What the Dog Knows (41 page)

The history of the dog sport of Schutzhund is long and complex. It was designed at first to help measure working dogs' abilities for breeding programs. It's a three-part sport: obedience, tracking, and protection work. For more on Schutzhund trials in the United States, see
http://www.germanshepherddog.com/schutzhund/trial.htm
.

For the section on singleton litters, I depended on Patricia McConnell, one of my favorite animal behaviorists, who wrote about her experience with a single pup (also named Solo) in
For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2006). As she put it in her notes, her experience is simply anecdotal, with little scientific research to back it up. “That doesn't mean it has no value, but until someone does carefully controlled research on the topic, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions.” She placed her Solo with a single woman, and he was “the light of her life.”

I also found Karen London's Dog Behavior Blog, on singleton puppies, helpful:
http://www.dogbehaviorblog.com/2008/08/singleton-puppi.html
, last modified August 2, 2008.

On Solo's ability to vocalize: I don't believe he is closely related to the wild dogs of Africa; nonetheless, that species has been classified as among the most social of all
canids, a category that includes wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, and dogs. The wild dogs of Africa have one of the most complex vocal repertoires of all the canids.

Interviews, correspondence, personal communications, and background information for this chapter include archaeologist Haleh Brooks; Dr. Edward David, former deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maine; Brad Dennis, search director for KlaasKids Foundation; Lisa Higgins, cadaver-dog trainer and handler from Louisiana, and a civilian contractor with the FBI on the victim recovery team; Nancy Hook; Paul Martin, anthropology graduate student at the University of Mississippi and cadaver-dog program coordinator for the Western Carolina University Forensic Anthropology Program; Lisa Mayhew, child death investigator/trainer for the North Carolina office of the chief medical examiner; Andrew “Andy” Rebmann, retired Connecticut state trooper and founder of K-9 Specialty Search Associates; and research associate professor Marcella Sorg, Department of Anthropology, University of Maine.

The epigraph for this chapter comes from
The Others: How Animals Made Us Human
, by Paul Shepard (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995). Shepard, a deep ecologist, wrote of the dog, “It is a borderline animal in so many ways that its marginality has mythic proportions, especially in connection with the geography of chaos” (62).

The book most central to this chapter—indeed, to this entire book—is
Cadaver Dog Handbook: Forensic Training and Tactics for the Recovery of Human Remains
, by Andrew Rebmann, Edward David, and Marcella Sorg (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000). It is considered the central text for cadaver-dog handlers and trainers. The other book that Nancy Hook mentioned in our first conversation about scenting dogs was William G. Syrotuck's 102-page book,
Scent and the Scenting Dog
, first published in 1972 (Rome, NY: Arner Publications). It has been reprinted numerous times and remains one of the classics on nose work.

The section on the history of dogs and death opens with the discovery of the canid skulls (there is some archaeological back-and-forth about whether those skulls represent “the dog”): “Palaeolithic Dog Skulls at the Gravettian Predmostí Site, the Czech Republic,” by Mietje Germonpré, Martina Láznicková-Galetová, and Mikhail V. Sablin,
Journal of Archaeological Science
39, no. 1, 2012: 184–202.

Whether Egypt's god Anubis is a desert dog or a jackal remains unknown, but as Stephanie Cass notes, the figure is “definitely canid and most likely a jackal or a wild dog—or a hybrid of both—but, as in the case of Seth (the god of chaos), with alterations that deliberately smudge the lines of reality.” (“Anubis,”
Encyclopedia Mythica Online
,
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/anubis.html
, last modified January 16, 2004.)

The quote on
canes sepulchrales
comes from
Introduction to the Study of Mortuary Customs Among the North American Indians
, by Dr. H. C. Yarrow (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, 1880: 10). It's one of the few sources available on these dogs, but it comports with what is known about the habits of dogs.

The Zoroastrian
sagdid
is well known and documented, with numerous sources and research devoted to it, including
The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees
, by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Mazagon, Bombay, British India Press, 1922),
http://www.avesta.org/ritual/rcc.htm
, accessed November 2011.

I am especially indebted to Haleh Brooks, an archaeologist now living in Norway, who took a snapshot in the museum of Tehran of a small bronze dog from ancient Persia that looks remarkably like a German shepherd. Her blog post of February 2012,
http://halehsworldofarchaeology.blogspot.com/2012/02/dogs-in-ancient-iran.html
, was enormously helpful, as has been her correspondence.

