Human Remains Detection Dogs and Historic Searches with Kim Cooper and Cat Warren

Learn about the work of human remains detection dogs, how they are trained, the skills the handler needs, and how they can help with historic searches.

By Zazie Todd, PhD

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Watch episode 35 of The Pawsitive Post in Conversation on Youtube or below, listen wherever  you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify) or below, or scroll down to read a transcript of the highlights.

Human remains detection dogs with Kim Cooper and Cat Warren

Dogs have incredible noses, and can trained to search for the scent of human remains, bringing closure to those who are grieving and the opportunity to memorialize. As well as recent remains, they can also search for historic remains. We're joined by two experts in the field, Kim Cooper of Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue, and Cat Warren, author of the New York Times bestseller What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, to learn more about these dogs and the work that they do.

We talk about:

• How Kim and Cat got started in working with human remains detection dogs and how the dogs are trained
• Historic human remains detection dogs
• How these dogs can help with searches at the sites of former residential schools in Canada
• The emotional side of a search from the handler's perspective and the skills a handler needs to work with communities
• Working with communities and the role of oral history in historical searches
• What type of dog is best suited to this work (breed, personality, size, etc.)
• And finally, we talk about the books we're reading

The books we recommend in this episode are:

•     The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
•     Native Nations: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen DuVal
•     Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books by Ursula Le Guin
•     Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell

The books are available wherever books are sold, including my Amazon store.

Also mentioned in this episode:

•     The work in Croatia is described in this article by Cat Warren 
•     Cat Warren at Bark! Fest (with Marc Bekoff and Zazie Todd) 

Kim Cooper is the owner and senior instructor at Best Friends in Ottawa and has been training dogs for over 35 years. She earned a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Royal Military College and served for 14 years as an officer in the Air Force before making a non-traditional career move and becoming a professional dog trainer. Kim actively competes in obedience, agility, tracking and other sports with her dogs, but her true passion is training search and rescue dogs. She has trained and handled 6 exceptional SAR dogs over the years, and revels in the special partnership that exists between a working dog and its handler. Some of her accomplishments include having certified 4 search and rescue dogs to OPP standards (something only 20 dogs have ever achieved, and she coached some of those others) and she handled multiple dogs on what was at the time (and might still be) the deepest water find by dogs in Canada (218′).

Learn more about Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue Dog Association.

Cat Warren is the author of the New York Times bestseller What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World (Touchstone). It was long listed for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She also wrote What the Dog Knows for Young Readers (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers). A retired professor from North Carolina State University, she currently researches and writes about scent detection dogs and archaeology. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband, David, a German shepherd, Rev, and a Boykin spaniel, Brio.

Learn more about Cat Warren.

Highlights of the conversation with Kim Cooper and Cat Warren

Z: It's a really interesting topic. And I've got a first question which is going to go to both of you because I want to know how you got started working with search and rescue dogs and cadaver dogs.

And so I'm going to put this to you, Cat, first, and then also to Kim.

C: Great. Well, I mean, I got started quite accidentally in the early 2000s with a dog where I was thinking that he was going to be an obedience dog, sort of a sport dog.

And he was a singleton and was actually dog aggressive or simply dog antisocial. And so part of my finding a way to work with him ended up via scent work.

And I happened to have a trainer who had done this for many years and introduced me to what was then called cadaver dog work. We call it human remains detection, more commonly now.

And it was a wonderful transition because we had a canine team in Durham. Our Durham police department had a sergeant who was very interested and invested in having me as a volunteer train along with their canine team. So I did that for a number of years.

And I do not have a dog that I'm deploying right now for lots of reasons. But my research has stayed in this area because I find it so rich and satisfying and such valuable work. 

Z: Thank you. And Kim, how did you get into this?

KC: I started over 30 years ago, I just combined two things I loved, which was training dogs and being outside. And back then there really wasn't such a thing as a cadaver dog or HRD dog.

But as the first decade or so went along, we started to realize a lot of the time the civilian volunteers were getting called on searches later, and the searches at that point often didn't have the happy ending we might like them to have and that we should perhaps be looking into this specialty as being necessary.

