute project manager; Andy Rebmann; Marcella Sorg; and retired New York State Trooper Ralph D. “Jim” Suffolk Jr. and his wife, Sally Suffolk.

  Books used for
this chapter include Cadaver Dog Handbook; The War Animals, by Robert E. Lubow (New York: Doubleday, 1977); A Killer Named Hatch: Massacre on Potato Hill: A True Story, by Thomas Blanchfield (AuthorHouse, 2009); Manhunters!: Hounds of the Big T, by William D. Tolhurst as told to Lena F. Reed (Puyallup, WA: Hound Dog Press, 1984); and K-9 Cops: Stories from America’s K-9 Police Units, by Richard Rosenthal (New York: Pocket Books, 1997).

  A number of declassified military research reports were also important to this chapter, among them “Body Recovery Dog,” by Woodrow L. Quinn Jr. and Nicholas Montanarelli, U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, Technical Report No. IRL-03B73, May 1973; “Mine Detecting Canines,” by R. V. Nolan and D. L. Gravitte, U.S. Army Mobility Equipment Research and Development Command, Fort Belvoir, VA, Technical Report No. 2217, September 1977; and Southwest Research Institute’s “Interim Technical Report on Olfactory Acuity in Selected Animals Conducted During the Period June 1972–September 1974,” Report No. AD-787 495, September 1974.

  Material for the section on Jim Suffolk, in addition to interviews and documents from his own archives, include the legal case The People of the State of New York v. Ralph Centolella and John Pella, County Court of New York, Oneida County 61 Misc. 2d 726; 305 N.Y.S. 2d 460, 1969.

  The Hartford Courant was one of the major newspapers to cover Andy Rebmann and his K9s, but the Norwich Bulletin; the Morning Union; the Day of New London, Connecticut; the Providence Journal Bulletin; the Boston Globe; and several magazines also reported on his work. In addition to interviewing Andy, I used many of those newspaper, magazine, and web sources, along with Rosenthal’s book, K-9 Cops, to create the portraits of the more well-known cases Andy was involved in, including Robin Oppel’s disappearance in Monroe, Connecticut, and the murder and dismemberment of Helle Crafts. Material for the section on the L’Ambiance Plaza collapse included a number of Courant articles. The Courant sent twenty reporters and photographers (including me) to cover the collapse and its aftermath. Courant reporter Lynne Tuohy especially covered the aspect of the search dogs deployed in this disaster.

  Thomas B. Slick Jr.’s patent, “Apparatus for Erecting a Building, US Patent 2,715,013,” was filed July 6, 1948, and issued August 19, 1955, http://www.google.com/patents?vid=2715013, accessed December 2011.

  The Korean Air crash in Guam in 1997 that Marcia Koenig worked with her dog Coyote killed 228 of the 254 people aboard. Pilot fatigue, lack of crew training, and an outdated flight map contributed to the disaster.

  5: The Shell Game

  Interviews, correspondence, and training observations important to this chapter include those with Joan Andreasen-Webb; Mike Baker; Kevin George, president of Sentry Dog Services, Ltd.; Deak Helton; Lisa Higgins; working-dog trainer and handler Kathy Holbert of Philippi, West Virginia; Nancy Hook; Marcia Koenig; and University of California, Davis, researcher Dr. Lisa Lit.

  Books used for this chapter include Cadaver Dog Handbook and Canine Ergonomics. Kevin George’s paper and program, “A Box Is a Box Is a Box,” is copyrighted.

  6: Distillations

  Interviews and correspondence and observations critical to this chapter include those with Dr. Mary E. Cablk, associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute; Ken Furton; Lisa Higgins; Nancy Hook; Paul Martin; Lisa Mayhew; Andy Rebmann; Dr. John C. Sagebiel, University of Nevada, Reno; and forensic anthropologist Arpad A. Vass. I also benefited from visits and training at FOREST, Western North Carolina’s outdoor human decomposition research facility.

  The epigraph is from Cincinnati Clinic magazine (September 4, 1875), “Odor Mortis; or, the Smell of Death.” Dr. A. B. Isham read that paper in front of the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine on August 30, 1875.

  Cadaver Dog Handbook remains the most practical, thorough, and complete textbook on these issues. Academic articles important to this chapter include “Beyond the Grave—Understanding Human Decomposition,” by Arpad A. Vass, Microbiology Today 28, November 2001: 190–192; “Odor Analysis of Decomposing Buried Human Remains,” by Arpad A. Vass, Rob R. Smith, Cyril V. Thompson, Michael N. Burnett, Nishan Dulgerian, and Brian A. Eckenrode, Journal of Forensic Sciences 53, no. 2, 2008: 384–391; “Characterization of the Volatile Organic Compounds Present in the Headspace of Decomposing Human Remains,” by Erin M. Hoffman, Allison M. Curran, Nishan Dulgerian, Rex A. Stockham, and Brian A. Eckenrode, Forensic Science International 186, 2009: 6–13; and “Characterization of the Volatile Organic Compounds Present in the Headspace of Decomposing Animal Remains, and Compared with Human Remains,” by Mary E. Cablk, Erin E. Szelagowski, and John C. Sagebiel, Forensic Science International 220, 2012: 118–125.

