What the Dog Knows (35 page)

Sometimes retirement comes tragically fast. One hard-charging five-year-old Malinois in Durham came up lame, and within two weeks he was diagnosed with degenerative myelopathy, a disease that destroys the spine and shortens the life of working dogs. He was off the force a few weeks after that. He would never again vehemently thrust his Kong toward K9 officers who reflexively and protectively cupped their hands over their crotches when they saw him arrive.

Down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Steve Sprouse retired his blocky-headed German shepherd, DJ, at eight because of arthritis and spine problems. When DJ lunged forward to hit the bite sleeve, it was clear he was in pain; he yelped when the jolt traveled down his back. He needed help getting into the back of the patrol car. Steve retired him just before I traveled to Florida to watch Steve training.

“He gets out of the patrol car just fine,” Steve's wife, Sandy, pointed out, looking at the shepherd fondly. DJ was tearing up coconuts from the backyard palms with Casey, their wild young sable female, as company. Sandy has lived with every one of Steve's patrol dogs over the decades, through their retirement.

DJ's forced retirement had Steve wondering as he tried on a stiff new bulletproof vest the department had issued him: Was he too old to start another dog? Were his reflexes on the street still good enough? All the moves that come naturally on a deployment would need to become part of his body memory again. He would have to synchronize with a new dog. Sandy and he would have to squeeze a third large, energetic
dog into their modestly sized house. “Do I have another dog left in me?” he asked.

It's a familiar question for handlers of a certain age, and not a rote one. For most professional K9 handlers, losing or retiring one dog becomes decision-making time. Some handlers get into K9 not because they love working with dogs but because of the prestige. They realize only afterward how all-consuming life with a patrol dog is. Sometimes promotion or another division can beckon. But I know more than one person who refused promotions in order to continue working with dogs in a unit.

Sometimes a handler's own retirement beckons. Steve, who spends most of his time training others, had some thinking to do. A new dog was more complicated than a new vest.

•  •  •

Solo's left hock can wobble, particularly the day after a demanding training or a long search. His right front shoulder appears arthritic, probably from years of leaping off the fourth step each time he comes downstairs. He slips occasionally on our concrete floor as he waltzes back and forth across the house, shaking his toys until they are dead, a nightly ritual before heading to bed.

Except for a smattering of gray on his muzzle and lower jaw, Solo doesn't look his age. In any case, German shepherd muzzles can get gray before they turn three. He doesn't act his age, either. He still dolphins around the yard, brings us toys at night, head up, a gleam in his eye, setting them on the couch, pushing them with his nose, and then backing off and crouching down slowly to see if we'll take the bait he's carefully set. When company arrives, he becomes a tiresome clown. When I tell him to go lie down, he'll run at the dog bed and jump on it with his front feet so he can use it like a boogie board to skate across the floor before flipping in crazy circles and throwing himself down on it with melodramatic yowls and moans. You're killing me here. Guests
laugh, escalating the noisy theatrics. If a particular find during training poses a challenge, he'll self-reward by doing a couple of extra victory laps, snaking through trees and leaping over obstacles, swinging the tug toy.

On searches and during training, he is still capable of being a jackass. During a recent search, two large dogs chained up in a backyard were too much of a temptation. Solo minded me but at the last minute; that's not sincere obedience.

It's rare these days, though, that I get truly angry at him or even embarrassed. It's not that I've gotten softer; it's that he has gotten better. And it's a sign of the beginning of the end. A summer training at Nancy's ended with her throwing up her arms as he panted into an indifferent alert on a cadaver hide, tongue hanging on the grass. “Just pathetic,” she declared. She looked at him with scorn and then at me accusingly. “You really need to start another dog,” she said, “if he's going to be around to teach it anything at all.”

I searched for excuses. It was, I said with triumph, the prophylactic antibiotics he'd been on for a bad tick exposure. Maybe it was his boredom with her hides. Same time, same place. Same dead stuff. Been there. Smelled that. Nancy knew my protestations were a delaying tactic.

