What the Dog Knows (37 page)

That promise gave me permission to indulge in what I called puppy porn, scanning dozens of websites and hundreds of photos, raising my endorphins and hopes with two-dimensional images of baby-faced German shepherd puppies. When they are four to six weeks old, shepherd puppies have a flop-eared cuteness that makes everyone go soft and gooey inside. By nine weeks old, they start looking and acting like clumsy tiger sharks. To each her own.

We couldn't get another Solo. I might have been tempted, but Joan Andreasen-Webb was no longer breeding dogs. If I wanted to continue doing cadaver-dog work, my best chances lay with an entirely working-line shepherd. And I wanted to keep going. This time, I wanted to add disaster training to the mix. My former fantasies of a large, calm, red-and-black prince had been replaced with an entirely new fantasy: a sable or black shepherd with a flat back, “environmental hardness,” nerve, and drive. I knew exactly what I wanted: one of Kathy Holbert's German shepherd puppies from the mountains of West Virginia, raised with Kathy's mellow laughter and low-key working-dog knowledge, with the gentle hands of her husband, Danny, and with rollicking adventure: crawling through culverts, swimming in creeks, running through the woods, balancing on gently sloped ladders, diving into swimming pools, walking across balance beams. Working-dog heaven.

“You'd better have something for this pup to do once it gets to your house,” Lisa Mayhew warned me. She was right. This was not a pup who was going to lie there as Solo now did, snoozing while we watched the new
Sherlock Holmes
on PBS and ate dinner on rickety TV trays. Our morning ritual of coffee in bed with the
New York Times
would be history. Solo slept in and arose, with a luxurious stretch and yawn, only when we decided to.

This would be the kind of pup handlers name Havoc, Harm, or Hecate. We'd kept another name in reserve for years. It had aged
nicely and still rolled off our tongues with pleasurable, bisyllabic ease: Coda. Now, though, my goal wasn't a pup who would reflect a quiet, thoughtful ending. I wanted less sonata summation and more Beethoven's coda for his 8th Symphony: fast and furious at points, occasionally disharmonious, “anything but orthodox.” This time I would be sobbing in David's arms late at night if the puppy
didn't
immediately leap on us, scrabbling to pepper our arms and legs and noses and toes with puppy bites and claw marks, making us look like heroin addicts. Solo taught me that such behavior wasn't personal, and it wasn't aggression, but rather a gnawing, biting appetite for life. My standards had changed. I knew I could build in obedience, but it was harder to build drive if the basic material wasn't there. I could teach a pup not to leap over the couch and all over us and not to chew on hands. At least, given a few months. Or years.

For all our preparations and research and joy about the choice, I also felt mournful and scared. We were moving into medium-risk territory after several years of relative comfort. A puppy would take lots of time, time away from Solo. That was if Solo even accepted a pup in the house. Also, I would be abbreviating his training in favor of the hot new pup on the block. Getting a new dog up and running could take up to two years—if the pup continued to show promise, if the K9 teams in Durham allowed me to train with them, if no terrible accidents occurred. I had a discussion with another volunteer handler about what might happen if the new dog and I washed out: She condoned finding the dog a new home and moving on quickly to another. I wasn't sure I could do that. I did know our house was too small for three German shepherds. And I was fully aware of the problem of “second-dog syndrome.” If the pup didn't work, it would be partly my fault.

I had encouragement in my forebodings. Two experienced law enforcement trainers told me that I would never again have a dog as naturally good as Solo. When I told Nancy that, she scoffed and told me not to be maudlin. “It's the handler, stupid,” she said. Within the
hour, I overheard Nancy telling a friend that she had just lied to me. I might never again have a dog as good as Solo. I knew that this wasn't the first time she'd lied to me. Her first major lie came when I entered her yard in Zebulon, my belly pack filled with liver treats strapped across my salmon-colored linen pants, hoping to find something for my young
canis horribilis
to do, and she cheerily told me she thought I would love cadaver work. She hadn't thought that. She had seen potential in Solo, but she hadn't thought that I—“little hippie yuppie” that I was—would follow through. Ha. I showed her. Now I was going to have to show her all over again.