  There are only six or seven scientific studies on cadaver dogs, along with two controlled studies. The one I found most evocative was that of Lars Oesterhelweg and his fellow researchers, “Cadaver Dogs—A Study on Detection of Contaminated Carpet Squares,” by L. Oesterhelweg, S. Kröber, K. Rottmann, J. Willhöft, C. Braun, N. Thies, K. Püschel, J. Silkenath, and A. Gehl, Forensic Science International 174, 2008: 35–39. Mary Cablk and John Sagebiel authored a well-controlled study, “Field Capability of Dogs to Locate Individual Human Teeth,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 56, no. 4, 2011: 1,018–1,024. Earlier studies included those of Debra Komar, “The Use of Cadaver Dogs in Locating Scattered, Scavenged Human Remains: Preliminary Field Test Results,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 44, no. 2, 1999: 405–408; and “Cadaver Dog and Handler Team Capabilities in the Recovery of Buried Human Remains in the Southeastern United States,” by Alanna E. Lasseter, Keith P. Jacobi, Ricky Farley, and Lee Hensel, Journal of Forensic Sciences 48, no. 3, 2003: 617–621.

  Although people kept asking me if I planned to see the science-museum hit Bodies: The Exhibition, I found the idea disturbing. The ethical issues were nicely summarized by Renée Marlin-Bennett, Marieke Wilson, and Jason Walton in “Commodified Cadavers and the Political Economy of the Spectacle,” International Political Sociology 4, 2010: 159–177: “Notwithstanding the enthusiastic response of the spectators (or because of it), these claims of educational value seem to put a gloss of respectability and virtue on these productions while silencing the unsettling questions: What is the provenance of the bodies? Is it ethical to use human mortal remains for commercial purposes? Why do the rules governing the international transportation of cadavers not apply to these plastinated dead? . . . Indeed, the spectacle hides a silence in international and domestic laws governing an extreme form of human trafficking—trafficking in dead humans.” (160)

  7: A Spare Rib

  Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include those with Joan Andreasen-Webb; Roy and Suzie Ferguson of Tennessee Special Response Team-A; Suzi Goodhope of Southeast K-9 Search and Rescue and KlaasKids search team; Nancy Hook; Marcia Koenig; and Andy Rebmann. Team members of the Triad Bloodhound Team helped enormously with early training of Solo, especially Ken Young and Darlene Griffin. I also benefited from observing at seminars, including Dogmeet 2011 at the Kitsip County Fairgrounds in Bremerton, Washington.

  I used a training record model from Andy’s Cadaver Dog Handbook for Solo, which included time, temperature, humidity, wind direction, what material we used, where we hid the material, and how both Solo and I did. Those records helped with time lines and training descriptions for this book.

  In retrospect, the decision David and I made to neuter Solo probably wasn’t the answer to Solo’s problems; we are now learning about a multitude of health reasons to delay or never neuter male and female dogs, despite the pressures from national and local spay-and-neuter programs. It’s possible that, because of early neutering, Solo grew significantly taller and didn’t develop some of the muscle he should have. One of the clearest explanations of the risks and benefits of neutering, especially for active dogs, comes from veterinarian Chris Zink: Her PDF article, “Spay Neuter Considerations, 2013,” can be downloaded from http://www.caninesports.com/useful-info.html.

  Bruce Lee’s quote comes from the film Enter the Dra
gon, directed by Robert Clouse (Hollywood, CA: Warner Brothers, 1973).

  8: Comfort Me with Bite Work

  Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include those with Mike Baker; K9 legal expert Terry Fleck; Nancy Hook; Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Lopez; Lisa Mayhew; Dr. Charlie Mesloh of Florida Gulf Coast University; Indianapolis Metropolitan Police K9 training supervisor Craig Patton; Andy Rebmann; Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Peter Sepot; and Steve Sprouse, patrol-dog trainer for the Broward Sheriff’s Office in Southeast Florida. For the past seven years, I have been fortunate to be able to observe suspect apprehension training under a number of law enforcement K9 trainers in both North Carolina and Florida, at standard weekly trainings, and at seminars.

  The book Police and Military Dogs: Criminal Detection, Forensic Evidence, and Judicial Admissibility, by John Ensminger (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2011), was helpful, along with numerous Police K-9 magazine and K-9 Cop magazine feature stories and columns. Other articles for this chapter include “Police Service Dogs in the Use-of-Force Continuum,” by Jonathan K. Dorriety, Criminal Justice Policy Review 16, no. 1, 2005: 88–98; “Barks or Bites? The Impact of Training on Police Canine Force Outcomes,” by Charlie Mesloh, Police Practice and Research 7, no. 4, 2006: 323–335; “Practical, Ethical and Political Aspects of Engaging ‘Man’s Best Friend’ in the War on Crime,” by B. Grant Stitt, Criminal Justice Policy Review 5, no. 1, 1991: 53–65; “Changes in Officer Use of Force over Time: A Descriptive Analysis of a National Survey,” by Bruce Taylor, Geoffrey Alpert, Bruce Kubu, Daniel Woods, and Roger G. Dunham, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 34, no. 2, 2011: 211–232.