Wag - What the Dog Knows - page 187

across my salmon-colored linen pants, hoping to find something for my young canis horribilis
to do, and she cheerily told me she thought I would love cadaver work. She hadn't thought
that. She had seen potential in Solo, but she hadn't thought that I—“little hippie yuppie”
that I was—would follow through. Ha. I showed her. Now I was going to have to show her
all over again.
“It's very common to see a dog handler be a 'one dog wonder' and to either give it up once
that dog is done or to suffer miserably with the next dogs,” wrote one cadaver-dog trainer.
I exhibited all the clinical symptoms of being a one-dog wonder, and I didn't even have the
pup yet.
I was now the working-dog researcher who knew too much. Between genetics and tem-
perament, accidents and poor health, and the limits of my ability as a still-new handler, get-
ting another dog to succeed was a crapshoot. We could stack the odds in our favor, but we
ultimately didn't control every contingency.
Maybe I'd been hanging out with law enforcement too much, watching good handlers
struggle mightily to understand and respect their new dogs—and failing. Dogs failed, too.
I watched almost-adult dogs get shipped in from Europe, get evaluated, and wash out. Not
hitting the bite sleeve hard enough. Hesitating before leaping up a metal stairway. Not lev-
itating onto a slippery desk in a warehouse. Mike Baker, who had evaluated many hundreds
of dogs, was more patient and knowledgeable than the sometimes judgmental handlers. He
knew how long the dog had been in the country, whether it had the equivalent of jet lag,
what its early experience might or might not have been. Many dogs faced entirely new en-
vironments. Breeding kennels, even top-notch European ones, don't always provide dogs the
exposure they need.
And here I would be bringing in a ten-week-old puppy who wouldn't be big enough to
climb warehouse stairs. It was bad enough that the pup would be a German shepherd and
not a Malinois, but I wasn't bringing in a dozen dogs to evaluate. Only one. So much could
go wrong. Solo's gifts were serendipitous and helped shape what he became. There would be
no beginner's luck this time around.
On the other hand, I had resources at my disposal. Nancy Hook, for example. Kathy Hol-
bert. Joan. Mike Baker promised me that, though he would be retired from the Durham K9
unit when the pup arrived, he would still be in the K9 training business and would help me
put a foundation on the young dog.
During training one night, I tried to assure Mike—and myself—that I wouldn't be as clue-
less. “I'll know more with the next one. I won't make the same mistakes.”
Mike shook his head. He knew better. “If I had every dog in front of me that I'd ever
worked with, I'd apologize to each of them.”