What the Dog Knows (21 page)

Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.

—Harry G. Frankfurt,
On Bullshit
, 2005

Clever Hans, a smart German draft horse at the turn of the twentieth century, drew crowds with his amazing responses to numerical problems. He would paw the ground to enumerate sums and differences. His owner, a math teacher with a white beard that flowed as munificently as his horse's tail, would ask him, “If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?”

“Der Kluge Hans” would tap his hoof, answering correctly, and the audience would burst into amazed applause.

We know why Hans could do this, partly thanks to German psychologist Oskar Pfungst's lengthy report in 1907: He was stomping his foot until he got a subtle, albeit often unconscious, cue from his trainer or his audience. Pfungst's report went further, though. The folie à trois had escalated over time; the feedback loop between horse, handler, and crowd grew with Hans's fame. So did his owner's increasingly delusional faith in the horse. When Hans erred in his foot-stomping answers, his handler stopped noticing.

Pfungst wrote, “One day it came to pass that the horse even understood French, and the old gentleman, whose apostolic exterior had always exerted a high degree of suggestion upon his admirers, in turn fell captive to the spell of retroactive mass-suggestion. He no longer was uneasy concerning the most glaring kinds of failure.”

When I first read about Clever Hans and his deluded owner and audience, I viewed the whole affair as a turn-of-the-last-century anachronism. But Clever Hans returned to haunt me during Solo's training. Early on, I thought the story was about the horse, not the human, and about Solo, not me. Now I know better. People use animals for a variety of faith-based practices. Once you start to load expectations on a horse's back, you realize it can hold all sorts of ideologies and theories. The Darwinians saw in Hans clear evidence of the similarity between the human and the animal mind. Cartesians argued that Hans was a mere brute. Hans, of course, was neither genius nor brute, but a smart and devoted horse.

Solo is clever and devoted as well. Which means he's fully capable of a dog version of lying. It's my job as his handler to prevent him from doing that. I don't always perform perfectly. Here is one example from Solo's training, but it's not the only one.

We were in an abandoned warehouse in Durham several years ago. A patrol-dog handler had obligingly put out some training hides for Solo. They had “cooked,” as one says about all sorts of scent training material (not just cadaver), for about a half hour. Long enough, on that warm North Carolina night, to send out scent, which I then sent Solo
to find. The other handler was idling behind the two of us, monitoring us but not closely. Solo hurtled through the building, accelerating madly, trying to dig his claws into the slick concrete for extra purchase.

His head twisted, he flipped almost in midair, flew back toward a garbage can, and came in for a deep sniff, working scent hard. Classic. I caught up with him and slowed to a stop, admiring his technique. Solo eyed me, and I stood there, stupidly meeting his gaze. He then went into his down alert, staring at me happily. It felt wrong. I looked back at the other handler, who had tuned in a few seconds too late and gave a quick head shake. Nope. No cadaver hide there.

My bad timing, when I slowed down and stared at Solo, helped trigger a false alert. I unconsciously encouraged him to do what he shouldn't have done. Even a microsecond's hesitation makes a difference at certain stages of training. Solo's behavior could become chronic if encouraged. I had made a sloppy beginner's error. The only mistake I didn't make at the garbage can was rewarding him for his minor perfidy. I broke his gaze and repeated the command: “Go find your fish.” My voice probably had an edge, although it shouldn't have. Solo moved on to find a couple of hides that were really there.

“That's why we call it training,” Mike Baker said after I had put Solo in the car, chagrined. He was slightly irked at me for allowing Solo to con me and at the other handler for not preventing the con.

The adaptive advantages of our two species co-evolving are obvious. Yet those same connections become a real disadvantage when you want a dog's nose to be an independent and disinterested witness.

False alerts have to be dealt with honestly, or they become the elephant in the training room or on search scenes. Like alcoholism, they are more common than acknowledged. A few handlers swear that their dogs never, ever false-alert and that something must have been there, even if it was just residual scent. That comforting circular story—
there must have been something there, because I trust my dog, who is perfect and would never, ever misrepresent
—can come back to bite you in the butt. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls it “bullshit.” Bullshit, Frankfurt
notes in his famous essay, is more insidious than a lie. While someone may not realize she's bullshitting, and while the bullshit isn't always false, it creates a broader problem: a general indifference to facts. We see this in politics all the time—and in the dog world, which is different but similar. That's why Frankfurt argues that bullshitting is more corrosive than lying. The liar, unlike the bullshitter, is aware that he's positioning himself against what he thinks is the truth. Lying takes a bit of effort, a slight respect for the truth that is out there, somewhere.

I will never know for certain, when Solo false alerts, whether he distinguishes between lying and bullshitting. I believe Solo tries to be honest. Mike Baker once called him one of the most honest dogs he knows, partly because it is so easy to read his body language before an alert.

Nonetheless, Solo will false alert. Infrequently, but it goes into my training and search records. Every alert gets counted. It mostly happens when he's in scent, but not as close as he could and should get, but he decides that's good enough for him. Or if I'm handling him badly, as I did in the warehouse. Sometimes I'll never know why. Sometimes I can speculate why he alerted. Not all of them are false. If we're searching a junkyard of wrecked cars, and Solo alerts on a front seat where an airbag has deployed or the windshield is shattered? I'll reward him for that one, even if there's no body in the trunk. Blood can stick around for years.

If there are five or six cops standing and staring at something redolent lying on the ground, say, a bag with a dead dog in it? Solo will look at it, too, look around, gauge everyone's expression, and think, Hey, maybe that's something worth alerting on. They're into it, right? In that case, no reward. Move on. During searches, if people want me to check garbage bags that look suspicious, or particular bones, I politely ask if they can keep a short distance away. On a recent search, I was having Solo check what I was sure was a pile of sand deposited by
a recent creek flood, though one careful investigator thought it looked gravelike. I simply asked the searchers to stand away while I ran Solo through the area. They all obediently stepped well away and turned their backs, but they couldn't help looking over their shoulders to see what he would do. Solo sniffed and moved on. Over the years, he has been increasingly proofed off dead animals. More important, he's been increasingly proofed off the human gaze.

