What the Dog Knows (12 page)

Every solution in foundation training stems from a unique problem. Back in 1978, Kevin had a patrol dog who didn't want to search properly. It was all a big yawn to the German shepherd. Kevin wondered whether he could use magic to motivate his dog. He wanted to teach the dog to search with enthusiasm, to quarter back and forth properly, to cover the search area thoroughly. To be interested instead of cynical. To stick his head in confined spaces. It was a tall order. Kevin filled that order with magic cardboard boxes.

Since I was Solo-less at a dog seminar in Seattle, I was tapped to be Kevin's magician's assistant for his show, “Box Magic.” Kevin practices the purest kind of magic: the art of misdirection and the craft of sleight of hand. He teaches people to teach their own dogs. A trainer's job is to try to train the handler, and the handler's job to motivate the dog. But the handler has to be motivated in order to motivate the dog. “Any fool can take a great dog and make it greater,” Kevin said.

To train people to motivate their dogs, he gets them started thinking inside the box. It was hot that fall day in Seattle. Kevin sat in the minimal shade, and I followed his orders. I knew I wasn't going to be sawed in half or have knives thrown at me. All that was needed for Kevin's magic show were some dogs and handlers and five cardboard boxes in a parallel line on a lawn, three or four feet apart. I looked inside them. I felt around. They were empty. There wasn't a scent source in any of them.

As the magician's assistant, I probably shouldn't betray the magician's secret, but Kevin did give permission. My job as magician's assistant, after putting out the boxes, was to stand there holding dogs,
expressionless as a butler. Every single dog—from the blind English spaniel to the squat guy who looked like a puggle (a designer-dog cross between a pug and a beagle) to the pretty little Chesapeake Bay retriever named Truffle—became gullible marks in Kevin George's game of five-box monte.

Kevin, a short, humorous, white-haired, generously proportioned pasha, directed the handlers to make fools of themselves. “If you can't act like a crazy person, you will not be a good dog trainer. Don't be scared to do things that make you interesting to the dog,” Kevin told them.

I held the first dog, and the handler started acting insane. She played the role of the monte scammer. She shook the dog's favorite toy in front of his nose. She then ran away, screaming, shaking the toy as if breaking its little neck. She ran to a cardboard box and made a big deal of holding the toy, as if holding a live rabbit by the ears. The dog, the mark in this case, was staring intently—he couldn't help it—as the toy disappeared into the cardboard box, very much like a rabbit going down its hole. The handler then ran back to the dog, who by now was pulling like crazy on my arm. I stood impassively, trying not to wince. I handed over the excited dog, and the handler unclipped the lead. The dog ran to the box with the handler right behind him. Bam. Toy retrieved. Big happy, joy joy.

We did the same thing a second time. The dog was the mark. He knew he couldn't lose. He watched, knowing exactly where the toy was. How cool and how simple. Stupid handler. Stupid handler's helper. On the third run, the game changed. The handler ran to box one and pretended to put the toy in the box. She moved to box two and quietly put the toy in that box. She returned to box one and made a fuss as though the toy were in there. She faked out the dog. Misdirection at its finest.

Kevin again pointed out to everyone that it was critical to act as stupid and obvious as this handler, like a bad melodrama.

Set loose, the dog ran to box one, of course, and found nothing.
The box was contaminated with the dog's scent, the owner's scent, even the toy's scent. But no toy. What betrayal. Puzzlement. Outrage. The dog flipped the box over. Nothing. Then the dog glanced over and saw another box a few feet away. Maybe he got a little whiff of his toy, since the wind was working to help the process. He ran over to the box. Whoa! Look! My toy!

Everyone cheered as if watching a three-card monte game on a street in the Bronx. The dog pranced and shook his toy hard. He was hooked.

“When people get interested, they can get hooked hard-core. They don't like not being successful,” Kevin pointed out. “They will put more money down and more money down.” The dog, not having much money, put down more and more drive. Interestingly, so did his handler and the others watching. Everyone who was watching was invested. The dog had been scammed. That's what you want. At first.

Kevin folded his hands over his waist and smiled. His favorite part of the scam was coming up. A dog has a huge advantage over a human. Sure, dogs have eyes and ears, but they have noses, too. The dog trying to find his toy soon realized that he couldn't believe his eyes and ears, so he stopped using them. He didn't look at or listen to his screaming, unreliable box-switching handler, asking her to solve the puzzle for him: Please, Mommy? Where's my toy? Instead, as the game progressed, he used what an ancient pre-mammalian ancestor, the shrewlike
Hadrocodium wui
, had bequeathed to him: The dog started thinking and smelling for himself. All the dogs did the same thing. At first gullible and betrayed by their handlers and their own eyes, they started using their noses, working it out for themselves. Soon the dogs were methodically and quickly searching up to eight boxes scattered across the yard, flipping them over with their noses, ignoring their handlers, to get their toys. They were no longer marks. Kevin had gotten the handlers to convince their dogs to commit more and more interest to the hunt.

It's critical that a working dog be able to lead, to independently decide where and how to search, instead of timidly looking to the handler for cues. It is the inverse of the relationship that most trainers suggest we have with our household pets.

I watched about twenty dogs work that day—all shapes, sizes, and personalities. They were hooked; they all wanted the same thing. The big dog-aggressive chocolate Lab who had been getting up in the muzzles of other dogs realized better stuff could be found in the boxes. Dogs? What dogs? Where's my toy?

“The dog itself always has a high degree of interest,” Kevin pointed out. “They're very aware of what's going on around them. The simplest thing will draw them in if it's intriguing enough.”

