Death and the Dog - What the Dog Knows - page 16

softened and shifted somewhat in intervening centuries, dogs get short shrift in many Muslim
countries, and some Christians want dominion over the natural world.
Even today, in a secular Western world, we remain oddly fascinated by the role that dogs
play in death. Scamp, a schnauzer at an Ohio nursing home, got wide news coverage in 2007
for his habit of barking and pacing near patients' rooms when they were about to die. He
had “eerily” raised the alarm for forty deaths in three years, the director of nursing told Inside
Edition . Far from shunning him, the patients adored him. “It's not like he's a grim reaper,”
director of nursing Adeline Baker told the reporter. “It's kind of comforting to know that
maybe at the end of our lives, if we don't have family members, there will be somebody there
to be with us.”
Perhaps Scamp was a comfort because he wasn't large and black but small and gray with
quizzical eyebrows. The darker side of our superstitions has also survived: More big black
dogs are reportedly euthanized in U.S. shelters than any other size or shade.
In modern times, we have updated and sanitized the Homeric language of “devouring
dogs.” Forensic scientists now call it “canine predation.” Despite having a name for the phe-
nomenon, we tend to keep an uneasy distance. Yet, a few years ago, children streamed into
our local science museum for one of its most popular shows ever, on bugs and death. Shows
like CSI and Bones have made us surprisingly comfortable with maggots, and what they tell
us about the stages of death, and have contributed to the popularity of an entire discipline:
forensic entomology. Scientists know a fair amount about bear activity; they know less about
dog activity. Yet the handful of available studies show that dogs and their coyote cousins ac-
count for much of the scavenging on human remains.
The media appear to know a lot about dogs finding the dead. The problem is that stories
are scattered everywhere, hundreds and thousands that all have the same innocuous story line:
A person walking a dog finds a body. I am convinced that an analysis would show that un-
trained dogs out for walks or roaming neighborhoods find more bodies than trained dogs do.
It's a simple question of acknowledging the millions of dog noses out there working unpaid
overtime.
Depending on your perspective, it's either good or bad to let your dog roam off-lead, but
let's face it: Dogs on leads don't find bodies nearly as often. Generally, finding a body is a
good thing, although the dogs' owners and walkers are never thrilled when it happens.
Ollie, a golden retriever, was in Hollywood Hills on an unleashed walk in January 2012.
A professional dog walker and her mother had eight other dogs with them. Ollie dashed into
the underbrush and started playing enthusiastically with a plastic bag: “He was digging, dig-
ging, digging, barking,” the dog walker, Lauren Kornberg, told the local radio station. Ollie
shredded the bag and came away with something big and round in his mouth. He dropped