So I started to cross train my dogs to do both live and deceased. I had a couple of dogs in there who were specialized to just do human remains. And yeah, it's an incredibly compelling journey. 

I'm not sure if either of you have done scent work with dogs, but once you get started in it, you just get hooked. You can't stop. It's the ultimate in teamwork, as opposed to so many things in dog training which aren't about teamwork. They're more about you need to do what I tell you to do.

While in scent work, it's, I can't do the job without the dog, but the dog also can't do the job without me. So it's a real team.

KB: One of the things that came to my mind when we decided to have you both on is that we have a lot of our listeners, and I think a lot of Zazie's and my colleagues are pet dog trainers. So they deal a lot with, you know, not obedience in the way that I think we're talking about up till now with, like, competitive obedience, but like, dogs who are jumping on grandma or, you know, or behavior issues, like dogs who are aggressive or really fearful or have, you know, separation anxiety, something like that.

So I don't actually have a good sense about how these dogs are trained. And I think I and our audience would be curious, you know, a little. A little bit nuts and bolts about, you know, what goes into training these dogs, because it seems like such a colossal task.

So I would be interested in hearing from both of you, not like the training plan, but, you know, an insider view to other dog pros, but just those pros have a very different discipline. So, Cat, maybe you can start on this one as well.

C: Well, I'll start very quickly, and I want to send it over to Kim. But, you know, scent work is one of those things where you make finding a particular odor or set of odors valuable to the dog. And so when Kim talks about teamwork, it's that notion that most dogs are pretty good at using their noses. Some are better, right?

So part of the training of this is just handling and timing and making it into the most fun game in the world. Because human remains do not have a particular sort of emotional set for the dog. We impose a lot of that when people talk about, oh, does the dog dog grieve? 

And it's like if you're training the dog properly, the dog is doing the absolute opposite of grieving. The dog is going, oh my God, I have found this thing.

And so I think that part of the specifics of this, and Kim can talk a little bit more, is that the nose and training, the odor is like one set of things, but all around it is a dog that's environmentally sound who loves to work with you, where you are working as a team and can recognize when a dog is in scent and working scent, as opposed to just going and literally finding the scent. 

And especially as we talk about the kind of work with burials where scent is more diffuse, it's even a different set of challenges.

So it's one of those things that not, not all dogs can be good at it. It's one of those things where people need to be really honest about the time commitment and the kind of dog that you need to do this. And I'll let Kim take it away because she has the kinds of dogs who can do this.

KC: Yeah, I mean, at its root, it all starts with classically conditioning the dog to associate a particular odor with something of value. So there's different ways we can do that, that classical conditioning or that imprinting process.

Some people, for example, might put the target odor and some food side by side. So the dog just literally associates that, if I go to where the odor is, I'm going to find food.

Other people might take rolled up towels and sort of drench them in the scent, and then play fetch with the dog. So as the dog's running out there to fetch his favorite toy, it also happens to have the odor, the desired odor.

And that's the basis to just build the value for the odor. Then we have to teach the dog what the indication is that we want. And it's all well and good to talk about this very clinically and very, you know, like the recipe, the recipe of making it work.

But underneath all of that is you've got to be injecting heart. The dog has got to want to do this with all his heart and all his soul so that you can count on them to do it under the most difficult conditions.

Z: That's amazing. Thank you.

C: Yeah. I mean, we talked about commitment to odor, and that very term of a dog that has commitment to odor is such a huge part of this and figuring out how to build that and maintain it. And, you know, it's so easy to take a dog who's actually very enthusiastic about this and sour them by pushing them too hard too soon.

So there isn't one recipe, as Kim said, and there's a hundred different ways you can train this. But the end result has to be the same is that you need a dog who is rock solid if you're going to deploy them Even in these cases where they are not forensic cases, legal cases where we're working, the stakes with burial grounds, to me, are as high as the stakes with some of the more commonly associated scent work tasks of finding the missing.

Z: And I think it kind of blows my mind that dogs can still find these historic burial sites and maybe bring closure, or if not closure, at least answers or a different set of questions to people.

