What the Dog Knows (40 page)
Read What the Dog Knows Online
Authors: Cat Warren
Hal and Patsy Hopfenberg helped us escape to their mountain home with Solo, where we ate, drank, talkedâand I wrote. And when I was depressed and overwhelmed and frantic, and David was tired of dealing with me, we would drive the 1.1 miles down the road and get
a little table at the bar of the Magnolia Grill. Ben Barker, chefâowner, would take a brief break from the kitchen and come over to chat, even though he knew our arrival meant I was in a foul mood. I would whine, taste Ben's warm brown food, and feel so much better that by the time I ate one of Karen's amazing desserts, I would have forgetten what ailed me. The Grill happened to have the best food and desserts in the country until it closed last year after twenty-five years, and I am everlastingly grateful for its existence. We will soldier on, despite its closure. Thanks to Ben and Karen and our friends Joe Levine and Louise Antony, David and I got engaged at the Grill. They helped sustain this bookâand our marriage.
David's siblings in New York, Bob and Irene, and their respective spouses, Arleen Auerbach and Phil Schaeffer, were amazingâI thank them for being such wonderful in-laws to me, and for their understanding that our schedule went a bit south with this book project. We will visit much more in the coming years. My brother Mark talked through early memories of Irish setters, my nephew Kelly loved the very idea of this book, and my brother Dan, who has hunting Labradors, understood my predilections for working dogs.
My father, Charles Warren, who died of cancer in 2005, left me, at the supposedly mature age of forty-nine, in the deepest mourning I have ever experienced. David lost both his parents when he was a teenager; I lost my mother more than a decade before Dad died. But his death still feels near. I can still hear his slow, thoughtful voice. I still want to pick up the phone so that we can talk through the state of the world and our lives. He is woven throughout my life and this book. I am so grateful to my dear stepmother, Agnes Rands-Warren, for making Dad's last years so happy and being a “best-mother” to me.
Finally, there's David: my husband, my heart, my dearest friend. I don't know how to acknowledge him, except to say that I love him, and I promise not to do this again too soon.
Cover photograph of Solo, seven and a half years old.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
1: The Little Prince of Darkness
Solo, four weeks old, at breeder Joan Andreasen-Webb's home in Pataskala, Ohio.
(Photo by Sherri Clendenin)
A statue of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed dog god who protected the deceased in their tombs.
(Photo by Son of Groucho)
Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association, rewards a bloodhound for finding him during training.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
Military and Southwest Research Institute studies showed the value of using dogs. The snapshots of dogs training during the 1960s and 1970s came from researcher Nick Montanarelli.
(Photo montage by David Auerbach)
Durham K9 Sergeant Mike Baker and K9 Officer Danny Gooch work with Danny's young patrol dog, Rin, using boxes where only one has a drug scent.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Human remains can easily disappear in the woods, becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding flora.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Solo created new training problems for me. Nancy Hook laughed and called him a jackass.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Broward County Sheriff K9 officer-in-training Dave Lopez takes a bite from Diesel, a German shepherd learning to work in the water.
(Photo by Steve Sprouse)
Solo running through undergrowth in the woods during training.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Solo is smart and devoted, which means he wants to please and to get his reward. That can be a problem.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
11: All the World's a Scenario
Setting up realistic scenarios during training is crucial to both the dog's and the handler's success.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Andy Rebmann and his German shepherd Josie searched for days for the victims of a serial killer or killers along the highways near New Bedford, Massachusetts.
(Photos by Paula Bronstein,
Hartford Courant
article by Lynne Tuohy)
In Iraq, German shepherd cadaver dog Strega alerts on a training aid hidden by her owner and handler Kathy Holbert, a civilian contractor from Philippi, West Virginia.
(Photo by Army Staff Sergeant Daniel Yarnall)
In Mississippi, Paul Martin helps Gwen Hancock train her Labrador, Ruger, on human remains detection in the water while Cathi Brown observes.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
Lisa Higgins and her cadaver dog Maggie train at the Cobb family cemetery in Tuckaseegee, North Carolina, where research that combines family history, cadaver dogs, ground-penetrating
radar, and other methods is being used to locate grave shafts and unmarked graves.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
Sean Kelly, a K9 officer in North Carolina, during a training break with Nero, a former military working dog.
