Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
it, and it rolled into a ravine. Kornberg admitted that it was her mother, “a responsible adult,”
who went to investigate—and found the head that Ollie had dropped.
A four-year-old black Labrador named Fish brought a decaying human arm into the front
yard of his Mission, Texas, home in August 2011. Police were able to get the hand and arm
bone before they disappeared down Fish's throat. The dog's adult owner was traumatized. Not
so his eight-year-old daughter, who chatted with the television reporter. Their dog, she said,
likes to visit the neighbors' chicken coop as well: “Fish gets everything. He brought eggs on
Easter.”
I understand her father's repulsion. I wouldn't accept Fish's gift of eggs.
When dogs become, in Paul Shepard's term, “the spoiler of human graves,” it's a reminder
of how we tend to deal with human bodies. We Westerners tuck them away fairly quickly.
Dogs like Fish remind us of the disorder and chaos inherent when there's an arm or hand ly-
ing around where a dog can find it. We prefer hands either made into sterile ash or nicely pre-
served with formaldehyde and gently crossed over the body in a coffin. On the flip side, turn-
about should be fair play. Both historically and in current practice across the world, people
eat dogs without much compunction. There's good evidence that dogs were and are raised for
meat; they were the first agricultural animal in a number of societies, and they remain so in
some today.
None of my early research on cadaver dogs grossed me out. I realized there was a difference
between reading about it and coming face-to-face with it, but abstractly, the idea of cadaver-
dog work didn't offend my sensibilities. It made me happy. Perhaps my childhood in the
woods and fields, growing up with fishing and hunting and gutting and plucking and skin-
ning, was a factor in my sanguinity. Or the fact that I had taken care of my paralyzed mother
and worked in nursing homes for years. Perhaps it was because my father was a biologist who
taught me to look at dead organisms with a disinterested but not uninterested gaze.
Cadaver-dog work seemed straightforward to me. As one medical examiner and early
cadaver-dog trainer, Edward David, noted with great cheer, “love of the putrid” is inherent
in canines. So why not take that love and channel it toward something more socially useful
than rolling in dead squirrel?
Why not take that love and see whether it might be used not to increase the chaos but to
restore, even if only slightly, a sense of order?
