Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
that around the same time, several researchers, trainers, and agencies appeared to independ-
ently arrive at the idea of the “body dog”: using dogs to find victims of homicide, disaster,
accident, or war. That idea was a natural outgrowth from other ideas but also from errors and
dead ends, such as the pig experiments.
One of the earliest efforts came in July 1970, when the Lancashire Constabulary in Eng-
land started training dogs to recover the dead. Its training program, using pig meat as a sub-
stitute for human tissue, lasted eighteen months. It worked, according to the few accounts
available, although the history of the program is spotty. An English handler and his dog were
deployed in the Sinai after the disastrous Yom Kippur War in 1973. Tasked with recovering
the Israeli dead, that team reportedly recovered 147 bodies, and an Israeli dog-and-handler
team hurriedly trained for the task found the body of Anwar Sadat's brother, a pilot.
Within two years of that project, Nick Montanarelli had launched the first U.S. body-re-
covery dog study out of the U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory. The study wasn't an idle,
let's-see-what-we-can-dream-up experiment. Nick was a practical guy, already thinking bey-
ond the Vietnam War. Dogs, he thought, might have been useful in two domestic disasters:
Hurricane Camille in 1969 had killed 259 people as it ripped through Cuba, up the Missis-
sippi Delta, and flooded Virginia. The hurricane's actual wind speed was never known, as it
destroyed all the recording instruments. In 1972, a dam in South Dakota's Black Hills broke,
sending water cascading down a creek into Rapid City. Two hundred thirty-seven people died
in a matter of hours, many buried under mud or swept away. Nick also had been talking to
handlers and trainers in Canada, where the search-and-rescue dogs weren't doing a good job
of recovering the dead in avalanches.
Finding appropriate training material for body-recovery dogs was a challenge. Nick's po-
sition in the military, with its long history of honoring deceased servicemen, kept him from
using human tissue for training. Nonetheless, he wanted to get as close as he could to the real
deal. He visited morgues and talked to morticians. He talked with military people who had
been around lots of bodies. His solution was a combination of sweaty soldier uniforms and
monkey meat (or as the report called it, “macerated subhuman”) with some other chemicals
added. It was a potent mixture, Nick recalled. The dogs found it. The four German shepherds
in the study learned to work in fields, in buildings, in rubble, with a 92 percent accuracy rate
in the final tests. Nick signed off on the study in May 1973, and the dogs went on standby
for disasters.
It's difficult to trace the exact relationship of who did what and when because of gaps in
the record. People die. Memories fade. Some of the work was classified. But at the time Nick
finished his report, Southwest Research Institute, too, was studying whether dogs could help
find the dead.
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