(Photo by Cat Warren)
Solo and Coda at home in Durham, one week after Coda's arrival.
(Photo by D. L. Anderson)
© LISSA GOTWALS
CAT WARREN
is an associate professor at North Carolina State University, where she teaches science journalism, editing, and reporting. She lives with her husband, David, and two German shepherds, Solo and Coda, in Durham, North Carolina.
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The source materials for this book include my own training experiences, especially since I started working with Solo in cadaver work in 2004; my observations and participation at numerous search-and-rescue and cadaver-dog seminars and at police and sheriff K9 trainings and seminars; and my experience on searches and deployments. The book depends on personal communications, off-the-record conversations, on-the-record interviews, and lengthy correspondence with dozens of dog handlers and trainers, members of law enforcement, search-and-rescue volunteers and managers, forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, analytical chemists, cognitive scientists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, conservation biologists, medical examiners, military researchers, and historians. In addition, I am grateful for access to the personal archives and training and deployment records of several experienced trainers and handlers. I also depended on literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, academic articles and conference proceedings, military reports and studies, and several dozen books.
Oliver Sacks noted in a February 2013
New York Review of Books
essay, “There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections.” I agree. However, when I quote someone in direct quotes, those come from extensive notes, tape-recorded conversations, e-mails, or other correspondence. In a few instances, the words were seared into my brain because I'd heard them often and repeated them to my husband, David Auerbach, and to many others. Durham Police K9 Sergeant Mike Baker's standard advice to handlers, “Be more exciting than pee on a tree,” is just one example.
These endnotes, like the book itself, are not comprehensive and are not meant to be, but represent highlights of the materials used. In some cases, I don't use people's names because I was an outside observer at seminars or trainings where handlers and trainers graciously allowed me to take notes and photographs. Although I don't use names in every instance, I am deeply grateful for the knowledge imparted. I did not use composite characters or composite quotes, nor did I change names or details. In several instances, I don't identify certain particulars about a search, but I did not in any other way change the facts of any case.
Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include Solo's breeder, Joan Andreasen-Webb; my husband, David Auerbach (who is present in every chapter in some fashion); Nancy Hook of Hook's K9 Training; and our friend Barb Smalley. Joan exchanged dozens of e-mails with me in those early Solo days, and later noted that she wished she could have lived closer, as she felt somewhat helpless from a distance.
The German shepherd is a controversial breed (many breeds are). For the German shepherd fan, no argument is as heated as the one about whether Americans, especially the American Kennel Clubâwith its insistence on a distinct and standardized look for particular breeds over other qualities, such as health and working abilityâruined the German shepherd. There is also a “purer” history of the German
shepherd that working shepherd lovers tend to equivocate about or simply avoid. That history began with Max Emil Friedrich von Stephanitz (December 30, 1864, to April 22, 1936), a German army officer who developed the German shepherd breed as we know it today; set guidelines for the standard; and was the first president of the S.V., which stands for
Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde
, or Society for the German Shepherd Dog. His book,
The German Shepherd Dog in Word and Picture
(Jena, Germany: Anton Kämpfe, 1925), weighs in at 710 pages. As Susan Orlean notes with light irony in her book
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), Stephanitz had a “Germanic enthusiasm for genetics” (23). Nonetheless, he reportedly only reluctantly turned his registry over to the Nazis, who took up German shepherd breeding with alacrity. Two helpful resources on the topic include
Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust
, by Boria Sax (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2000), and “Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the German Shepherd Dog,” by Aaron Skabelund,
Society and Animals
16, no. 4, 2008: 354â371. Working-dog aficionado James R. Engel also provides a great deal of history and context in his web-only book project,
The Police Dog: Evolution, History and Service
,
http://www.angelplace.net/Book/
.