And I know, Cat, you've been involved in some historic searches, so can you give us an example of one of the historic searches that you've been involved with?

C: Yeah, I mean, the one I'm sort of working with right now is one on a portion of Bureau of Land Management land in Maryland where there was an abandoned farm, slash plantation, and finding the burial ground of where the enslaved might have been buried using dogs and ground penetrating radar.

But also, you know, the dogs are such a small portion of this at some level.

And I mean, dogs are a wonderful, essential tool, but they are one small tool among many. So it really is maps, it's historical, it's oral history, people's memories. I know that for Kim's work, and she'll talk about this, I mean, it really is the memories of the people who are deeply involved and invested that help bring some of the understanding we have.

And so finding this area in the woods, which was literally cheek to jowl with the white family cemetery, and then what I'm doing now is actually working with the African American community there, of the descendant community, of finding the stories of the people, and we won't know who's specifically buried there. These are unmarked, and we're not going to disinter in these cases because it's actually unethical.

But the issue is to say, is there a way both to commemorate this and also to create a better understanding in the community of what has been lost and needs to be reclaimed?

Not necessarily just this space, this ground, but also the stories associated.

Z: Yeah, I like that focus on what's been lost and what can be reclaimed. I think that shows just how important the work is, really.

KB: Yeah. And I think the focus on telling people's stories is important, too. And that resonates with my work because outside of my dog work, I am an anthropologist, and I work with a First Nation in the Northwest Territories in Canada.

And something that is coming up, you know, for my work is work is identifying indigenous children that were in graveyards in residential schools. And Zazie asked for me to do like a really quick intro into residential schools in case some of our listeners aren't aware, if they're not Canadian, they might not be aware. 

There's this terrible chapter in Canada's history where we incarcerated children from First Nations and Inuit and Metis families in schools. They were removed from their families in terrible, violent ways. Many children died in these schools. They were very under resourced by the government. Typically they were associated with churches.

And this isn't a chapter that has ended and it's not something that's really far in the past. The school that closed, the latest in the Gwich'in area where I work was in the mid-90s. So you know, it's in my lifetime and it continues to affect, through this like generational trauma, the people who are alive today, even very young people. 

So setting that as the stage, we wanted to ask you, Kim, because we know that you have worked on the sites of residential schools where these young people, these children were buried after they were, you know, essentially murdered through neglect or other ways. 

So can you tell us a little bit about your work there? And just, you know, it's interesting to me because we may be looking to have dogs come out and help the Gwich'in, and just sort of your work in that domain.

KC: Well, interestingly enough, we're heading up to the Northwest Territories next week to work at a site up there.

Overall, in the last three years or so, we've worked at a about 12 or 13 different Indian residential school sites.

And you know, this whole field of using the dogs is pretty new. So we're working out policies, procedures, methodologies to make sure we're doing this as well as we possibly can. As Cat said, we're a tool and just one of several.

And you know, Kristi, you can probably talk to this much more intelligently than I can, but the archaeological method seems to be about layering tools to put multiple tools over the same site, collect information from each tool.

And then the more tools that you have that seem to be pointing towards a positive one spot, the more sure you can be that that's exactly what you've got.

A lot of these places do not get excavated. So the intent is not necessarily to excavate. It's like Cat said, it's to remember, it's to memorialize. So having the multi tool approach is about the only way you're going to get increased confidence in your results.

KB: Right, for sure.

KC: Nobody's digging anything up.

So, yeah, we go out to the schools we have. Our system that we employ is we go. We recommend that we bring in three dog teams when we go, as well as a data technician, and we'll run each one of the dogs over the search area separately.

We don't watch each other work, we don't talk to each other. We relay our information back to our data technician who collates the results. So that way we're not influencing one another.

Because, you know, a fancy way of calling a sniffer dog, it's a biosensor, but at the end of the day, it's a dog. And if I pause and scratch my head and stub my toe in the sand, is my dog going to come over and have a closer look at that spot? Almost certainly. We know we can have an impact on the dogs.