It's hardly dogs' fault: We humans hardwired them through selective breeding to be utterly responsive to us. With working dogs, we take it a step further. We ask them to be both deeply bonded with their handlers and to act independently. They need to be both obedient and to think for themselves. We train them to ignore us and go get their work done. Push that door. Don't look at me to do it. Open that gate. Find that body. Stop watching me and do your job. The game is to be together
and
separate. Bonded
and
independent. For some breeds, and for some dogs, it's easier than for others.

It's partly why one of the hardest exercises in advanced obedience can be the “go out.” An obedience dog is used to being fed treats in exchange for gazing lovingly, unstintingly into the handler's eyes on the heel and recall. Then the handler asks the dog to run enthusiastically straight away. If it's not taught with the proper chain of treats and rewards, you can witness an otherwise fine obedience dog walk away slowly, sulkily, gazing back at his owner: You don't love me anymore. You want me to go away.

We humans are hardwired, too. We are attached to our dogs. The handler or even the helpful trainer can unconsciously play an unhelpful role in creating dependency, wanting the dog's success. That's why a handler training a sniffer dog should start training on blind problems, where the handler doesn't know the location of the hide and can't help the dog cheat. Then she should go on to double-blind problems, where the trainer flanking her doesn't know the hide's location, either. That's why it was good when Nancy Hook started forgetting where she put
the hides in the fields and woods early in Solo's training. She was unconsciously providing all three of us with double-blind trainings. She was helping us avoid bullshit.

•  •  •

So what's the harm with a cadaver handler here and there saying, with some bravado among friends at a seminar, that her dog never false alerts? Or a bloodhound handler bragging that his dog can follow a two-month-old track, or trail someone driving in a car for miles? Aren't they the harmless equivalent of big fish tales?

No. Bragging on your dog provides a tiny contribution to the general spreading of bullshit about working dogs. It creates a wishful blindness that doesn't just end up hurting the training of a particular dog. It also helps create a filmy fiction about working dogs in general—a kind of milky, soft-focus portrait that helps us practice Hero Dog Worship.

False claims, repeated often enough—as tracking trainer Tracy Bowling pointed out—reach the level of legitimacy. From there, one can trace the real and obvious harm those lies create. They undermine truthful handlers who don't overreach. They keep people from training their dogs to the necessary level. They can make the work of a good dependable dog look obvious and simple when, in reality, it's enormously difficult.

The exaggerations send the media into a tailspin about the wonder of dogs, then a counter-tailspin when the inevitable cautionary tales emerge. The bed-bug backlash is a nice example. The
New York Times
's honeymoon with bed-bug-detector dogs ended in less than a year. Its first March 2010 article had nary a doubt about the effectiveness of canine versus bug: “Bedbug-sniffing dogs, adorable yet stunningly accurate—entomology researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy—are the new and furry front line in an escalating and
confounding domestic war.” Dogs in those accounts seemed to work alone, without handlers. They just took a taxi to inspect Upper East Side hotels by themselves.

Eight months later, the
Times
's tone had changed: “Doubts Rise on Bedbug-Sniffing Dogs”: “But as the number of reported infestations rises and the demand for the dogs soars, complaints from people who say dogs have inaccurately detected bedbugs are also climbing.”

Cautionary scientific studies are starting to appear, to the great consternation and sometimes rancorous objections of some dog handlers and organizations, who can pick holes in a study faster than an army of termites and claim that they are “shocked, shocked” to find there is anything amiss in the magical kingdom of working dogs. The feigned shock is another nice example of what Frankfurt calls bullshit. But it's inevitable and, at one level, understandable. The canine legal arena has become incredibly complex and contentious—the Supreme Court took on its first two Florida dog-sniff cases in 2013. The cases were based on the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. While the court sided with the dog and handler during a traffic stop in one case, the other case, which involved suspected marijuana growing in a private home, had a different outcome. The police used a drug dog's sniff at the door of the house to establish probable cause to get a search warrant. The majority ruled that K9 noses aren't that different from prying government eyes. Your right to privacy extends to keeping a K9 nose away from your home. That decision will have repercussions on how sniffer dogs' noses can be used.

So when a scientific study casts any doubt on the invincibility of working dogs, handlers and trainers react with alacrity. That was certainly the case for a 2011 study in
Animal Cognition
by researcher and former detection-dog handler Lisa Lit and two colleagues at the University of California, Davis. The study showed that law enforcement K9 handlers, when they expect to find gunpowder or marijuana in a certain place, either will state or will actually believe that their dogs have found the substance—even if there's nothing there.

It was a simple study at one level: no drugs or explosives planted anywhere. Instead, the researchers placed little pieces of red construction paper and told the handlers that those markers indicated either drugs or explosives. When handlers saw a red piece of paper falsely marking a scent location, they were much more likely to say that their dogs had signaled an alert. Conscious? Unconscious? Perhaps both. What was interesting was that the handlers were more distracted by those misleading pieces of red paper than their dogs were by the Slim Jims and tennis balls stashed in various corners. Lit and her colleagues recorded literally hundreds of false alerts.

Lit's study was not a dog study; it was a human-nature-with-dogs-added study, and it highlighted the need for a strengthened training regime. It also pointed to the problem of expectations. If we go in expecting to find something, the chances are higher that we will. We all have confirmation bias. How much better it is when we can get our dogs to confirm that bias as well.