As more and more boxes were added, “It should look like fanning cards,” said Kevin, spreading his fingers open from a fist, one by one in a fluid movement. This was the cascade of understanding that the dogs experienced as they flowed among the boxes, sorting scent like pros. Kevin's easy hand motion showed the importance of learning things in sequence. And the importance of remembering to keep things magical.

•  •  •

I didn't know how to keep things magical in my early days with Solo. I was trying to follow basic directions. Just as I started to get my timing down on the buckets—swoop and present, swoop and present—Solo was starting to get bored. Soon he ignored the liver treats. The same thing gets old quickly. Essentially, Solo was learning the parts of speech when he wanted to parse paragraphs. So, of course, did I. But I had read far enough ahead in
Cadaver Dog Handbook
to know that our own desires—to leap ahead of mechanical scent imprinting before Solo had it down solid—were not always desirable.

Nancy had anticipated our boredom. We wouldn't leave the buckets, but she added another layer. She pulled something that was more interesting than liver treats out of her capacious canvas pants pocket.
I took it gingerly. It was a PVC pipe, about two inches in diameter and nine inches long, drilled full of small holes, the ends capped tight with purple plumber's glue. A little bit of death was trapped within on a piece of cloth, its odor gently seeping through the holes. I sniffed, partly to reassure myself that I could do what Nancy had done: stick it in my pocket without having to think twice about it. An old, independent Appalachian woman, increasingly vague with dementia, had wandered away from her cabin. She had been dead twelve days before her family found her. I thought I knew the smell of human decay, having worked in nursing homes throughout my teenage years. But this pipe's smell wasn't the cloying sweetness I remembered. It was a light dry must, like mold on an orange, not potato leaking in the vegetable bin. Just a twist of cloth with dried body fluids provided enough to start training Solo.

It could have been anyone inside that pipe. Cadaver scent is chemically generic, not linked to an individual. Nonetheless, I was secretly glad that my and Solo's introduction to cadaver work was with what I wanted to believe was a benign death. It might not have been. Nancy didn't care. She's not sentimental. She wants to donate her body to the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility, more fondly known as the “Body Farm,” so she can lie out on a hillside, decomposing. Preferably in the open air. Not under a tarp but not naked. Otherwise, she says, she'd prefer to have her body divvied up for search teams to train on.

Solo came to know the pipe as “fish.” It signified fun and would ultimately teach Solo that—even more than the buckets—that odor was what he should look for. Nancy showed it to him. “Good fish,” she said.

He sniffed. Sure. Whatever. Interesting, but not as interesting as Whiskey. Then Nancy started to gambol about, large and nimble and silly, whipping the pipe around, making it irresistible. She encouraged him to grab it. She pulled it away. He followed, grabbed it, tugged hard, and she let him have it. He won. My, what a strong, big dog you are.

In the world of working dogs, and when laying a foundation you can build on, dogs get to win. They get what they want, they are encouraged to chase it, grab it, chew it, shake it, kill it. One problem is that men are often afraid to gambol around, and even more afraid to lose. Mike Baker, the K9 sergeant at the Durham Police Department, always tells his new, stiff, nervous handlers to raise their deep voices high and get silly: “Come on. Be more exciting than pee on a tree!”

For Solo, the PVC pipe was more exciting even than Whiskey. By the time the pipe was no longer needed to signify that the search was beginning and was bequeathed to another cadaver dog in training, it had fully served its purpose—forever bonding the concept of play to the concept of dead human in Solo's head.

It underwent many iterations. At first fish was the toy that got tossed out, retrieved, played with. Then it became a toy hidden in an easy spot in the yard or house. “Go find the fish!” Then it was the toy that I presented and pretended to throw before tucking it under my arm or in my back pocket, holding out my empty clean hands, sending him forth to find the fish somewhere else. The first few times, he stared at me hard. I know where it is. Your hands aren't clean. Then he entered into the game, yowling before bounding away. After all, it was a lot more exciting than pee on a tree. I was slowly introducing Solo to the idea that he might have to solve a problem on his own, rather than staring at me to try to suss out the answer.

While he was developing his independence, I was starting to appreciate that a dog who uses his teeth to pull Mason jars out of buckets in search of scent wasn't a bad dog. He was just a jackass.

Marcia Koenig, whose German shepherd cadaver dog, Coyote, found dozens of people, still remembers the embarrassment of her trickster dog, born on April Fools' Day, taking the test that FEMA requires for agility and obedience. The little sable shepherd, bored, grabbed the traffic cones set up for her exam and ran away with them. She flunked. Marcia sighed and started back to the laborious task of training her to obey.

Nine days after that, Coyote found the disarticulated bones of a homicide victim. That was her first find but far from her last.

One day, less than two months after Nancy had started Solo and me with our clumsy bucket dance, it happened. Solo channeled his energy. A bit of form emerged from chaos.

I e-mailed Joan, elated: “He was literally running right past the hidden Mason jar with the cheesecloth lid. Scent was seeping slowly through the top. He screeched to a halt from a dead run, his tail went up, he froze, and he turned. It was lovely—it was so clear that his nose said to him, ‘that's the smell!' and that his nose stopped him even when his feet wanted to keep going.”

The smell . . . was most closely aligned with musk, yet the impression upon the olfactory organs was more delicate, more subtle.

—A. B. Isham, MD, professor of materia medica, 1875

The moment a person dies, the body starts to decompose, although different cells decompose at different rates. Billions of the trillions of cells in the body that had been chugging along just moments before, mindlessly doing their duty to both conscious and unconscious bodily functions, give up and collectively exhale. The process begins, researchers believe, the moment the heart stops beating. Something incredibly light leaves the body, diffusing almost instantly.