Free What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren Page B

convention centers and guns at airports?
    Jim Polonis, a project manager at SwRI for thirty years, helped manage a number of the successful and even some of the not-so-successful animal behavior projects. Like Nick, he has fond memories of those chaotic, fertile times. If someone had an idea, he said, talented researchers, trainers, and handlers were there to try to realize it. Jim Polonis’s job was to make sure that when the ideas got turned into projects, everything went smoothly. It could be a challenge, hauling dogs from one end of the country to another. One spring, he, his wife, and their two children dodged killer tornadoes in a pickup while hauling a forty-foot-long horse trailer filled with German shepherds and Labradors from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to San Antonio. Jim took care of dogs, handlers, and researchers on test sites across the country. One winter, he helped run mine-detection tests while fighting hip-deep snow and blizzards in Wisconsin. He and SwRI employees commandeered a utility truck with an attached telephone-pole digger to break test holes and plant mines in the frozen midwestern ground. Another year, he had to figure out how detection dogs and their handlers might cope with dust storms and 118-degree temperatures in Arizona.
    Dogs weren’t the only potential detection species to interest SwRI and the military. They added pigs to the mix, which wasn’t actually much of a stretch: The Italians and French had used pigs to find pricey truffles since the fifteenth century. SwRI used red Durocs, an old handsome breed with drooping ears and the mahogany coloring, if not the fine feathers, of Irish setters. Unlike Irish setters, Durocs were exceptionally mellow. Jim Polonis remembered one that could detectburied mines at much deeper levels than any dog could. “That pig could detect anything,” Polonis said. Partly, he thought, the pig wanted to please its talented, petite female handler. The final army report on mine detection, sadly, didn’t give full credence to the gender of the best pig handler; instead, the report noted the pigs’ great willingness “to work with man.” No, that particular pig was clearly willing to work with woman.
    There were just a few problems with the test Durocs: They were pigs, with “unfortunate social habits” and a certain stigma: “Would you let a German shepherd in to search your house or a red Duroc?” Jim asked me. Another problem was that red Durocs were highly regarded for their “excellent rate of gain,” a plus for slaughter but a minus for mine detection—especially when the four-hundred-pound pigs got excited about finding mines. They would pull on their leashes. “They’d really drag you around,” Jim said. More problematic than their enormous girth, and potentially more dangerous, was the pigs’ “irrepressible desire to root in the soil,” which needed to be discouraged during a mine search. So even though domestic pigs were especially effective at sniffing out all sorts of materials, SwRI ultimately rejected them as sniffer animals.
    The test pigs weren’t wasted. Joan Johnston, whose husband, William Johnston, was a researcher with the U.S. Army center that co-sponsored the study, remembered the great picnic SwRI hosted the year of the pig study: It featured a delicious pork barbecue.
    The experimentation didn’t stop with pigs. Coyotes, coyote-beagle crosses, deer, javelinas, raccoons, foxes, a badger, coatis, timber wolves, a civet cat. Three kinds of skunks: spotted, striped, and skunk-nosed. And the occasional indigo snake and rattlesnake, thought uniquely suited for mine detection because of an unsurpassed ability to crawl into holes. Researchers even tried raptors for mine detection.
    The behavioral scientists, project managers, and trainers at SwRI were beginning to realize, with some disappointment, that wild animals had issues: They were wild. Wolves and