Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The ensuing decades have seen highs and lows for real bloodhounds in the United States.
One of their principal working uses was for tracking escaped prisoners. Those dogs—tall and
lean and less wrinkled than the AKC version—were usually trained and handled by prison
trusties, a good number of them African-American. Many a trusty would be freed from pris-
on, wrote bloodhound specialist Leon Whitney, and find a criminal excuse to make it back
so he could continue working with his beloved bloodhounds.
The bloodhound's star rose with increasing use in police departments during the mid-
twentieth century, and a few became celebrities. When Nick Carter, a tracking bloodhound,
and his handler, V. G. Mullikin, would arrive on the scene in Kentucky, wrote Whitney,
“great crowds gathered, so many people that they often constituted his chief problem—how
to get started, rather than how to follow the trail.” One of Mullikin's longest trails was re-
portedly fifty-five miles. He had to stop in the middle while one of his dogs had puppies. He
sent her and the pups home and kept tracking with another dog. When James Earl Ray, the
killer of Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from prison in 1977, bloodhounds tracked him for
three miles, finding him in a pile of wet leaves.
The modern bloodhound, in other words, was evolving into a tracking machine that po-
lice and search-and-rescue teams still depend on today.
• • •
Every dog handler, law enforcement officer, and volunteer searcher seems to have a story
about Andy Rebmann, who has trained dogs for more than forty years. Since retirement as
a trainer for the Connecticut State Police, he's been teaching across the world, from Japan to
Germany to Mexico. He's trained dogs and their handlers for trailing, patrol, narcotics, ex-
plosives, arson, and cadaver work. He's a court expert and an author. He continues to train
bloodhound handlers. His own bloodhounds tracked hundreds of criminals and lost victims.
In 1972, Andy had been a state trooper for less than two years when he decided to try a
patrol dog. A year later, he got a bloodhound, Tina, and fell in love with her nose and her
trailing ability. Yet Andy, never sentimental, was noting an irritating tendency in his blood-
hounds if they smelled a hiker who had gone beyond hypothermic: The dog would stop,
looking hapless. Trail? What trail? Tina did that on her first dead person in 1973. “Not work-
ing into deceased subject,” Andy's notes read. Even indomitable Clem—whose famous nose
was upheld four times by the Connecticut Supreme Court; who trailed one man on an eight-
day-old trail; who got a national award for his tracking nose; who was quite capable of tag-
ging a felon with his teeth once he found him at the end of a trail—was a chickenshit when
it came to dead bodies. He refused to trail all the way into them. he one time he did, he
turned around and ran out the same way he had tracked in. “He almost turned me upside
down,” Andy said. “No way he was going to stay and sniff that guy.”