British scholar Mary Boyce, who died in 2006, is still considered the world's foremost authority on Zoroastrianism and wrote extensively on the role of dogs in that religion. One of her easily accessible pieces on the web is “Fauna and Flora: Dog in Zoroastrianism,” an excerpt from
Encyclopaedia Iranica
,
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Animals/dog_zoroastrian.htm
, accessed December 13, 2011.

The section on the role of dogs in early Western civilization and monotheistic religions has a number of sources, but the article by historian Sophia Menache at the University of Haifa, “Dogs: God's Worst Enemies?”
Society & Animals Journal of Human-Animal Studies
5, no. 1, 1997: 23–44, was most helpful, as was the article “Guardians of the Corpse Ways,” by amateur historian Robert N. Trubshaw,
Mercian Mysteries
no. 20, August 1994,
http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogfl.htm
, last modified November 2008.

Scamp, “The Grim Reaper Dog,” was featured in newspapers and television stories across the United States and Great Britain, including
Extraordinary Animals
on
Animal Planet, which originally aired May 31, 2011,
http://www.thepetnetwork.tv/videos/extraordinary-animals-the-grim-reaper-dog/
, accessed November 2011.

Numbers for “black dog syndrome” are difficult to come by—many shelter managers say it's a problem, but a few people call it an urban legend. On black dogs at shelters, see, for example, “Black Dogs Face a Hard Choice at Shelter,” by Deb Hipp,
The Bark
35, March/April 2006, and “Black Dog Bias?” by Craig Nakano,
Los Angeles Times
, December 6, 2008,
http://www.latimes.com/features/la-hm-black6-2008dec06,0,6461430.story
, accessed November 2011.

Tales of discovering bodies while walking one's dog abound in the mainstream media. Lauren Kornberg was interviewed for
The Madeleine Brand Show:
“Hollywood Severed Head: Dog Walker Recounts Grim Discovery,” 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio (January 19, 2012),
http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/01/19/22180/lauren-kornberg-hollywood-human-head-severed
, accessed March 2012; Fish, the dog, was featured in “Pet Dog's Discovery of Decaying Hand Leads Police to Body in Mission,” by Naxiely Lopez,
The Monitor
,
http://www.themonitor.com/articles/mission-53721-human-carrying.html#_jmp0_
, last modified August 12, 2011.

There is a limited but increasing academic literature on canine, coyote, and bear predation on human remains. Here is a brief sampling of the articles and textbook chapters devoted to the subject: “Canid Modification of Human Remains: Implications for Time-Since-Death Estimations,” by P. Wiley and L. M. Snyder,
Journal of Forensic Sciences
34, no. 4, 1989: 894–901; “Canid Scavenging/Disarticulation Sequence of Human Remains in the Pacific Northwest,” by William D. Haglund, Donald T. Reay, and Daris R. Swindler,
Journal of Forensic Sciences
34, no. 3, 1989: 587–606; “Dogs and Coyotes: Postmortem Involvement with Human Remains,” by William D. Haglund, in
Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains
, edited by William D. Haglund and Marcella H. Sorg (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1997): 367–381;
Skeletal Manifestations of Bear Scavenging
, by E. Ann Carson, Vincent H. Stefan, and Joseph F. Powell,
Journal of Forensic Sciences
45, no. 3, 2000: 515–526; “Taphonomy of Child-Sized Remains: A Study of Scattering and Scavenging in Virginia, USA,” by Robert Morton and Wayne Lord,
Journal of Forensic Sciences
51, no. 3, 2006: 475–479.

Archaeologists may have underestimated dogs' roles at digs, misreading dog activity as human activity: “Analogic Reasoning, Ethnoarchaeology, and the Impact of Canines on the Archaeological Record,” by Lawrence A. Kuznar and Robert Jeske,
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association
16, 2006: 37–46; and “Identifying the Involvement of Multiple Carnivore Taxa with Archaeological Bone Assemblages,” by Marie M. Selvaggio and J. Wilder,
Journal of Archaeological Science
28, no. 5, 2001: 465–470. Even something as simple as the joy of digging pits in the ground may have been misinterpreted: “Canine Digging Behavior and Archaeological Implications,” by Robert J. Jeske and Lawrence A. Kuznar,
Journal of Field Archaeology
28, nos. 3–4, 2001: 383–394.