Working dogs depend on their fitness and strength. At some point, climbing the hill at the solid-waste landfill to follow an evocative scent coming from the other side will hurt too much. The best nose in the world attached to arthritic hips or legs won't cut it.

I spent the first three years of Solo's life wondering which full-bore accident or macho posturing might kill him: running at top velocity into a barbed-wire fence on a search and bouncing off it like a bird hitting a window; deciding to take on a herd of cows; charging out of a warehouse and belly-flopping off the loading dock onto the pavement below. He survived those and many more incidents of our combined bad judgment. Then we reached homeostasis for a few years. He was at the top of his game mentally and physically, no longer as impetuous.

When a big water moccasin came thrashing out of the murky water and toward us during one search, I simply called Solo off and we moved on, leaving the snake to its territory. We could search pastures filled with horses and I didn't worry. I could speak in low, quiet sentences and mostly not at all—unless we flushed a coyote from her den or a fawn out of a swamp.

Those years were lovely and temporary. Solo is now eight, the age where physically, things start to go wrong no matter what. Like me, he is headed downhill. And because he's a dog, he's moving faster than I am. As always. Dogs don't last. At best, he's got just a couple of years of work left. How can I know? By being ruthlessly honest and not telling myself stories about old dogs and their wisdom. Not just joints and muscles suffer from age. A dog's sense of smell is not forever. The nose's abilities diminish with age, with disease, with a series of micro-injuries, Larry Myers noted. People's noses aren't that different. Human scent expert Avery Gilbert wrote that human olfactory performance starts to deteriorate when people are in their forties. This nose degradation story comes with caveats: Perfumers, Gilbert said, get better with age. “A given seventy-five-year-old may outperform a given twenty-five-year-old. . . . Experience and skill more than compensate for any dimming of acuity that comes with age.”

The same can be true of dogs, according to Deak Helton. Experience, skill, and good physical condition can help a dog compensate for certain kinds of aging. I've seen it with several of the Durham Police Department's patrol dogs, since I've watched them now for more than six years. A couple of them, around Solo's age, simply get the job done. Perhaps not as dramatically, at a frenetic run, as they did a few years before, but with such admirable efficiency and clear knowledge that it's not until they're back in the patrol cars that you realize the older dogs finished the job in half the time.

Watching those dogs get older made the issue of “retiring” Solo seem overwrought. What does it mean to retire from part-time volunteer work? All I knew was that I wasn't ready to quit.

•  •  •

The small lump on Solo's leg, just above his dewclaw, appeared a few months after I noticed his occasional limp. I called the vet immediately, but by the time David and I got there, I had talked myself into the obvious diagnosis—bone cancer. Osteosarcoma in German shepherds, more frequently seen in males than females, is common. It shows up on those long leg bones at a median age of seven and a half. By the time a limp appears, the cancer has usually metastasized to the lungs. Cure rates are low.

I assured myself and David, trying to ignore the gaping nausea in my chest, that Solo had had a good life, an active one, and while it would be truly sad to lose him, it wasn't a tragedy. We'd had a nice run. I laid out the limited treatment options in my head, to be ready for the vet's arguments. We'd do surgery, sure, but no amputation, and no radiation or chemo.

David and I had already had this discussion about Solo's shortened life span because of where we train and search. That nose, those lungs, those feet and legs have been exposed to all sorts of crap. Swamps and fields filled with runoff, herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals. Abandoned houses filled with chemicals and lead paint. Wrecking yards with heavy oils and antifreeze slowly oozing into the ground. One time we worked on fields that had just been sprayed with sludge—human waste treated with heavy doses of chlorine. After that, I had a wide-ranging conversation with a friend who is a public health epidemiologist. He knew a lot about sludge. Sterilized human poop is somehow more disgusting than its original form. To say nothing of human garbage that has steeped in landfills for decades until it oozes out as corrosive and toxic hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. More than a few times, I came home with heart palpitations from having trained in dusty tobacco warehouses and factories, wondering how I'd managed smoking on and off for nearly twenty years before finally quitting, and whether Solo would get lung cancer.

