Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Bill Syrotuck, wrote the clear, concise topic
Scent and the Scenting Dog
(one of the topics
Nancy Hook had permitted me to read). Today volunteer groups deploy to search in wilder-
ness areas, in avalanches, on water, and in disasters. Marcia Koenig estimates that the U.S.
has more than five hundred volunteer teams.
While working dogs were off and running by the mid-1960s, it's best not to feel too sen-
timental about what that growth represents. Each time a dog accomplishes a particular task
for humans isn't automatically a moment for celebration. Dogs may have co-evolved with us,
but they don't have a lot of say in how we decide to use them, so the “co” gives a false impres-
sion of equity. The dog mostly tries to please us, using its “canid tool kit of flexible sociality, a
good nose, and expertise in hunting,” as John Bradshaw, Foundation Director of the Anthro-
zoology Institute at the University of Bristol, puts it.
Good working dogs have to move swiftly, hear acutely, smell well, and communicate
clearly with their handlers—even bite on occasion. Since domestication, they've been used as
adjuncts for the evil that people do, as well as the good, and sometimes both at once. They
can be used to consolidate or pervert power in concrete ways. They can track a slave, a lost
child, or a rapist without distinguishing. They can help suppress peaceful civil rights protest-
ers or control an angry mob that's up to no good. People create the problems, and working
dogs come along for the ride. Right now, as we engage in conflicts in the Middle East and
South Asia, we use dogs to find bombs and control the groups fighting against us. When
domestic boas and pythons get too big for Florida apartments, they are dumped in the Ever-
glades, and we use dogs to locate them before the snakes decimate the native wildlife. We
have huge prisons filled with contraband and cell phones, and we use dogs to find them.
Though we've been using working dogs for tens of thousands of years, academic research-
ers are just starting to catch up with what these dogs do and how. Characterizing and under-
standing dogs' olfactory and cognitive skills isn't best done in a lab with limited and usually
untrained dog subjects. If working dogs are overrated in the popular imagination, they have
been mostly underrated in science, although that is rapidly changing. Nonetheless, far too
much scientific work on dog cognition and olfaction has been done on pets—dogs who don't
use their brains and noses for a living.
Just as Berkeley scientists took undergraduates out of the psych lab and onto the grass to
track, just as Avery Gilbert urged neurobiologists into the kitchen of a great chef or the lab
of a master perfumer to understand how human experts process scent, some working-dog
experts are urging psychologists and neurobiologists to start using working dogs as research
subjects.
The first scientific problem-solving tests with dogs appear to be those of Edward
Thorndike, who served as president of the American Psychological Association at the turn
of the twentieth century. He created “puzzle boxes” (precursors of the Skinner box), put do-