“It's very common to see a dog handler be a ‘one dog wonder' and to either give it up once that dog is done or to suffer miserably with the next dogs,” wrote one cadaver-dog trainer. I exhibited all the clinical symptoms of being a one-dog wonder, and I didn't even have the pup yet.

I was now the working-dog researcher who knew too much. Between genetics and temperament, accidents and poor health, and the limits of my ability as a still-new handler, getting another dog to succeed was a crapshoot. We could stack the odds in our favor, but we ultimately didn't control every contingency.

Maybe I'd been hanging out with law enforcement too much, watching good handlers struggle mightily to understand and respect their new dogs—and failing. Dogs failed, too. I watched almost-adult dogs get shipped in from Europe, get evaluated, and wash out. Not hitting the bite sleeve hard enough. Hesitating before leaping up a metal stairway. Not levitating onto a slippery desk in a warehouse. Mike Baker, who had evaluated many hundreds of dogs, was more patient and knowledgeable than the sometimes judgmental handlers. He knew how long the dog had been in the country, whether it had the equivalent of jet lag, what its early experience might or might not have been. Many dogs faced entirely new environments. Breeding kennels, even top-notch European ones, don't always provide dogs the exposure they need.

And here I would be bringing in a ten-week-old puppy who wouldn't be big enough to climb warehouse stairs. It was bad enough that the pup would be a German shepherd and not a Malinois, but I wasn't bringing in a dozen dogs to evaluate. Only one. So much could go wrong. Solo's gifts were serendipitous and helped shape what he became. There would be no beginner's luck this time around.

On the other hand, I had resources at my disposal. Nancy Hook, for example. Kathy Holbert. Joan. Mike Baker promised me that, though he would be retired from the Durham K9 unit when the pup arrived, he would still be in the K9 training business and would help me put a foundation on the young dog.

During training one night, I tried to assure Mike—and myself—that I wouldn't be as clueless. “I'll know more with the next one. I won't make the same mistakes.”

Mike shook his head. He knew better. “If I had every dog in front of me that I'd ever worked with, I'd apologize to each of them.”

•  •  •

Steve Sprouse came to a decision soon after he retired DJ. One last patrol dog.

“My knees say, ‘You stupid idiot,' but I just can't picture doing anything else,” he told me. Steve wouldn't be getting a nine-week-old pup. “We try to get a dog that's eighteen months, and even at twelve months, we get a dog and there are problems. That six months is really critical.” Steve is always looking for two things: genetics and potential.

“I don't want to see what man has put into the dog,” he said. “I want to see what God has put into the dog.” Steve got lots of eighteen-month-old dogs to evaluate: He would have his pick of a large and mostly unrelated litter from all over Europe. He knew what he wanted—a strong, confident, balanced dog with an internal motor that wouldn't quit. One vendor offered to fly him over to Germany to
assess dogs, but soon after that, a vendor he knew well called to say he thought he had a pretty special dog for Steve. The dog had been flown in recently from Slovakia to Florida. Steve didn't take that call for granted; the vendor knew Steve was looking for what would probably be his last patrol dog.

The dog who came out of the kennel toward Steve was no juvenile but a muscled three-year-old, a rich sable male with copper-colored eyes, probably a mix of German shepherd and Malinois, though it was hard to tell. He was “a dog on a mission,” Steve said. The dog was looking around, checking out everything, including Steve. Steve did the same with him.

Steve kept the dog's name. Aaron. Hebrew for “mountain of strength.”

Despite his age, Aaron was a green mountain. Steve reminds handlers he trains that it takes time and patience and energy to get a dog up to speed, working smoothly, knowing what to do. Now Steve had to adjust his own expectations. DJ had been, as Steve said, “on autopilot.” Aaron wasn't. During training searches, he wanted to range out two hundred yards, rather than just fifty yards. He wanted to look around to see if he could figure out what to do without using his nose.

“You have a brand-new dog and you almost expect him to do exactly what the other dog did,” Steve said. “He's not sure of the game. That's the hard part. You have to go through that whole process all over again.”

Yet Aaron had the potential to be an exceptional patrol dog. Steve knew it. It was just a matter of getting time. Steve was still flying across the country and off to Trinidad to train handlers and dogs, and training handlers in Florida, then coming back to Fort Lauderdale to work with Aaron. It wasn't, Steve admitted, the worst problem to have.