Running the three dogs, all blind is our way to try and normalize any of those influences to the best of our abilities. 

Z: So this is really very important work, and it's also emotionally heavy work, and I imagine that sometimes it must be quite physically demanding as well. Such as especially perhaps on the searches for people who are recently missing, when maybe you're running through woods or whatever after the dog.

So what does it feel like? What's the emotional side of this like for the handler while you're working with the dog? And I'm gonna put this to both of you, but probably to Cat first and then to Kim, please.

C: Well, you know, Zazie, I still have very clear memories of all of this. And I will say that my reaction when I was working with the dog was that I was so deeply focused on the dog and the dog being properly deployed, my being relaxed, and not having my tension run down the lead. Because certainly in cases, high profile cases with homicide, it was inevitable. right.? 

But having a dog that's resilient enough to just sort of flip its paw at you, who is like, I don't care about your feelings. I'm going to go do this.

And the fact is that I think I've described it. We know that when people go in to do jobs and to do them right, they set aside certain kinds of emotions in order to do those jobs. And so there were certainly cases that were missing children cases, actually, all of them in their own way, that would prey upon me in the days and weeks and months after a search.

During the search, I think between adrenaline and that need to you do as excellent a job as you can to help your dog do their best sort of mitigated against bringing all of that into the field.

And I will say just briefly, and Kim has, I know, much experience with this. The same kinds of stakes happen with burial groundwork, and perhaps there's less of a sense of urgency, but the people involved and the stakes that are involved with them, it's deeply emotional and deeply resonant.

But once again, when the dogs are doing their work, I mean, they're so happy. And even when we had cases of missing people or whatever, the thing is, is that when the dogs are actually working, it brings everybody up in some ways.

I mean, Kim said it's a joyous thing to watch. And once you're hooked on nose work and watch watching dogs do their thing, I think it helps. It helps bring the mood up for everybody. Inevitably, as serious as this is.

Z: Thank you. Kim?

KC: Yeah. Cat said it very well. You invest so much time and effort into training to be a useful tool out there for whoever needs your services, that when the searches come up, while they're sad circumstances, it's an opportunity to proof all that training that you put in to see, you know, are we as good as we think we are? Are we up to this task?

And there is joy in working a dog. It's very contradictory, but we're often a little bit insulated from families as well, so we don't have a lot of that pain right in our faces. We're out in the woods.

It is different with the historical work because we're actually immersed in the communities there. The survivors come out and watch us work. And we always worry about, if my dog turns to the left and sits to scratch his ear, have I got a whole bunch of people now going, something's happening, when in fact, nothing's happening. 

So we're trying to take care of them and make sure that they don't overreact to things that they might see happening.

And at the same time, part of the historic work, really, is to take their stories back to our homes.

So there is time spent listening to them and listening to what their lives were like in the residential schools. And I would say, honestly, I have had more emotional challenges doing the historic work than anything modern.

C: Yes, yes. I'm in such agreement with Kim on this. And working on a burial ground in Richmond and its history is so utterly tragic, and working with a descendant of that burial and then working with the people whose great grandparents were enslaved in Maryland and the resilience of the communities and the ingenuity of the communities.

And all of that is always just coupled because I'm doing genealogical work as well, and I'm going through old wills and finding these records of lists of enslaved people and how much they cost and what lot number these folks were is inevitably I will.

I will be sitting at my computer with tears running down my face.

And it is not my tragedy, but it also is my tragedy. This is what our country did. And there's a responsibility there that I think, as Kim said, it's part of it.

Inevitably, it's part of it. This is for us, US History and a US History that we still, amazingly, haven't grappled with, as we can sort of tell because of our current situation. 

So all of those things, plus the dogs and the science and the scent work.

And just to note quickly about Kim's work that I remember, Kim, when you sort of first reached out, just in a text going, how would we start this work? How would we do this work?

And as she says, it is new. Folks over in Croatia are probably some of the founders of this work, a woman named Andrea Pintar and her husband, Christian Nikolic, and an archaeologist there.

