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,...
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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...
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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...
Sunday, August 23, 2009
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...
Monday, August 10, 2009
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...
Monday, August 3, 2009
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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