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of years. Once I start to think about who might lie beneath the forest floor, my perspective
broadens and deepens.
Historic human remains, as they're known in the cadaver-dog world, can be a distraction
during missing persons searches. One long day's work around an abandoned plantation, in a
case that was barely cold, ended with Solo sniffing and working the downhill side of a slave
cabin foundation with great interest but no final alert. I watched and rejected his interest as
insignificant to the search we'd been called to do. As I drove home, exhausted, I realized how
much birthing, living—and perhaps dying—must have occurred in that dirt-floored cabin.
Kentucky coroner Barbara Weakley-Jones, who founded and directed the Kentucky State
Cadaver Dog Program when she was with the medical examiner's office, said that she doesn't
like to train her dogs on “old old” human remains. In Kentucky, she noted, you can legally
bury “your brother, your mother, your father” in the backyard. Training dogs to alert on old
graves is “insignificant” and even distracting for the medical examiner's office when they are
out on cases.
I understand her point. I remember the time that investigators spent pulling a cairn apart
based on Solo and another dog independently alerting, only to get down to ground level and
find roots that clearly had been there much longer than two years. If someone were farther
down, it wasn't the victim we were looking for. They didn't dig. That was fine with me,
though I remain mildly curious about that pile of stones overlooking a pond in the middle of
the woods.
Increasingly, people are searching for historic human remains purposefully, using family
Bible records, land deeds, oral history, Google Earth—and dogs. In the last decade especially,
dogs have been used to discover or pinpoint what are essentially open-air museums: old
cemeteries, battle sites, archaeological digs. One of the first documented uses of dogs on an-
cient remains belongs to the now-deceased bloodhound trainer and handler Bill Tolhurst,
who in 1987 took his chocolate Lab, Candy, to an archaeology site in Ontario, Canada, after
construction workers found a skull. Archaeologists realized the remains were from the War of
1812. Bill and Candy helped them locate three additional bodies.
Across the United States—from suspected massacre sites along the Oregon Trail, to hasty
burials along the Old Spanish Trail, to slave graves, to Revolutionary War and Civil War
burying grounds, to the prehistoric mounds of the Mississippi Delta Indians—archaeologists,
historians, and geologists are teaming up with cadaver-dog teams to map where the dead
might lie. I say “might” with deliberation. Only excavation and good testing can establish
what lies beneath. Often excavation isn't possible. Or desirable.
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