But it is coming up. It is happening. And I think Kim and her team are some of the folks in Canada who are doing what I would say is sort of cutting edge work with combining dogs in archeology. Just to brag on you, Kim.

KC: It's been a fascinating couple of years. There's literally nobody to ask questions of as we're trying to forge a path forward because people, the dog training world has not really been in this place before.

So it's fascinating, it's exciting, it's challenging, and we just hope we're doing right by it.

KB: That somewhat leads into my next question, which is about how people approach us. My assumption is that none of us are members of the communities, of the descending communities, as you would say, Cat, of the graveyards that you're dealing with. So I'm curious about how do communities reach out to you or how do these projects actually get started?

KC: Well, in our case, we've been reached out to in a number of ways. A lot of the communities are organizing their own search for unmarked graves, some of them are hiring a contracting firm, such as an archaeological firm to actually take care of their project management.

There has been some government reach out at times. There has been development corporation reach out at different times. So we had a series of different employers as it is, and each is very, very different.

And one of the first ones we went on, it was dictated by court order that dogs had to be used on this particular site. And so we were brought in to do it. And we were being followed by government, development corporation and community members. 

And you knew that all three of those groups wanted a different outcome, which I'd never experienced in search and rescue before. In search and rescue, everybody wants you to find it. And here we knew we had people there who didn't want us to find anything.

It was very different. It was very different.

C: It's so interesting because, here in the United States, we were on the cusp of doing some really wonderful things at the federal level because the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management and there was legislation coming through for burial ground research and work, all that has come to a halt. So I think it will be very interesting to see moving forward.

You know, as Kim says, sometimes there are other groups involved. So there are certainly people who have private land who have some interest in some of this work. But it's, it's, it's really so important that provincial and federal, or state or federal or even city people be involved with this because it is expensive.

And I'm not saying, I mean, many of us volunteer as much time and energy as we can, but for some of the equipment and, you know, for ground penetrating radar studies and the people who are good at that and to just pull together all of the research, it's enormously time consuming and it's a process that shouldn't be rushed.

I mean, we know how important it is that First Nations be able to, in a sense, be the drivers of what happens and when it happens. And all too often with things like development in the United States, the autonomy there is just incredibly limited. 

I think Canada is quite far ahead at this point of the United States in how to. I mean, we have our own boarding schools and we've just barely begun to do work and I expect it's not going to go forward for a few years right now.

Z: And you've both just alluded to different groups of people who might be involved in these kinds of searches. And Kim, you gave an example where different people might actually want different outcomes.

So what is it like working with the communities here? Are they ever wary of you coming in? Do they have disagreements amongst themselves? And if so, how do you handle that in a respectful way? Kim, will go to you first.

KC: Sure. We've had almost nothing but positive, positive experiences here.

Most of the time they're quite intrigued by the idea of bringing in an animal to help in the search. And it seems to fit with the culture better that this is a natural way to make some forward progress.

And we go through ceremony quite frequently, smudging ceremonies, paint all those things to protect us. We get brushed down with eagle feathers at the end of the search to remove any evil spirits.

And as I say, they tell us their stories, but at the same time, they seem quite concerned that we're okay at the end of our search work. They want to know that they haven't burdened us too much with what they're going through. So we've had almost exclusively 100% positive.

The only small exception to that, and it's very small, is some of the communities have had some bad experiences with people who are denying that this history ever happened and with press leaks and things like that. So some of the communities are a little closed in in terms of opening up to strangers.

But, you know, I think once we get a chance to show that we have nothing but good intentions, they warm up really fast. They really do.

C: I think that there are differences in the United States, again. If we think about our history, the US history with enslaved people and their relationship with dogs, it is much more problematic.

And so in some of the communities where I've been involved, the difference between a, say, a Labrador versus a pointy eared Malinois or German shepherd, right? Where the US has used these dogs to terrorize people. Law enforcement has used these, has misused these dogs. 

And so part of this can end up being a process of it not feeling, I mean, as Kim says, sort of this is part of the natural world in bringing in a dog. For some poorer African American communities, it's scary and disrespectful, right? 