My cure-all for toxic exposure is soap and water: first Solo, then me, as soon as we get home. Solo, who has just spent his time throwing himself with delight into muck-and-algae-filled swamps, will tuck his tail and lay his ears back tight against his head, trying to seal them against a single drop of clean water.

Is Solo more prone to cancer or respiratory illnesses or stray bacteria than a standard pet dog? It's hard to know. Few studies are out there. Working dogs tend to be in good physical condition and less obese than pet dogs. It may go beyond that, though. Cynthia Otto, founder of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, studied the dogs deployed during 9/11 and came away encouraged. She told Terry Gross of
Fresh Air:
“[T]hese dogs seem to live longer and healthier lives than your average dog that we see in our hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. So I have a theory that I would love to explore as well. If the physical activity and the fitness and the mental stimulation and just the joy of life that these dogs have, because they're doing something so great and have such a great bond with their handlers, if that doesn't enhance not only the quality of life but their longevity.”

Otto is not the only researcher to look at the dogs of 9/11, although she concentrated on the volunteer search-and-rescue dogs.

Another small study of the twenty-seven New York City police and fire department dogs who worked at the 9/11 sites showed similar results. In the five years after those dogs were deployed, their health problems were “minor and infrequent.” The dogs were exposed to air laden with the dust of cement, glass, fiberglass, asbestos, lead, jet fuel, dioxins. Those dogs worked even longer hours than the search-and-rescue dogs who arrived a bit later to the site: thirty-seven weeks without masks, without hazard suits. They were getting toxins through every pore. None of the dogs showed long-term respiratory problems—the diseases that affected the human rescue workers at a higher rate.

The average dog in our industrialized nation isn't doing so well. One 2008 study of pet dogs showed they were contaminated with
thirty-five chemicals, including eleven carcinogens and twenty-four neurotoxins. Happily, one can't leap from chemical contamination to disease, but skin cancer, bone cancer, and leukemia are much more common in dogs than in people. It is estimated that almost 50 percent of all dogs over the age of ten will develop cancer and approximately 20 to 25 percent will die from it. In the late 1930s, a researcher showed that chemical compounds used in dyes caused bladder cancer in dogs. In the mid-1950s, other researchers showed that another industrial chemical caused bladder cancer in dogs. By 1980, a large study of pet dogs showed that bladder cancer correlated with living in industrial areas.

I arrived at the vet's knowing all of this, resigned. After fourteen years of living with me, David was resigned to my fatalism, realizing that he couldn't stop my predilection for imagining a bleak future. Solo doesn't do resignation, so he struggled against the biopsy needle, believing the vet was going to do the unthinkable and trim his nails. Once he felt the thick needle piercing his skin, which was no big deal to him, he relaxed completely and let her take the cells and smear the slide. She didn't need a microscope for the first step.

The vet held the slide up to the light and then smiled. “Grease.” The most beautiful word in the vet lexicon. Solo had a benign cyst.

•  •  •

Solo, like most American volunteer search-and-rescue dogs, hasn't had constant exposure to toxins, compared with, for instance, the military working dogs deployed in the Middle East and South Asia. And the military working people deployed there. People come back with a variety of health problems that might or might not be related to what they were exposed to while serving.

Dogs are one of the best warning systems we humans have, and not only as guard dogs. Dogs can be both sentries and “sentinels”—an early-warning system for understanding human disease. The general
idea of using animals as a human model in biomedical research goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the idea of sentinel animals, which because of their shorter life spans might help us understand how disease or toxicity affects humans, is a slightly newer medical model. The earliest recognized sentinels were the canaries in the nineteenth-century coal mines; they dropped dead from methane or carbon monoxide before the miners did. In 1952, cattle dropped dead in the smogs of England. Then the people died alongside them. In the 1950s, in the tiny fishing village of Minamata, Japan, cats started exhibiting bizarre behavior, “dancing cat fever.” The cats sometimes fell into the sea and died, what villagers called “cat suicides.” Then symptoms started showing in people. Every living thing in the village was suffering from mercury poisoning, coming from an industrial plant making vinyl chloride and sending its effluent into the bay.