What the Dog Knows (11 page)

“My next search is the important one.”

 . . . the foundation ceremony can be seen as a recognition that building is both an act of memory and also a fresh start.

—Tracy Kidder,
House
, 1999

Solo stood in Nancy Hook's training yard, brow wrinkled, staring at five identical white buckets lined up with military precision. One of them had a cadaver “hide” in it—a little bit of something from somebody who died, or from someone kind enough to donate part of himself to Nancy for a moment like this. One canine trainer shared a portion of his rib, removed in a surgery. As he explained to me years later, he didn't want his own dogs wandering around confused about
what they should be indicating on—the rib outside the handler or the ribs inside him.

For this particular exercise, Nancy was using one of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's wisdom teeth, packed with a bit of bloody gauze. Now nearly six months old, Solo was fifty-five pounds of raw bone and sinew. Few juvenile German shepherds are handsome. Only a handful are well adjusted. He was increasingly impervious to pain, whether receiving it or causing it. Despite my nightmares, Solo wasn't that far outside the shepherd mainstream.

Nancy had given him his first job: to duck his head inside bucket after bucket and figure out which one held the tooth and gauze. This is one method for laying a foundation for a cadaver dog, or any scent-working dog, as it learns to recognize and then signal clearly that it has found what you want it to find. Cadaver, cocaine, gunpowder, heroin. Bed bugs. Some trainers use buckets; others use concrete blocks. More advanced rigs consist of wooden boxes with holes in the top, even springs inside so that a rubber Kong or tennis ball can pop out like a jack-in-the-box for an instant reward. These were early days for me, before I knew the great varieties of boxes available. Everyone has a favorite system, but bells and whistles aren't necessary; perfect timing on the part of the handler is.

On the first run, Solo ducked his head into the fourth bucket, which held the bloody tooth, looked up at me, then ducked his head back in. He had no association with that odor, although it smelled intriguingly different than the smells in the first three buckets. Nancy hissed my cue at me, and I fumbled to give him a liver treat. Solo tried to help himself to the tip of my finger along with the treat. Soon enough, he threw himself into the game. As Nancy switched the position of the buckets, he charged from one to the next, jerking me along, tangling us in his lead, pulling his head out of the “hot” bucket, staring at me, griping loudly if I didn't reward him quickly. His complaints moved up and down the scales, howls of frustration and delight.

Nancy's chestnut eyes narrowed as she watched Solo and me perform a bad rendition of the funky chicken with some leash bondage added. I could hear my heart forcing blood through my head. It should have been simple. I was to move just ahead of Solo, using a loose lead, past each bucket, not hesitating, not rushing. With a gracious hand gesture, I was to present the bucket to him. Check here (dog's head dips into the bucket), check here (dog's head dips in the next bucket), check here (dog's head dips and stays). Good dog! Treat! Classic operant conditioning. Solo would start linking cadaver smell with a reward.

Nancy let me keep the treats in my handy belly pack, but it was turning out to be one more thing to manage besides the lead, the dog, the buckets. Oh, and my ego. I was terrible at this. Solo surged from one bucket to the next, skipping one that didn't seem interesting, doubling back, yanking us silly, then yowling when he got a whiff of scent and changed his mind. He was cheating, energetic, and out of control. Nancy loved it. She chuckled and crooned, “Good boy, good boy” to him while she hissed sotto voce to me, “Reward him, reward him.”

I was near tears. I didn't fully understand then, but Solo was in what working-dog trainers call “drive” mode, as essential to keeping a dog running as gas in a car's tank. That revved-up state of mind would be essential to the work ahead. I saw it as “bad dog” mode; it wasn't what I was used to. Zev had walked quietly and steadily at my side in a perfect heel. He got depressed and shut down if I scowled at him. Even Megan, though she cared not a whit whether I approved of what she did, was obedience-trained. Their good behavior was a reflection on me. I had tenure. I was a teacher of dogs and humans.

Solo was brutally rebooting my canine worldview. According to Nancy, I had my first working dog. As far as she was concerned, any male dog who was interesting or worthwhile was a “macho jackass.” Any good female was a “bitch from hell.” These were compliments. Sweet, compliant dogs were boring, and Nancy wanted nothing to do with them. Solo was making me miserable while achieving comparative
perfection in Nancy's eyes. I could feel her already skeptical assessment of my potential nosedive. I was not a bitch from hell. I was trying my best to be compliant, but I couldn't even coordinate my limbs.

“That's it,” Nancy instructed when she heard Solo yodeling at me for about the third time because he wasn't getting rewarded. “There's his alert!”

If I hadn't been so frustrated, I would have marked this as a special moment in a working dog's life, like Solo getting his tribal name—“Whines with Brio.” The behavior of an alert, or what some in the sniffer-dog business call a “final indication,” is supposed to be something that comes naturally to the dog yet is distinctive. For most narcotics dogs, the alert means sitting with a focused stare at the spot where the drug smell is coming from. A few drug dogs still dig and scratch, though that “aggressive alert” is disappearing, seen as old-school. Bomb dogs never used it, for obvious reasons. Nancy and I talked: Solo's distinctive whine combined with a sit might become his trained alert to tell me he had not only found the material we were looking for, he was committing himself to that spot. More important, I could say on a search, “This is what Solo does when he detects the odor of human remains. He sits and sings a cappella.”

That moment wasn't in our immediate future. If it ever came. This laying of the scent foundation and formulating an alert were the first baby steps on the long road to mastery.

