What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren Page B

breeds’. Solo’s nose on this spreadsheet was very good but not excellent. Much of the best-selling dog literature promotes the concept that the more smell receptor cells a dog has in its nose, the better its scenting ability: “For example, the Dachshund has around 125 million smell receptor cells, while a Fox terrier has 147 million and the German Shepherd has about 225 million.” The bloodhound has all those breeds beat, with 300 million receptors.
    Nancy Hook thinks such distinctions are silly. If she wanted to, she said scornfully to me, she could train her daughter’s Chihuahua, Pip, to find bodies. Lindsay drove the point home with smug delight by pointing out that her Pip could get into small spaces, unlike Solo, who is huge and clumsy.
    Nancy and Lindsay were right. I ran across a National Institute of Justice report that quoted Lester Shubin, then a program manager with the NIJ. He and another researcher, Nicholas Montanarelli, would go on to collaborate on a number of projects, but at that time, Nick was a project director for the U.S. Army’s Land Warfare Laboratory in Maryland. He was a military researcher who had started thinking early on about the potential of working dogs. He and Shubin were early proponents of bomb-detection dogs in the mid-1960s, when skepticism ran high about any dog’s abilities. The two men didn’t considerjust German shepherds or Labradors—they worked with poodles and other breeds. Unlike me, Montanarelli and Shubin had open minds, uncontaminated by the love of shepherd.
    â€œWe learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs, even very small dogs like Chihuahuas whose size could be an advantage,” Shubin wrote in the NIJ report. “Who is going to look twice at someone in a fur coat carrying a dog? But that dog could smell a bomb as well as the German shepherd.”
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    And when the bloodhound came to the chief market-town, he passed through the streets without taking any notice of any of the people there, and left not till he had gone to the house where the man he sought rested himself, and found him in an upper room, to the wonder of those that followed him.
    â€”Robert Boyle, Essays of the Strange Subtilty, Great Efficacy, Determinate Nature of Effluviums , 1673
    Enough of Chihuahuas and German shepherds. Consider the bloodhound. Surely there’s no debate about that nose being the best in the business.
    Of course there is. I didn’t think much about the bloodhound before getting Solo. What little I knew about its history, restrictively framed by popular culture, made me uncomfortable. With all that loose skin and hulking bone and wrinkle, the bloodhound is a generous and expandable doggie container into which we can throw all the myths, contradictions, drawbacks—and yes, even the real wonders of the working dog. It’s a pity that there’s so much contradictory nonsense about bloodhounds, and that I briefly bought in to some of it: not the silly pictures of bloodhounds wearing Sherlock hats and smoking pipes but the more serious nonsense about the bloodhound nose being the purest and most advanced miracle of nature, or the claims of bloodhoundsbeing able to follow four-month-old tracks and trail cars for miles down freeways.
    Exaggerations about the bloodhound’s nose distract from the truth about a fine single-purpose trailing dog. If you want to watch a working dog’s nose do its business, there’s no more beautiful sight than that of a good trailing bloodhound. On the other hand, I’ve also watched Belgian Malinois run wonderful trails, as well as Labradors, Plott hounds, one Weimaraner, and a bunch of mutts. And, of course, German shepherds. Chihuahuas are probably a stretch for trailing, at least over long distances. Let’s face it: None of these breeds is as evocative as the bloodhound. Or as storied. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night