Biology Reference
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trois had escalated over time; the feedback loop between horse, handler, and crowd grew with
Hans's fame. So did his owner's increasingly delusional faith in the horse. When Hans erred
in his foot-stomping answers, his handler stopped noticing.
Pfungst wrote, “One day it came to pass that the horse even understood French, and the
old gentleman, whose apostolic exterior had always exerted a high degree of suggestion upon
his admirers, in turn fell captive to the spell of retroactive mass-suggestion. He no longer was
uneasy concerning the most glaring kinds of failure.”
When I first read about Clever Hans and his deluded owner and audience, I viewed the
whole affair as a turn-of-the-last-century anachronism. But Clever Hans returned to haunt
me during Solo's training. Early on, I thought the story was about the horse, not the human,
and about Solo, not me. Now I know better. People use animals for a variety of faith-based
practices. Once you start to load expectations on a horse's back, you realize it can hold all
sorts of ideologies and theories. The Darwinians saw in Hans clear evidence of the similarity
between the human and the animal mind. Cartesians argued that Hans was a mere brute.
Hans, of course, was neither genius nor brute, but a smart and devoted horse.
Solo is clever and devoted as well. Which means he's fully capable of a dog version of lying.
It's my job as his handler to prevent him from doing that. I don't always perform perfectly.
Here is one example from Solo's training, but it's not the only one.
We were in an abandoned warehouse in Durham several years ago. A patrol-dog handler
had obligingly put out some training hides for Solo. They had “cooked,” as one says about
all sorts of scent training material (not just cadaver), for about a half hour. Long enough, on
that warm North Carolina night, to send out scent, which I then sent Solo to find. The other
handler was idling behind the two of us, monitoring us but not closely. Solo hurtled through
the building, accelerating madly, trying to dig his claws into the slick concrete for extra pur-
chase.
His head twisted, he flipped almost in midair, flew back toward a garbage can, and came
in for a deep sniff, working scent hard. Classic. I caught up with him and slowed to a stop,
admiring his technique. Solo eyed me, and I stood there, stupidly meeting his gaze. He then
went into his down alert, staring at me happily. It felt wrong. I looked back at the other hand-
ler, who had tuned in a few seconds too late and gave a quick head shake. Nope. No cadaver
hide there.
My bad timing, when I slowed down and stared at Solo, helped trigger a false alert. I un-
consciously encouraged him to do what he shouldn't have done. Even a microsecond's hesit-
ation makes a difference at certain stages of training. Solo's behavior could become chronic
if encouraged. I had made a sloppy beginner's error. The only mistake I didn't make at the
garbage can was rewarding him for his minor perfidy. I broke his gaze and repeated the com-
