What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren

to find bombs and weapons. Hijackings, bombings, and assassinations were on the rise in the United States: what one researcher called “the ills of the 1960s.”
    It wasn’t just in law enforcement that the uses of dogs’ noses started multiplying. Seattle area trainer and handler Marcia Koenig, one of the early volunteer search-dog team members, tracks the history of volunteersearch-dog teams to 1962, when the German Shepherd Dog Club of Washington State formed the first air-scenting search-dog group. One of its founders, Bill Syrotuck, wrote the clear, concise book Scent and the Scenting Dog (one of the books Nancy Hook had permitted me to read). Today volunteer groups deploy to search in wilderness areas, in avalanches, on water, and in disasters. Marcia Koenig estimates that the U.S. has more than five hundred volunteer teams.
    While working dogs were off and running by the mid-1960s, it’s best not to feel too sentimental about what that growth represents. Each time a dog accomplishes a particular task for humans isn’t automatically a moment for celebration. Dogs may have co-evolved with us, but they don’t have a lot of say in how we decide to use them, so the “co” gives a false impression of equity. The dog mostly tries to please us, using its “canid tool kit of flexible sociality, a good nose, and expertise in hunting,” as John Bradshaw, Foundation Director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol, puts it.
    Good working dogs have to move swiftly, hear acutely, smell well, and communicate clearly with their handlers—even bite on occasion. Since domestication, they’ve been used as adjuncts for the evil that people do, as well as the good, and sometimes both at once. They can be used to consolidate or pervert power in concrete ways. They can track a slave, a lost child, or a rapist without distinguishing. They can help suppress peaceful civil rights protesters or control an angry mob that’s up to no good. People create the problems, and working dogs come along for the ride. Right now, as we engage in conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia, we use dogs to find bombs and control the groups fighting against us. When domestic boas and pythons get too big for Florida apartments, they are dumped in the Everglades, and we use dogs to locate them before the snakes decimate the native wildlife. We have huge prisons filled with contraband and cell phones, and we use dogs to find them.
    Though we’ve been using working dogs for tens of thousands of years, academic researchers are just starting to catch up with what these dogs do and how. Characterizing and understanding dogs’ olfactoryand cognitive skills isn’t best done in a lab with limited and usually untrained dog subjects. If working dogs are overrated in the popular imagination, they have been mostly underrated in science, although that is rapidly changing. Nonetheless, far too much scientific work on dog cognition and olfaction has been done on pets—dogs who don’t use their brains and noses for a living.
    Just as Berkeley scientists took undergraduates out of the psych lab and onto the grass to track, just as Avery Gilbert urged neurobiologists into the kitchen of a great chef or the lab of a master perfumer to understand how human experts process scent, some working-dog experts are urging psychologists and neurobiologists to start using working dogs as research subjects.
    The first scientific problem-solving tests with dogs appear to be those of Edward Thorndike, who served as president of the American Psychological Association at the turn of the twentieth century. He created “puzzle boxes” (precursors of the Skinner box), put domestic dogs and cats in them, and waited for them to figure out how to escape. The performance of both species was disappointing. Thorndike’s conclusion was that operant conditioning, rather than any independent cognitive