And so again, that issue of how important it is that when you bring the dogs in, that these not be dogs that do what we call an aggressive alert, pawing or digging at the ground, that these are not dogs that lift their leg during a search. 

If we have community members out, I mean, there's a whole set of things that we wouldn't have to worry about quite as much without having people who are looking at the work. But in a way, it's also, these are the best practices.

We've moved away, thank goodness, from things like it being acceptable that a dog dig enthusiastically when it has located something. And if you're on a burial ground and you have people watching, as Kim said, it is really important that you have these dogs that do these nice quiet alerts or a bark or whatever that's a long way to go around. 

But people need to appreciate this history. And I think that it's a two way education because I think that handlers that have had human remains detection dogs where they've mostly worked in law enforcement or with law enforcement and are enthusiastic about this kind of work, there's also a learning curve.

Because it is very different work. And that willingness to take in that part of our history and everything else in doing this work ends up that handlers are learning some very different skills than they might have had working uniquely with law enforcement.

KB: Yeah, that is so interesting. I could fully see that unfold in my mind as you were saying that.

Cat, you mentioned this already. So I know you do bring in historical documentation to your work, but I guess the general question is how do you work with oral history?

Kim, probably also, you work with oral history because you're talking to community members and I'm assuming elders are there with you. We're curious about how you bring that into your work and what do you do with that?

C: You know, I mean, oral histories are not just about there's a burial ground here. The oral histories are, this is what I know.

And very often, for instance, I've been having conversations with three older men in their 80s whose grandfathers were fishermen on the Potomac and the connection between their history of their grandfathers being fishermen on the Potomac, that the great grandfathers who were enslaved, that that was one of their early, their sort of early jobs, both during enslavement and right after emancipation. 

And so, and so that issue of saying this is. There's a continuity here, it's not just about going back and saying, tell me about what you know about your great grandfather who was enslaved. It really is this whole history of resilience and skills and what kind of future came out of this person who was enslaved, who is there against their will and in some ways, so those histories become very long and very complicated and in a sense have very little to do about the space where they might be buried as opposed to that larger context.

KC: For us, you know, we're just dog handlers and all the ologists out there, the archaeologists, the anthropologists, they do the oral history, they do the collection and then they just tell us where to search.

In the interest of good dog handling, we actually don't really want to know why they want a particular area searched because again, that might skew how we handle the dog.

If they say, oh, we've got stories of 12 bodies buried here, well, I'm going to go over that ground 17 times till I find at least one of them. Whereas if nobody tells me there's anything there, I'll go at it as I should in a very unbiased way.

We do get the oral histories. When we're sitting around having coffee during a break, they tell us some of the stories and about the only other way we hear about it is if we do come back with a report and say, yeah, we've got the dogs indicating in this spot over here. 

It's going in the report. It's a fait accompli. Now will you tell us why you had a search there? And then we'll get, Ah, yeah, we have several stories from survivors who said that they figured there was a couple of burials over there.

C: Let me add just one thing to that because I think it's so incredibly important that one of the reasons that dogs are so helpful is that there are a way to narrow down areas because things like ground penetrating radar are sometimes difficult and it's time consumptive to clear areas enough and sometimes those areas can't be cleared.

And it's not that the dogs are putting their noses directly over a possible burial.

That's probably not usually where the scent may be the strongest. But the dogs are great at sort of helping define an area where you then can bring in additional tools.

So it is that idea Kim talked about layers and it's that idea of all of these different mapping systems and the dogs and ground penetrating radar and sometimes lidar that help create a three dimensional picture of what's there.

Z: I am really feeling the weight of colonial history at the moment, especially as a Brit as well as Canadian.

So the dogs play a really important role in these searches and they play a special role that only a dog could do. So I'm thinking about what kind of dog is suitable for this? 

Because one time, this is the only time I've ever really been to a nose work class. I went as a volunteer with a Malinois who was at the shelter, who was not coping with shelter at all, did amazingly well at the nose work class and staff arranged for them actually to be transferred out to see if they could become a scent detection dog. And I don't know the outcome, but that was a good thing for the dog that that happened. 

