Throwing Whiskey from the Negro Coach: Racism in a 1926 Tracking Case?

Perhaps half of police dog cases in the last twenty years involve canine sniffs, often of vehicles pulled over for traffic violations. The officer becomes suspicious and calls in a canine unit to see if the dog will alert to drugs (occasionally explosives). Before World War II, however, police dog cases most often involved tracking. Some cases are worth reading for the pictures of America that they give. Consider the following description of a crime from a 1926 case in Mississippi. "Two police officers, Parnell and Danner, and several constables...

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Multiple Alerts by Drug Dog to Suspect's Cash Deposits Help Prove Money Laundering

I have read dozens of currency sniff cases—prosecutions where a dog alerts to currency found in the suspect’s luggage, or car, or somewhere else near or on him. The government then seeks to forfeit the currency, arguing that it is the product of narcotics activity. If narcotics are also found on the suspect, the government, whether state or federal, will almost always win. If nothing else incriminating is found, the suspect may get his money back if he can convince the court that the only reason for the dog’s alert is that there is cocaine residue...

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Scott and Fuller's 1965 Treatise Still a Gold Mine

In reading modern authors on dog evolution and behavior, such as Coppinger and Miklosi, one finds many references to a book published long before modern genome technologies, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, by John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller (U. Chicago Press, frequently reprinted). I had avoided reading the book because I feared that its relative antiquity would mean that I would constantly be reminded how far science has come in understanding the genetics of dogs. To the contrary, once I picked the book up, I found it hard to...

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Court Would Not Pick Up Bill of Drug Dog Expert for Defendant

When charged with a narcotics offense, the chain of evidence often includes an alert of a drug dog. A significant proportion of traffic stops that balloon into drug busts involve a canine sniff of the vehicle. The sniff justifies a further search, uncovering drugs, paraphernalia, and/or large amounts of cash. The defendant may attack the alert of the drug dog, though this will seldom work unless there has been a very long delay before the dog was produced, or perhaps if the only thing uncovered in the subsequent search is a large amount of cash....

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Cadaver Dogs Help Solve Cold Case

Michelle Dorr was six years old on May 31, 1986 when she disappeared from her father’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland. Carl Dorr, Michelle’s father, reported her missing at 4 o’clock that afternoon. He told the police that he was not exactly sure when he had last seen his daughter, but thought it was shortly after lunch, about 1 o’clock. He seems to have left her unsupervised in the backyard for several hours before noticing that she was no longer there. Carl Dorr was immediately the prime suspect. The police interviewed him aggressively,...

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Are Breeding Programs Reducing Genetic Variability?

There are various conflicts in the dog world. Choke vs. no-choke in dog training. Treats vs. other rewards. One that I’ve encountered more in the last few years are disputes between those who want to keep breeds pure vs. those who believe in crossing in other breeds. Some remarks near the end of Adam Miklosi’s wonderful book, Dog Behavior, Evolution, and Cognition (Oxford University Press 2007) are worth considering: "Today dogs are subject to a dangerous ‘game’ which involves irresponsible playing with one tiny aspect of their phenotype: the...

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Psychiatric Service Dog Society Gets Transportation Department to Rethink Air Carrier Access Rules

The Department of Transportation has taken the somewhat unusual step of publicizing some criticisms that have been raised concerning its 2008 revision of the air carrier access rules (73 Fed. Reg. 27614, May 13, 2008). The criticisms come from the Psychiatric Service Dog Society (PSDS), which criticized 14 CFR 382.117(e), which reads as follows:(e) If a passenger seeks to travel with an animal that is used as an emotional support or psychiatric service animal, you are not required to accept the animal for transportation in the cabin unless the...

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Dog Determines Where Each Suspect Sat in Van on Night of Drive-By Murder

A 2002 California case shows how important dogs have become in the fight against violent gangs in Los Angeles. Jose Sandoval and other members of the Vineland Boys street gang drove into the territory of a rival gang and killed a member of that gang in a drive-by shooting. An officer close to the incident got into his personal car and began to call for help. He also was shot by someone in the van holding the Vineland Boys but managed to radio for help and follow the van, which soon turned into a high speed chase. Going at times almost 90 miles...

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Is There Any Beer in the Cellar? Dog Tracking in Iowa in 1904

Some investigations are handled so poorly that it might be laughable were it not that people’s lives are damaged. A suit in Iowa for wrongful arrest is a case in point. Some chickens having been taken from a man named Brown, a small crowd collected, including the mayor of Des Moines, the chief of police, and a city alderman. Some dogs were found which took a scent from the chicken coop and followed the trail to the house of McClurg, who along with his family was awakened by the sound of the mob. When McClurg opened the door, the police chief...

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1898 Bloodhound Decision Still Raises Relevant Issues

In the decade before 1900, tracking dogs began to be used to find suspects. The courts of the time struggled with the issues of how and when to admit this kind of testimony, which involved a silent witness not available for cross-examination. A case decided by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1898 reversed a conviction of two men accused of burning a barn who had, according to the evidence, fled to a tenement building “occupied by a large number of families and individuals, many of whom were of bad repute.” A dog had tracked to this location,...

