Birth of the Body Dog - What the Dog Knows - page 36

That wasn't the end of tweaking and experimenting. Both SwRI and the army tried a num-
ber of dog breeds for a multitude of purposes and climates, from Australian dingoes and Nor-
wegian elkhounds to Dobermans and cocker spaniels. The scientists and project managers
didn't experiment with mutts. The reason had nothing to do with blue-blood snobbery or the
German propensity for creating an über-shepherd that could best represent the nation-state.
It was a science thing. Mutts couldn't be replicated easily, and if you were trying to get uni-
form results, you needed consistency. Canis planus isn't that plain at all, genetically speaking.
While other breeds worked fine, the best all-around dogs for a multitude of tasks were the
German shepherds and Labradors. They had hunt drive and play drive. They were the right
size. They had fine noses. No one would laugh derisively at the handlers. The two breeds wer-
en't without faults, especially the German shepherd. Even then, the army was trying to de-
velop a solid breeding program for shepherds, to make them confident and capable of being
aggressive when needed but not nervous and without hip problems—sadly, both propensities
that American-bred shepherds, thanks to Rin Tin Tin's popularity, were starting to exhibit.
There were exceptions to the shepherd-Labrador dominance for particular project needs.
In 1971, when D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane and parachuted down over Washington, disap-
pearing with two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money and inspiring a rash of copycat
hijackings, SwRI and the military labs came in with a solution. A soigné woman with a lap-
dog draped over her arm would walk through an airport terminal and boarding areas. She
would pass close to the waiting passengers. If the dog smelled a handgun, it would scratch at
the woman's arm. Polonis recalled trying Lhasa Apsos, miniature greyhounds, and whippets,
among other small breeds. he whippets, he said, outsniffed them all.
Some of the other small breeds didn't work out as well. Happily, not all of the institute's
failed experiments ended with a barbecue. William Johnston brought one of the lapdog dro-
pouts, a Maltese puppy too pug-nosed to sniff properly, home to his wife, Joan, and their
children in Virginia. Puffin lived with the family until she died at the ripe old age of thirteen.
• • •
The next time you visit a zoo or a natural history museum and survey the extraordinary diversity
of the organisms on our planet, pause for a second to remind yourself that all this variation—the
elephant tusks and peacock tails and human neocortices—was made possible, in part, by error.
—Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From , 2010
Good ideas can occur separately and seemingly in isolation, like the summer popcorn storms
in North Carolina that arrive in late afternoon to water the vegetable garden. What good
ideas and rainstorms both need are the right atmosphere and some basic ingredients. So it was