So we think of this kind of breed, you mentioned Malinois and German Shepherds and Labradors. What kind of dog is good for this work and where do you get them from?

C: Kim, take it away first. You have your prejudices.

KC: I have to say I have very strong prejudices towards pointy eared dogs myself. Yes, but it's more about the characteristics that you need in the dog. 

Well, I'll tell you a really good search dog. What we are doing in training that dog is we are capturing and capitalizing on a mental health problem that they have, which is OCD.

They need to be absolutely obsessed with a toy or a reward system, whatever our reward system is, they have to be just anytime, any day or night, any day of the week, I'm ready for that reward. And so the drive to get the reward has got to be high.

Then there's got to be a hunt drive, which, and as you know, the drive theory is just, it's just words, but basically it's a dog who almost can't stop itself from hunting. It just, it's in its nature to be constantly snuffling around and looking at stuff.

But you can have snuffly dogs like say beagles who aren't interested in playing ball, for example. So you cannot capture that drive because the dog does it for himself and not for the ball.

So we need to have that balance. Yes, you want to sniff, but you want to sniff for me and for what I have in my pocket.

And then on top of that you have to look at physical characteristics. They have to be fit, healthy, able to move around easily in more challenging terrain.

I personally like a dog about 50 pounds because if I have to pick it up, I can. The big 100 pound shepherd, I don't see the value in the extra 50 pounds myself. And so I'm looking for something a little bit more compact.

And then finally the temperament on these guys has got to be incredibly solid, you know, people neutral or people friendly.

And I mean, the travel we put these guys through is crazy. And they have to be able to get off of the ATV, get out of the airplane and go to work right away.

They have to become just so adaptable to all kinds of different things. And a lot of that socialization and training. But some of it is that the character the dog arrives with.

C: Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is really fun because I had shepherds for years and then I downsized I got a Boykin Spaniel and he's 40 pounds and is a brilliant hunter. He sadly has a bad hip and a bad knee. Genetics, right?

And so I had to make the decision that I was not going to train for historic human remains detection as much as that disappointed me.

However. he is winning placements in nose work trials because he comes out and is ready to work. And like Kim said, he brings all the characteristics that something like a well trained Dutch or a Malinois would bring.

He's a little hunter, he's a little hunting machine, but has that same desire to communicate at the end. 

And all of these dogs, they may start out going, I'm going to do this for the ball. All of them get an inherent pleasure out of the act of hunting, right? That is part of it. It is like the border collie that herds. The border collie is not waiting for a treat at the end or a ball. The dog is being driven by that.

And I think that that's the nice part that you're capturing both of those things with scent detection dogs. And it's also a reminder to people who have pet dogs who are sort of interested in the scent detection world, is that it is sort of a deeply satisfying sport activity for your dog to do. 

And it is why reactive dogs, et cetera, et cetera, can sort of find their place in the world with these kinds of sports because it satisfies them. They think less about being worried about environment.

KB: And we all love looking at pictures of Breo on Facebook, he's just so cute. I kind of want to eat.

C: He is. I have not ever had a push button dog. That dog is a little push button dog. He's just right. And it's true that there's a level at which I want to go, oh yeah, but I want a layered, complicated German shepherd. And then I go, fine.  

And the spaniels and the Labradors, but especially the spaniels, are much more common in Europe as scent detection dogs and human remains detection dogs than they are here.

And I think that there's a good reason for that. It's a very different kind of dog, but it's equally as devoted to these tasks.

KB: Yeah. Sometimes I have this discussion with my wife because we have kind of separate dogs. We have our dogs, but they're sort of. especially when they're bad, you know, they're your dog.

Her dog is a spaniel crossed with a cattle dog. And I think she would be great.

C: Yeah. Oh my God.

KB: But she's ridiculously adorable. She's the right size. Like, she would chase a stick for seven years straight. 

But then the dog who's recently kind of become a little bit more mine. I'm not sure how this happened because it's definitely her dog, but it's sort of become my dog, is like 150 pound livestock guardian dog.