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Tracking Dog Case from 1893

On the night of the killing of Rose Stanback in Alabama in 1893, a man’s tracks were found near her house. Neighbors arrived, one with a tracking dog, which scented to the tracks and followed the scent to the house of one Amos Hodge. Defendant’s counsel objected to the testimony of the man with the dog. The entire decision of the Supreme Court of Alabama consists of the following paragraph: It is common knowledge that dogs may be trained to follow the tracks of a human being with considerable certainty and accuracy. The evidence in this case...

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Does Dog Folklore of Native American Peoples Leave Clues About Migratory Paths from Asia?

It is now generally accepted that the dogs of the native peoples of the Americas were descended from Eurasian wolves, not from North American wolves, which means that dogs came across the land connection between Asia and Alaska at the same time as humans migrated to the Americas. This leads to other questions. What was the relationship between these two migrating species? What did the dogs do for men? Absent some lucky archeological find, one...

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Owning Both a Dog and a Cat: Start Them Young

We have been expecting them to get along for perhaps thousands of years. An Italian woodcut from 1549 shows two dogs and a cat waiting for scraps to fall, or be thrown, from a table (Banchetti Compositioni di Vivende, 1549).  The second picture is the left section of Pietro Lorenzetti's Last Supper in Assisi (c. 1520).Two scientists at Tel Aviv University recently applied some scientific approaches to looking at the interactions of dogs and...

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Behavioral Repertoire Differences in Breeds Deserves Further Study

Some dogs still look much like wolves, and some dog populations have continued to interbreed with wolves. This raises the possibility that dogs that are closely genetically to wolves might also be closer behaviorally. Many of the interactions between domestic dogs are similar to the dominance and submission interactions of wolves within their packs. One team considered the question of whether the variation of signaling repertoire between breeds can be correlated with the degree of dissimilarity in overall appearance from the wolf. They also...

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Claiming Service Animal Status After a Condo Board Refuses to Change a No-Pets Policy Requires Thinking Strategically

Soon after I began doing research on service and support dog access law I realized that by far the largest category of legal decisions are disputes over dogs in apartment buildings and other housing environments where there is a no-pets policy. It makes sense that these cases often lead to litigation. If a handicapped person tries to take a service dog into a restaurant and is refused, refusal may lead to a lawsuit, but people don’t always want to take the time to enforce their rights. A few letters will often change the restaurant’s policy and...

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Dogs Take Our Visual Perspective Into Account When Obeying Our Commands

Dogs have been shown in numerous experiments to be very good at following a human’s pointing gestures to find hidden food. They have even been shown to follow the movements of our eyes. This is generally thought to prove that in the process of domestication they have learned to interpret certain signals given by humans. Most other species, including apes and wolves, do not follow our gestures as well, though there are some studies of wolves that...

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Empathy Responses of Dogs to Other Dogs?

Wolves and feral dogs live and hunt or scavenge in groups. Conflicts can arise between members of a group over food, efforts to mate, and for other reasons. Resolving these conflicts becomes important, since continuing hostility can reduce the effectiveness of the group to act as a unit. Curiously, conflict resolution has not often been studied in dogs, so recently published research by three Belgian scientists at the University of Antwerp is...

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Why Do Dogs Respond to Our Social Cues?

A focus of research on dog behavior has concerned the ability of dogs to respond to our social cues. In object choice tasks, a dog will have to decide which of two or more containers contains food. With certain controls, the dog unaided by a human will only perform at chance levels. If, however, a human points to the correct container, the dogs will much more likely go to it than the others. Even a human moving his eyes from the dog to the correct container and back and forth in this manner will help the dogs make the right choice, though not...

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Dogs Identify Murder Suspect from Manure on Shoe

Something of a precursor to the modern scent lineup is described by Adee Schoon and Ruud Haak in their book, K9 Suspect Discrimination. In 1918, a farmer was murdered near the town of Breezand in Holland. Fingerprints taken from the crime scene were found to belong to one suspect, who confessed and implicated two other men, one of whom was also apprehended. This second suspect had slipped when climbing through a barn window and his right foot went into a manure gutter. When asked about the manure still on his shoes, the suspect said that he...

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The Cancer Sniffers

Training dogs to detect lung and breast cancers requires a rigorous training approach. A team that used 3 Labrador Retrievers and 2 Portuguese Water Dogs taught the dogs to distinguish a tube with a cancer breath sample and food from four blank tubes. In this, the first stage, the dogs were taught to SIT before the correct sample, then received food and praise. In the second stage, the dogs still distinguished a tube with a cancer breath sample...

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Service Dogs for Autistic Children Also Help Their Families

Service dogs for autistic children are proving beneficial for both the children and their families. National Service Dogs of Cambridge, Ontario, uses a double-leash system where the autistic child is attached to the dog by a leash that is attached to the child’s belt. A parent or other person holds a separate leash. The dog obeys the parent’s commands, but is also trained to prevent the child from bolting away from the parent, or into traffic....

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Older Bloodhounds Track Two-Day Old Trail Almost Perfectly in Multiple Environments

A professor and a member of the San Bernardino police department determined to test the tracking abilities of bloodhounds that had received more than 18 months of training against bloodhounds that had received less training. They obtained four dogs in each category and performed the following test. Subjects down trails from a half mile to a mile and a half long in five separate areas at five separate times. Two of the areas were in regional parks,...

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