Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The toddler problem was only the first in a long day of Suzie and Roy toying with hand-
lers' minds and challenging their dogs. To start the morning with an elaborate negative scen-
ario may have seemed cruel, but training should make an occasional effort to simulate real-
ity. More than nine times out of ten, Andy Rebmann estimates, nothing is found on actual
searches. Police are following vague leads, unreliable jailhouse-snitch testimony, or simply the
need to rule out areas. Clearing areas—being able to say, “We don't think the missing person
is here”—matters.
The wonderful thing about scenarios is that one doesn't need to invent them. Life itself
provides the best material, although re-creating life takes an enormous amount of work, re-
sourcefulness, and, oddly, imagination. Roy and Suzie's mentor, Art Wolff, a Roane County
sheriff detective and K9 trainer, developed many of these scenarios for their search-and-rescue
team. Many others have benefited from the care and thought that went into these training
exercises.
The toddler scenario that Ben and June Bug did so well on was adapted from a 2007
Tennessee Valley case. Police had found a fresh grave and called Tennessee Special Response
Team-A. Roy went to the scene with his German shepherd, Cherokee. Cherokee ignored the
grave, but police excavated anyway. I can understand their need to know. They found a dead
pit bull. That might not have been the end of the story if it had been a larger grave or if Cher-
okee had alerted. Murderers have sometimes used a dead animal on top of a human victim to
mislead investigators.
The scene created that day in Georgia was “just” a training, but that's why setting up real-
istic scenarios is crucial. Often handlers, like lovers—as fair Rosalind points out in
As You
Like It
—can “desire too much of a good thing.”
It's not only handlers who let their wishing and wanting lead them into trouble. Their
dogs, especially if they aren't conditioned to defeat, can want that good thing just as much.
False alerts can have devastating consequences in real life—fruitless days of excavation for law
enforcement or charges that prove false.
A grave scenario is especially suggestive. Arpad Vass, whose main laboratories were just an
hour down the road from where Roy and Suzie live, noted that our minds have a genius for
finding and interpreting anomalies in the landscape. Dogs react in turn, because they, too,
excel at finding anomalies and at sensing our reaction. It's not just handlers and their dogs
who do this. Geophysicists, botanists, geologists—all of them can look and see what might
be a hump, or vegetation that's different, or a suggestive change in the soil—and build an
entire grim but fictitious narrative around them.
The negative that June Bug trained on wasn't an entirely blank area, as I realized after
watching a few dogs work. Roy and Suzie had scattered odiferous horse-hoof clippings to
distract the dogs and irritate the handlers. That was what the dog had munched on while ex-
