“That one has stayed with me for some reason. I knew the victim’s name,” Ward said. “You take the emotions, and you set it aside, because you’ve got a job to do. You deal with the grief, or the anger, afterwards.”
Even big counties usually don’t have enough annual missing persons to justify the time and expense it takes for police to train a cadaver dog. Therefore, the majority of cadaver dog teams nationwide are volunteers. They are doctors, teachers and stay-at-home moms, and their dogs.
A dog’s sense of smell is stronger than a human’s by orders of magnitude. One police officer gave this metaphor: if you walk into a house where someone is cooking gumbo, you can smell that immediately. But a dog smells the garlic, chopped onions, and each kind of fish going into the pot. Death, much like gumbo, emits a bouquet of smells. One scientific study found cadaver dogs were approximately 97%accurate overall in picking out a square of carpet that had been contaminated with the smell of a human corpse.
laidback pet breeds
Any dog breed can be used, though classic working breeds such as labradors or shepherds are common. Any person (excluding those with a criminal background) can become a handler, but many don’t get through the grueling training. The teams that do achieve certification become a rare few civilians allowed to participate in criminal investigations, including murders, kidnappings and serial crimes. Why the handlers volunteer – and why police let them – tests the boundaries of community service and law enforcement.
Wood uses the same word the local cadaver dog handlers use when talking about their work: service. Wood has never told the local dog team the story about his sister. Instead, he expresses his gratitude through service: even on some of his days off, he pilots a boat for team training. “It amazes me, the dedication and just the drive,” he said of the volunteer teams. On a sunny Saturday in January, a group of dog handlers arrive at 9am near the 36,000-acre Bogue Chitto refuge. The handlers come from New Orleans, Walker and as far as the Baton Rouge area. They swap homemade cookies and talk about their vacations. Out of the cracked windows of their parked cars, nearly a dozen dogs bark in excitement.
Every Saturday, regardless of the weather, the team trains around Louisiana, sometimes from sunup to sundown. The newest member is Kirsten Watson, a petite woman in her 40s who somehow manages to control her 77lb German shepherd. She has been training for about a year, while some of the veteran handlers have decades of experience.A Wagging Tail Does Not Always Equal a Happy Dog. Don’t approach a strange dog just because it’s wagging it’s tail. Tail wagging isn’t always the universal sign of happiness – it can also indicate fear or insecurity. Be sure to teach your children about the basics of dog bite prevention.
Later this afternoon, Wood will take teams on the water, the dogs’ paws clenching the edges, until they pick up on the smell from an underwater air canister scented with human remains. The dogs learn to alert on the water based on odor that comes through air bubbles (dead bodies emit gases that gurgle to the surface).
Lisa Higgins starts herding the dogs and their handlers toward the first exercise: a speed drill with autopsy rags. Higgins, whom everyone calls “Miss Lisa”, founded the Louisiana Search and Rescue Team (LaSAR) 30 years ago and has responded to upwards of 400 searches. She’s the team trainer now, and her manner of answering questions and gently correcting the handlers brings to mind the patience of a school teacher. She was the first female mounted police officer in Pearl River in 1978. Seeing a need for the dogs in her search and rescue work with the police, she started a volunteer cadaver dog team with her daughter.As she opens a plastic case of training materials, the smell of death becomes obvious. This team trains on bones, blood, teeth, skin, placenta, autopsy rags and blood-smeared weapons, much of which comes from donations to science. The bones are on loan from a professor who worked with Higgins on a five-year study about cadaver dogs. Access to materials like bones or flesh are restricted in most states, and handlers have to prove their credentials. In Tennessee or North Carolina there are “body farms” to train dogs on full corpses.READ ALSO:
Play a Nice Interactive Game of Tug With Your Dog. A 5 minute game of tug works wonders for tiring out your dog & letting him get rid of some of that pent up energy. (and no – it won’t make your dog aggressive despite the old myth)
Tails are wagging and the dogs pull on their leashes. On one drill, the dogs must find a container of gauze stained with human blood, hidden a few hundred yards into the woods. When the handlers say “seek” or “go find it,” the dogs take off, running in wide circles, with their handler traipsing in the woods behind them.
The only sounds during the drill are leaves crunching, the dog’s deep breathing trying to smell everything around her, and Lisa’s quiet corrections to the handler. “Talk less,” she’ll say. “Trust your dog.” All but the most stubborn handlers respond with “Yes ma’am.” The dogs are trained to keep looking until they’re not just close but inches away – and that’s when Messi barks. She found the gauze, hidden in a rotting tree stump.
After a cadaver dog is fully trained – which can take as long as two years – they are meant to have the intelligence of a seven-year-old child. They understand dozens of words and find human remains across a variety of environments. Law enforcement recognizes about half a dozen different certifications, but no single entity regulates the teams.
Dogs respond to their handlers’ emotions, which is why the handlers must show only joy when their dog finds something. That’s not always easy, especially when it comes to murder, dismemberment or the death of children. Ann Dugas has been doing this work for more than 20 years, and she can usually compartmentalize. Tears came to her eyes as she described finding a 14-year-old drowning victim more than a decade ago, at a time when she had a child the same age. After her dog indicated his location and police took over to pull the body up, she walked down the road and cried.Many handlers and experts are women. During searches in the 1990s, Higgins encountered resistance from the male-dominated world of law enforcement. One diver said he wouldn’t jump in the water because “some lady’s dog said so”. Gesturing around us, she said: “You’re in the south. They did not want women.” She added, laughing, “but it was their mistake”. That reluctance has changed, in part because of national tragedies in which cadaver dogs were used, such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and California wildfires.
Your dog needs his own cozy spot as well, preferably a crate, a comfy bed that’s his alone and a selection of appropriate toys.
“They need to come home too,” she said of those missing people. “Many times, these people that we’re looking for were discarded like trash – and being able to bring them home to their families – someone’s got to do it.”