It wasn't just the scent that Solo needed to recognize. He needed to be willing to go anywhere to find it. That meant turning his natural drive into environmental toughness. I was slowly starting to understand why working-dog trainers liked dogs who were pains in the rear, who destroyed crates, who tore up the insides of cars, who challenged everything, who tried to jam three toys in their mouths at once. The first time I met West Virginia working-dog breeder and trainer Kathy Holbert, she was in the yard offhandedly throwing a dog's rubber Kong. It landed repeatedly in the middle of a heavy brush pile that looked like a funeral pyre, the kind of awkward toss that makes most
people curse. Only Kathy was doing it on purpose, and the young shepherd was diving into the rough limbs, making them part like water. Kathy was developing the dog's nose and drive.

The energy had to be there first. If you had that in a dog, you could work with it. As canine trainer Lisa Lit explained to a group of search-and-rescue handlers about building drive, “Let them explode, then rechannel it.”

First comes the energy, then the expertise. Cognitive scientists have intensively studied the notion of human expertise. We watch playful children start out banging incoherently on the piano. That's a start, but it's the structured, guided practice and play with constant feedback over an extended period of time that can turn random notes on a keyboard first into “Doe, a deer, a female deer” and ultimately into Thelonious Monk's “ 'Round Midnight.” That is, if a parental figure doesn't ruin the sound of music by haranguing the child to practice. Along the way, a number of the motor behaviors for playing the piano become automatic, so the child doesn't have to think about them. The fingers start to fly by themselves up and down the ivories as body memory pulls them along.

The notion of expertise applied to dogs and other animals is scientifically controversial. Working-dog trainers have no doubt that it exists, and they aren't worried about whether the learning curves mimic humans', as long as the dogs learn, keep learning, and layer that knowledge.

The beginning of the process was what Nancy was teaching me and Solo: “What the heck is that smell?” That early stage is important. Once that scent is second nature, add some distractions: some of Nancy's chickens, perhaps. A clumsy handler like me. I might teach a juvenile Solo to teeter on a low balance beam in the backyard and to keep his paws on the board. I wouldn't comfort him if he fell off and yelped; I would urge him back in a happy, relaxed voice until he could walk along the beam with a sure paw and confident grin.

William “Deak” Helton calls the entire emerging research arena
of working dogs “canine ergonomics”—the study of the relationship between the working dog and her environment. The working dog learns the gymnastics of the body, mind—and nose. In due time, a good disaster dog should be able to crawl and balance herself purposefully over the rubble of a collapsed building, all while using her nose, then signaling to the handler what she has found. That dexterity, that multitasking, is what Deak Helton calls “canine expertise.” And Deak is a believer in the concept. “Although canine experts cannot verbalize their knowledge, this in no way implies they do not have it,” he wrote.

There's resistance to the notion that dogs can be experts, among both cognitive psychologists and people who feel it gives any animal too much credit. “I think a major problem is the bogeyman of anthropomorphism,” Deak said. Yet we can train people to do things that other people can't do without training. “If you asked me to do a backflip and discovered I could not do it now—untrained, unconditioned—would you conclude people cannot backflip?” Watch gold-medal gymnast Gabby Douglas, the “Flying Squirrel,” at the 2012 Olympics and try to imagine her first gymnastics lesson at the age of six.

At the same time Nancy was teaching me how to train Solo's nose, I needed to teach him skills that would complement that nose: how to tolerate electric fences, how to swim in rivers, how to push through heavy brush, how to climb over and into and under and through. How to ignore distractions, like Whiskey, Nancy's big brindle East European shepherd—Solo's nemesis—who snarled next to the cyclone fence, suggesting that the upstart come try him out.

When it comes to dogs doing detection work, Deak said, people tend to forget it takes time to develop skills. Dogs, like humans, need a chance to learn before their capabilities are dismissed. I was going to give Solo a chance, even if he wasn't giving my fingers much of one.

Science aside, experienced working-dog trainers are clear about the order of things. You lay the foundation first. The analogy with building a house is perfectly apt. If you don't get that right, nothing you put on
top will hold. You'll have a shaky, unreliable dog. A dog who can't keep his eyes on the prize.

•  •  •

Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, 1865

For the moment, Solo was staring fixedly at the buckets, ignoring me. Whatever fun thing was happening, it was coming from those buckets. Solo loved the buckets. That could change. While this kind of foundation work is essential to future stability, it can be boring for both you and the dog. Especially if you forget that it's supposed to be fun, which is easy for an overly invested handler (like me) to do. That's when a little magic can come in handy. One day, without Solo being along for the ride, I got to participate in a magic show and learn from a master trainer how to keep foundation work interesting for both handlers and dogs.

The shell game is probably one of the oldest cons in a world filled with bait-and-switches. Illustrations and detailed accounts of shell games date back to Greece, long before a deck of playing cards was the easiest way to mount a quick three-card monte game on a street corner. It's a game that includes misdirection and dexterity, audience participation and manipulation. On busy streets all over the world, hustlers are setting up shell games, using shills in the crowd to pull in gullible marks, who can't help watching and then can't help thinking they can beat the system. Soon the marks' money has disappeared, along with the hustlers and their shills.

Canadian Kevin George is a conjurer, a dog trainer, a people trainer. Before he was a master dog trainer, before he tried his hand
training an elephant and a bear, before he was a cop, before he was a rodeo clown or a shiatsu massage expert, Kevin was a kid who loved magic, who loved learning how to make his fingers furl and then unfurl like birds set free, who plucked coins from behind ears. That love of magic stuck around, through decades of training dogs to bite bad guys, to search for drugs, to track lost children and criminals, to find them alive and sometimes dead.