Federal Turf Wars Over How to Train Explosives Detection Dogs

On August 11, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to the Directors of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) specifying that as “soon as practicable, all Department components that use explosives detection canines shall use only canines certified by ATF.”(1) This did not happen in the Bush administration, and seven years later in the Obama administration the FBI continues to use dogs not certified by...

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The Dogs of the Conquistadors

Reading Dogs of the Conquest by John and Jeannette Varner reminded me of reading Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee almost forty years ago. After a while you just want it to stop. Every page in the Varners' book has a horror. Just one example:“A letter of protest, dated June 4, 1516, from fourteen Dominican priests of Hispaniola [the island that now contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic] to a royal counselor related … how on one occasion...

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K9 Fraud! Essential Reading for Handlers, Lawyers, and Judges

A book that should be in every police canine handler’s library, as well as the library of every lawyer and judge who handles cases involving canine evidence, is K9 Fraud! Fraudulent Handling of Police Search Dogs, by Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak (Detselig Enterprises Ltd., Calgary, Canada, 2010). The authors are married and live in the Czech Republic near the Austrian border, where they are training directors for the International Red Cross Federal,...

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Canoe Conquests of the Western Pacific: Who Brought the Dingo Ancestors, and Why?

That Australian dingoes descended from domesticated dogs was considered a possibility by Hamilton Smith (1856) more than a century and a half ago, and the first plate is one of several paintings of dingoes that he published in his volumes on dogs. Edward C. Ash (1927, p. 24) described the dingo as follows: “Canis dingo is smaller than the wolf, and has somewhat long legs. It stands 24 inches at the shoulder. The tail is bushy. There is a greyish...

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