Dingoes, Dogs That Think Like Wolves

In 1699, sailors coming ashore in Australia saw their first dingoes and assumed they were starving wolves. Early settlers, fearing for their sheep, described dingoes as cunning and used the same tactics sheep farmers everywhere else use against wolves. A recent cognitive experiment shows that dingoes are able to solve problems much in the way that wolves do, yet dingoes are dogs, and were almost certainly at one time domesticated to some degree....

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Police Bomb Dog Bites Handler's Son, Mother Sues TSA and Port Authority

A police officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was a K-9 handler of an explosives detection dog owned by the Transportation Security Administration. TSA provides bomb dogs to state and local law enforcement agencies under the National Explosives Detection Canine Team Program (NEDCTP). TSA is responsible for training the dogs and their handlers, as well as for establishing search protocols used by the Port Authority. The Port...

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New Access Rules for Service Animals: Dogs and Miniature Horses Win, Cats and Monkeys Lose

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Guide Dog in Chinese Scroll from 1516?

Artistic depictions of blind people relying on dogs for some level of guidance have been argued in a number of cases, although the painters were probably more interested in contrasting the misery of some with the wealth of others, or in showing the wages of sin. See my discussion of a fresco from Pompeii on July 19 (Guide Dog in Pompeian Fresco?). A poor man with his dog in a Chinese scroll has come to my attention. The scroll dates from 1516,...

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Hair of the Dog Bites Even After Dog Can't: Canine DNA Becomes a Forensic Tool

Human DNA testing has become a major forensic tool since 1985, but animal DNA testing is also proving useful. In 1998, the FBI created the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database of DNA profiles of convicted criminals. The first use of DNA profiling on an animal that led to forensic evidence involved a cat. The police found a leather jacket spotted with a murder victim’s blood on Prince Edward Island. There was no evidence linking the key suspect (the estranged common law husband of the victim) to the jacket, but numerous strands...

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