Some of the saddest cases are those of lonely people whose remains are found in houses or apartments with dogs who have inevitably eaten their deceased owners: “Case Report: Canine Scavenging of Human Remains in an Indoor Setting,” by Dawnie Wolfe Steadman and Heather Worne,
Forensic Science International
173, 2007: 78–82.

This chapter includes material from interviews with K9 legal expert Terry Fleck; director emeritus of the International Forensic Research Institute at Florida International University Kenneth Furton; cognitive psychologist William S. “Deak” Helton at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand; Marcia Koenig, of K9 Specialty Search Associates; Nicholas “Nick” Montanarelli, who worked for numerous government agencies during his career, including the U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory; associate professor of animal behavior and sensory physiology and medicine at Auburn University Laurence “Larry” Myers; retired Maine game warden and owner of Maine K-9 Services Deborah Palman; Andy Rebmann; retired neurosurgeon George Stevenson, who took up the grizzly brain after his retirement; and Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association.

This chapter benefited from my observation of Roger Titus training bloodhound handlers. I have watched dozens of training sessions with patrol dogs from the Durham Police Department K9 unit and the Durham Sheriff K9 unit, among many other law enforcement agencies, mostly in North Carolina.

Also critical to this chapter were Marcia Koenig's unpublished papers; Andy Rebmann's news clip book with cases involving him, his dogs, and law enforcement handlers he trained going back to the early 1970s; and Nick Montanarelli's snapshots of some of the early military training and research with dogs during the 1960s and '70s.

Books critical to this chapter include
Cadaver Dog Handbook
and Deak Helton's edited collection,
Canine Ergonomics: The Science of Working Dogs
(Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009). Leon Whitney—veterinarian, breeder of bloodhounds, and enthusiastic proponent of stuffing purebred dogs and exhibiting them at the Yale Peabody Museum—authored the classic
Bloodhounds and How to Train Them
(New York: Orange Judd Publishing Co., 1947). The book by recently deceased K9 trainer Tracy Bowling,
Police K9 Tracking: A Guide for Training & Deploying the Police Tracking Dog
(K9 Publishing, 2010), was also helpful. For understanding more about humans' sense of smell, Avery Gilbert's
What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life
(New York: Crown Publishing, 2008) was a guide. Although I don't agree with a few of John Bradshaw's conclusions about dog cognition, his book
Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet
(New York, Basic Books, 2011) is chock-full of wonderful history and science.

The article on the shrew breakthrough was “Fossil Evidence on Origin of the Mammalian Brain,” by Timothy B. Rowe, Thomas E. Macrini, and Zhe-Xi Luo,
Science
332 (2011): 955–957. Animal Planet's overtouting of the bloodhound's nose can be found on its website under “Top 10 Animal Skills,”
http://animal.discovery.com/tv/a-list/creature-countdowns/skills/skills-09.html
, accessed November 2011.

Frank C. Craighead Jr. and his identical twin, John, are credited with helping save the grizzly bear from extinction with their twelve-year study of radio-collared grizzlies around Yellowstone. As the
New York Times
noted in its obituary of Frank Craighead, he and his brother had to go the extra (vertical) mile in their research: “They and the students who worked with them did pull-ups and other calisthenics to build strength in case they had to climb a tree to elude a grizzly.” The paper that shows up with a certain promiscuity is “Grizzly Bear Ranges and Movement as Determined by Radiotracking,” by Frank C. Craighead Jr., Third International Conference on Bears, Paper 10, 1976: 97–109.

As noted, even Nobel Prize winner Linda B. Buck has a hard time getting specific about what humans can detect. Her quote comes from “Olfactory Receptors and Odor Coding in Mammals,”
Nutrition Reviews
62, no. 11, 2004: 184–188. There's extensive literature on physicians' evaluation of “effluvia”: see, for instance, “Advances in Electronic-Nose Technologies Developed for Biomedical Applications,” by Alphus D. Wilson and Manuela Baietto,
Sensors
11, 2011: 1,105–1,176. On Larry Sunshine, odor mitigation expert, see “On PATH Trains, Noses Wrinkle at
a Moldy Mystery,”
New York Times
, June 7, 2011: A22. The quote on patchouli comes from
Perfumes: The Guide
, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (New York: Viking Adult, 2008), 283–284.