Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
down into parts (it's those great cheekbones!) doesn't work. It's the whole face. Machines still
aren't nearly as adept at facial recognition.
So the two scientific arenas—what volatiles in what percentages are involved in human
decomposition itself, versus what volatiles dogs react to as cadaver scent—may overlap a great
deal. Or not. Who cares? Well, we like to know things. It might help us figure out why some
dogs are drawn to rotting trees like sycamores or to the vegetative decomposition in swamps.
Isolating what the dogs find significant in decomposing humans might help handlers and
trainers identify which training aids are best and the ideal way to store them. Ultimately, that
knowledge might lead to finding substitute training aids that are legal, safe, and much closer
to the real thing than the pseudoscents or other chemicals in current use.
This new research arena has started to upset old beliefs. Some trainers and handlers—more
in the past but a few in the present—have claimed that pig samples are the next best thing
to human samples for cadaver-dog training. The temptation is great. Pigs are plentiful and
a forensic fallback, a model for studying human disease and decay. No ethical fuss or muss
about using them as training aids: Just pick up some pork spareribs from the grocery meat
counter. Yet, as Arpad Vass noted, there's a vast difference between the chemical profiles of
deceased humans and swine. “Pigs smell quite different from humans. We have this well doc-
umented.”
Nancy Hook scoffed from the beginning of training about handlers using pig tissue as
training samples. It was pretty simple to her: “Pigs aren't people.”
Mary Cablk, an associate professor at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada who trains
cadaver dogs and does research on the reliability of detector dogs, took the pig problem a
step further. She and her analytical chemist husband, John Sagebiel at University of Nevada,
Reno, compared the volatile organic compounds of chicken, cow, and pig with those from
human remains. Their results should be the final nail in the coffin for an entire cadre of train-
ers and handlers who have said for decades that pig samples are the next best thing to human
samples for training. Their research shows that we humans smell much more like chicken
than pig when we decompose. If it's any comfort, we smell like organic chicken from Whole
Foods.
• • •
. . . and suddenly, coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting
against the lower limiting bar. . . . The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.
—Duncan McDougall, MD, “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance,”
Journal of the American Society
for Psychical Research
, 1907
Cadaver-dog handlers and trainers have watched dogs find human remains for several dec-
ades. No matter. No rigorous scientific studies had shown how well dogs could do it. They
