Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
country—including veterinarian and behavioral research scientist Edward E. Dean, behavi-
oral psychologist Daniel S. Mitchell, and William H. Johnston with the U.S. Army Mobility
Equipment Research and Development Center in Virginia—were starting to work together
on detection projects.
That era, Nick said, was special: You could launch ideas, get results, and have an applica-
tion in the field in six months. The military would provide up to three thousand dollars and
tell Nick to start solving a problem. Often, he said, he'd fly out to San Antonio to brainstorm
projects with Ed Dean. “I was down at Southwest Research every other week,” Nick recalled.
“Dean and I would go to lunch, and we would try to devise some methodology for trying
some things.”
SwRI and various army laboratories and centers worked together and separately, trying
to determine how good dogs were at detecting land mines, punji pits, and trip wires, all of
which were killing citizens and soldiers in Vietnam. There were new problems at home: assas-
sinations of prominent political figures during the 1960s, from John F. Kennedy to Martin
Luther King Jr., and during the 1970s, bombings protesting the war, as well as airplane hi-
jackings. Could dogs be used to help find bombs in convention centers and guns at airports?
Jim Polonis, a project manager at SwRI for thirty years, helped manage a number of the
successful and even some of the not-so-successful animal behavior projects. Like Nick, he has
fond memories of those chaotic, fertile times. If someone had an idea, he said, talented re-
searchers, trainers, and handlers were there to try to realize it. Jim Polonis's job was to make
sure that when the ideas got turned into projects, everything went smoothly. It could be a
challenge, hauling dogs from one end of the country to another. One spring, he, his wife,
and their two children dodged killer tornadoes in a pickup while hauling a forty-foot-long
horse trailer filled with German shepherds and Labradors from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to San
Antonio. Jim took care of dogs, handlers, and researchers on test sites across the country.
One winter, he helped run mine-detection tests while fighting hip-deep snow and blizza-
rds in Wisconsin. He and SwRI employees commandeered a utility truck with an attached
telephone-pole digger to break test holes and plant mines in the frozen midwestern ground.
Another year, he had to figure out how detection dogs and their handlers might cope with
dust storms and 118-degree temperatures in Arizona.
Dogs weren't the only potential detection species to interest SwRI and the military. They
added pigs to the mix, which wasn't actually much of a stretch: The Italians and French had
used pigs to find pricey truffles since the fifteenth century. SwRI used red Durocs, an old
handsome breed with drooping ears and the mahogany coloring, if not the fine feathers, of
Irish setters. Unlike Irish setters, Durocs were exceptionally mellow. Jim Polonis remembered
one that could detect buried mines at much deeper levels than any dog could. “That pig could
detect anything,” Polonis said. Partly, he thought, the pig wanted to please its talented, petite