“I guess I may never get to retire and sit in a rocking chair on my front porch, looking over the hills of somewhere in my imagination. It's frustrating sometimes. But I wouldn't trade it for anything else.”

•  •  •

I opened up my file labeled “Very Cool Dog Research” and looked at the studies within to see if any of the researchers had considered the sex of the dog as a factor. Nope.

—Patricia McConnell, 2009

We were standing outside yet another abandoned office building, on a hot North Carolina night. Each patrol dog who had gone into the building, each dog who had come out, had given the K9 salute to the nearby shrubbery. One of the dogs had especially noxious urine; as the dogs coated and recoated the holly bushes, the acrid odor wafted back to us.

The stench inspired the continuing K9 cop conversation about the inherent superiority of male working dogs. I was used to it and could almost ignore it. The law enforcement patrol-dog world is overwhelmingly male and unneutered, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any stray female patrol dog who managed to slip past the gender guards got close scrutiny until she made an error. And she would. Her original error was being female. The next was coming into heat. So when the male dogs got distracted and couldn't work, whose fault was it?

I sighed and rolled my eyes as the stereotypes escalated. Testosterone is undeniably a powerful hormone, its production bumped up by the kind of competition playing out in front of the building. The problem was that I, too, had a preference for male German shepherds: Solo was my third. But I have a feminist contrary streak as well. I talked with Mike Baker, and I talked with Nancy Hook. Mike pointed out that one of the toughest dogs on the K9 team had been a female. Females tended to be less distractible than males, he said. Nancy said it depended on the dog, and I should get the pup I liked. She'd approve of any female as long as it was a “bitch from hell.” Nancy would make sure I didn't put too much obedience in the dog, so she didn't stare adoringly at me and ignore her work. I thought about the cadaver and tracking dogs I had been reporting on—from Lisa Higgins's to Kathy
Holbert's to Andy Rebmann's to Marcia Koenig's to Jim Suffolk's to Roy and Suzie Ferguson's. A mix of sexes, with just as many females as males. Roger Titus, bless him, had used all female bloodhounds but one in his tracking career. That male was an early mistake, Roger said.

Joan helped nudge me further along the female trail. “I love the way females work,” she wrote me. “Totally different kind of relationship . . . at least, for me. I always found it interesting that Stephanitz also preferred the work ethic of females.”

Max von Stephanitz—the most sexist of them all, the man who explained that German shepherds would obey the woman of the house only “with reservations”—preferred the work ethic of female shepherds?

Neither Stephanitz, Mike, Nancy, nor Joan tipped the balance. Solo put his big paw on it. He had grown up a lot in eight years, but I could easily imagine a male adolescent shepherd telling him to shove it when signals got crossed one too many times. One doctoral dissertation showed that more egalitarian relationships and play occur between male and female canines than between same-sex pairs. That made sense. Even socially challenged Solo would ultimately start to show off for female dogs, cavorting goofily, rather than bristling. That was my hope: more romp and less hackle.

How, though, could I assess which female puppy to get?

Of course, I fell back on research. I found a great deal of work on “whorls”—those mathematically inevitable spots where hairs converge and then wheel one way or the other. Cowlicks. Temple Grandin's early work in cattle-hair whorls showed that the direction and position of the hair swirls on a steer's forehead helped predict whether he was calm or fearful.

Australian veterinary researcher Lisa Tomkins went to town based on that work. She assessed 115 future guide dogs, looking at their whorls and their paw preferences. Then she followed their progress. Puppies who preferred to use their right paws over their left were twice as likely to pass guide-dog school. Puppies with counterclockwise
chest-fur whorls were more than twice as likely to succeed than those with clockwise chest whorls. Tomkins and her fellow researchers noted that it appeared to be linked with the whole left-brain/right-brain crossover. I already knew Solo preferred to use his right paw to snake toys out from under the sideboard if he couldn't use his mouth. I looked at his chest with some trepidation; at first all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of fur, but as I parted the fur and moved farther down his chest, just before he leaped up, frustrated by my nonsense, I saw one small cowlick moving in reverse. Thank God.