Free What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren Page A

thousand, one of the largest nonprofit applied-research institutes in the nation.
    Slick’s passion for mythic cryptids was surely an embarrassment for behavioral scientists at SwRI, who were deeply ensconced in training projects with real-world species. Yet something of his spirit lives on in their work. The institute’s honeybee research in 2001, for instance, falls into a similar category. Even before 9/11, SwRI scientists were working on “a controlled biological system”—that’s institute-speak for a cooperative critter—to detect bombs. Dogs aren’t the only creatures who can be harnessed to help humans. The scientists trained the bees of twelve hives, giving them sugar-water rewards. The worker bees performed beautifully in field tests, buzzing right to their bomb targets and ignoring nearby flowers. Nor did their delicate bees’ feet trigger explosions. SwRI researchers even put radio transmitters the size of a salt grain on the bees’ backs, to track them as they honed in on distant TNT. The researchers thought they might be on to something big.
    It was an inspiring experiment, but bees have their limits. They tend to die sooner than dogs, with a life span of about six weeks during high pollen season. They hate the cold, the dark, the rain. Using themat an airport security checkpoint isn’t practical. I know this because David and I keep hives in our yard in North Carolina. Our bees hate three things we love: garlic, wine, and bananas. We can’t consume any of those products before inspecting the hives, or we risk their displeasure. We love our bees, and need them for pollination, but I’d rather train Solo than a bee.
    The idea that bees might have potential in both war and peace was the continuation of a long tradition, not just at SwRI but nationwide. The tumultuous early to mid-1970s were an enormously fertile time for detection research generally and research using animals for detection in particular. The Vietnam War was winding down. At the same time, Department of Defense–funded researchers noticed the skills of military dogs and wondered what else dogs might be capable of. There was enough intellectual and experimental curiosity—and money—to percolate from the military labs on the East Coast clear to San Antonio, Texas.
    Nick Montanarelli, now retired but then a project manager at the U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory, remembers that era clearly: It was just a few years before he went on to co-develop the bulletproof Kevlar vest with Lester Shubin, an invention that continues to save thousands of lives. But at the time, Nick and a small cadre of other researchers across the country—including veterinarian and behavioral research scientist Edward E. Dean, behavioral 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 application 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: assassinations 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 hijackings. Could dogs be used to help find bombs in