Differences Between Tracking and Scent Lineups Are More Substantial Than Some Courts Recognize

A Texas court found that there is "little distinction between a scent lineup and a situation where a dog is required to track an individual’s scent over an area traversed by multiple persons.” Winston v. Texas, 78 S.W.3d 522 (Court of Appeals, 14th Dist., 2002). This supposed similarity, almost identity, of tracking and trailing to scent lineups, has been used by courts in applying the same foundational requirements to the admission of both types of evidence. There are, in fact, numerous differences between the two canine functions, and some...

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Chasing the Bears Away: Yogi Doesn't Like the Barking but It Doesn't Keep Him Away for Long

When my wife and moved to Stone Ridge, New York, neighbors warned us that there were bears in the area, harmless and not very large black bears that could be pesky at times. We learned to put ammonia on our outdoor garbage can after a bear’s investigation of the can gave us a half hour of unpleasant yard work one morning. We were told that having a dog was good because bears are afraid of dogs. Perhaps once or twice Chloe’s barking in the night was at a bear and not a deer, but we’re not sure. I recently came across a study on the effectiveness...

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Bomb Dog Fraud: Selling Ineffective Explosives Detection Dogs to the Feds Leads to Hard Time

Rollin Perkins, my criminal law professor at Hastings, often began classes with a “black letter” statement of the crime he would discuss that day. Perhaps this doesn’t qualify as black letter, but one of the first sentences in his lecture on fraud was a simple statement. “Where there’s a lot of money, there’s likely to be fraud.”In a prior blog (July 17, IRS Affirms…), I mentioned a case on which I was consulted where a family with an autistic child paid around $20,000 for an autism service dog that had, as near as could be told, received little...

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Dog Fights and Serial Murderers: A Federal Judge Shines Light into the Dark World of Dog Fighting

A detailed and disturbing description of dog fighting has appeared in a sentencing memorandum filed by the district court for the Southern District of Illinois. The memorandum does not mention the actions of the defendants who were being sentenced, but describes dog fighting in the United States. U.S. v Berry, 2010 WL 1882057 (S.D. Ill., May 11, 2010). The memorandum was written by Judge Michael J. Reagan of the Southern District of Illinois, a former police officer appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton. It must have been hard...

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Telling Tigers Apart: Scent Lineups Identify Individual Tigers from Scat

Dogs have been used to monitor the status of endangered species for some time, and a number of examples have been mentioned in prior blogs. (See Certification of Tortoise Detector dogs? May 20, 2009; Types of Detection Dogs—How Many Can You Name? March 5, 2010) In all cases I know of, however, the dogs were not trained to distinguish between individual bears, tortoises, ferrets, or whatever. Like drug dogs or cadaver dogs, they are trained to recognize...

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Life is a High School for Puppies Too

When two dogs are playing competitively and a third joins in, the new individual may attack or bite one or the other. How does it choose which one to support and which one to attack? Three theories have been advanced:1. Kin selection: interveners support relatives over nonrelatives, found in studies of primates, African wild dogs, and spotted hyenas. (Picture shows three African wild dog puppies at play. National Geographic Images. For the position...

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