And he's not any of these qualities. He doesn't care about food even really. He can feed himself with chicken food. Like he hangs with the chickens. He's like, I need you not.

I'm like, how could I? What opportunity could I give him? Barking at any everything. Like no barking until you do it. But it would be hilarious. I mean, in my mind I see, like, what if I went to like one of these courses or something where you go to see people and I have my livestock guardian dog. Here I am. Anyway, sorry.

Which brings us, not really, but sort of in a roundabout way to our next question. Our final question, which is a typical training journey for a dog. So to get a dog, these dogs that you have who are ready to do this work at the historic graveyards, what's their training journey look like? Is it a couple of months? Is it a couple of years? How many wash out?

Like just sort of, again, back for our audience, I think has a lot of pet dog trainers and might be curious about this. What does that look like?

KC: Yeah, it's probably one of the most complicated training journeys I can think of to do this.

Because when you train a dog to find wintergreen or find your dropped keys or whatever, in the beginning, you put out the thing to be found, you know exactly where it is. And then you can simply praise and coach your dog as he's doing the right behaviors at the odor source.

When it comes to training the historic dogs we train in graveyards a lot and we don't actually know where the odor is. As the handler, as the trainer, as the coach, I don't know where the odor is.

I can't just start training the dog in a graveyard and assume that everything he does is correct. I'm going to create a dog who's looking for mushrooms. I could do that really easily.

So our belief, I say our belief, our team's belief is that the dog needs to get trained as a run of the mill cadaver dog to start with. He has to be convinced he can find things so that he keeps looking, keeps looking, keeps looking.

He has to learn how to give his indication, how to let his handler know that it's good and then we'll start bringing them into the graveyard.

But as I say, once we're in the graveyard, we still don't know where the odor is. And we could really mess up the dog's training by incorrectly marking or rewarding something that actually isn't there.

So we never train alone. We train in a pack. We bring all of our dogs, as many as our dogs out as we can and we will run the most experienced dogs first so that they will let us know where the odor is on that day.

And then we can bring in the junior dogs and we can feel better about any kind of mark reward system we're using with them that we're probably rewarding the right thing.

So it's way more challenging than anything I've ever done before. And I can't imagine how a single person with a dog could do this well on their own. I really think it needs a team. I think you need a team to do this well.

C: Yeah, yeah. I agree completely with Kim. And you know, just to add a little fillip of complication to this, when Kim said, you know, running the dogs, the scent can be very different in a burial ground from the a.m. and 7am as opposed to 5pm the scent can move into completely different areas. And so you have all of these unknowns.

And then again, I think that, that people who are interested in this, this is not a replacement for standard human remains detection dog work. This needs to be a kind of ideally an additive thing because the dogs need to work in a kind of different way. Just as you, when you train a dog to detect on water, you're working with the same scent to some degree, but it's a very different system of how the dog can communicate with you and teaching them.

Andrea Pintar works on genocide cases in Europe and also on old archeological sites as well. But when you're looking at that kind of work, they are doing grids in farmers fields with the dogs on long lead, drones overhead.

I mean, it is enormously demanding. And so, as Kim said, and there's no typical journey.

The last question is, do dogs wash out? The answer to that is more dogs should wash out.

All sorts of things that can happen, right? But one of the things that needs to happen in cases of working with cadaver dogs is that these dogs need to be at the top of their game because the stakes are high. And not being honest about your abilities and your dog's abilities because you love doing this work won't cut it. 

I don't want to end on that. You'll ask us a nicer final question, but I think it's really important.

Z: We're actually going to move on to the book section and we're going to get your book recommendations.

And I want to say to anyone who is listening, I mentioned Cat's book in her introduction, What the Dog Knows: Scent Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. This is honestly one of my absolute favorite dog books. It's wonderful.

It will tell you more about the things that we been talking about today. So if you want to know more, get that. It's absolutely beautifully written. It's a wonderful, wonderful book.

And we also have a recording with Cat talking about it, which I will put in the show notes as well, so you can listen to her on that. So make sure you get that book and read it.

This partial transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.

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