Free What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren

problem—how to get started, rather than how to follow the trail.” One of Mullikin’s longest trails was reportedly 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 police and search-and-rescue teams still depend on today.
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    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, explosives, 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 bloodhounds 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 working 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 tagging 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. The 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.”
    On some cases, Andy had to tie his bloodhound to a tree and go poking around in the heavy brush himself. It was annoying.

4
Birth of the Body Dog

    This animal exhibited a remarkable ability to detect all forms of buried explosives, and a surprising willingness to work with man. Were it not for the great size of this particular breed (400 pounds or more) and its unfortunate social habits, it might have been the ideal choice for detection service.
    â€”Report #2217, U.S. Army, 1977
    Founded in 1947 on the outskirts of San Antonio, the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute is dedicated to developing breakthrough scientific and engineering technologies and practical research that translate into immediate benefits for its funders, from oil and gascompanies to NASA and the Department of Defense. The institute still designs spectrographs for missions to Mars, antidotes for chemical weapons, and compressors for offshore oil rigs. SwRI also plays around with the kind of wacky animal research that makes you think, with affection and wonder, “only in America.”
    This genre of blue-sky research wouldn’t surprise anyone looking at the biography of the institute’s founder, Tom Slick Jr., a Texas wildcatter, inventor, and committed cryptozoologist. He paid for three separate expeditions to Nepal to search for the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. He tried to get permission from the Nepalese government to use tracking bloodhounds, but the country refused to let the dogs in. Slick died in a private plane crash in 1962 at the age of forty-six, but his dream institute, SwRI, thrived, with brilliant scientists and engineers flocking to San Antonio. Today it has a staff of three