old graves

[rthonor]

HOw does one get into this area of HR? I live in Louisiana.

[oksaradt]

Contact your state historical socieity.
Find the US Roots Web grave project online and check the counties in your state for documented cemeteries.
Contact your state gemealogical society.
Basically, every state is different, but some of us worked the cemetery at Scottsville on Friday before leaving. I've worked it every year to show what's possible. That's only 40 miles from Louisiana, so I know they have old cemeteries there too.
The above ground mausoleums in New Orleans probably wouldn't help you much.

Jim

[oksaradt]

Louisiana US Genweb project. Look for cemeteries under the transcription link:

www.lagenweb.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1


Jim

[rthonor]

thanks, rt

[rthonor]

My family has an old cemetary. Some of the grades are marked in the 1800s. They all have very old, headstones. So, would it be of benefit to take my dogs there and see how they react? Is this a place to start? thanks,rt

[oksaradt]

Sure, but I must caution you to not coax the dogs in any way. The biggest mistake handlers make is they get in a hurry or anticipate their dog will do it.
If your dogs understand that sources can be buried and in your case due to grave age, historic sources can be buried then you can run them through the area. I would run the dogs through the area as a negative with you never hesitating in the area. Give them three chances each to notice or not the scent from the graves and headstones, approaching from three different directions. If they don't then have the discipline to move on; Otherwise, you run the heavy risk of creating a dog that is cue-dependent upon you and not scent-dependent.

As with Thorpe and the sub-surface problems, I contained his area to about 80 feet by 140 feet with 12 sources in the center line. The first time he worked through it, he only got scent in the shade. Rather than focusing him near the sources, I took him out of the area and we spent three weeks working 1-2 historic level teeth in various ground hugging scenarios. Last night was the result of a warm day with a cold front coming through such that the ground was warm and the air was cool. Scent was pushed up. I worked him on four surface problems and we were then migrating to a rib bone in grass that had been in my gravel drive but heavy rains eroded that section (which was how it got there in the first place) and pushed it out. The sub-surface teeth set was in our path. Thorpe picked up scent and began working, so I slowed down and let him work it out. He did a touch, I looked at the flags, he was spot on, so I rewarded. I went into his current required cheerleading mode and went back to containing his area, but letting him free search. (Cheerleading mode for Thorpe is me randomly saying "you can do it." if he's trying to problem solve. For Murphy, if he's in a scent problem, I simply tell him matter-of-factly, "work it out.......sometime today, aye?" No cueing is involved. I prefer to shut up and let the dog work, but stroke each dog as needed.)
He found three more sets with each time pumping him more to the point that he gave me a bark on the last two as well as the touch. The point is not to brag on him, but to demonstrate that this was a result of continuing to teach his nose to be finer tuned to historic teeth and that we went into the area with optimal results.
Murphy can get most of these in crappy conditions as he's that far advanced and much more methodical, but that's the result of continually pushing his limits over three years.

So, yes, you can try your dogs on the family graves, with and without headstones. Dogs tend to either find the seams or scent concentration of a grave itself. Try each dog one at a time as a negative area and allow them to miss it if they aren't ready. If they pick up scent and don't know what to do with it, that tells you which dogs might be trained to do this confidently. Have someone watch you to make sure you aren't cueing the dog even by simply walking slower as you near the graves. Only if the dog alerts/indicates on its own without any encouragement by you do you then have the dilemma of rewarding, when and for what.

With Murphy, his first introduction to graves was a native american christian-style burial ground that Dax was working. At 3-4 months of age (I'd have to check his logs), he found a grave all on his own as he was watching what Dax was getting rewarded for. Did that mean I felt he was ready to go work cemeteries? No way. It gave me a warm glow that he'd work out after the regimen of training gave him the tools he'd need. With Thorpe, he got drowned in scent at the Denver Jewish cemetery that Murphy blew through. He got to take it all in and then told me something was there. Murphy never had it that good as a puppy.

A handler in Texas had a sweet malinois that passed the NNDDA test at 8 months of age. 1) this demonstrates the test isn't comprehensive, 2) The handler is continually tempted to work the dog after that before it matured mentally.
The handler had to give up the dog because it developed biting issues that the handler wasn't comfortable dealing with. The dog was given to Law Enforcement, so not a complete waste.

Since I'm throwing out caveats, a year or so ago, a handler thought his dog had found more clandestine graves around where the Manson Family had stayed before they were caught and imprisoned. There were videos of the dog working. Vass went out there to work with the dog. No more graves were found, but the dog was very entertaining as it would run out to a spot and slam into a down. Such a performance suggested the dog was no longer using its nose. Even if my dogs know where a source is, I expect them to re-check to target precisely.
I have to think that with that dog that the dog might have gotten a hit of something nearby and the handler talked it into alerting at that spot. The dog then associated that spot with reward rather than scent with the mentality, "hey, if he wants me to down here and gives me a ball for it then I'll do it. I just want the ball." I felt bad for the handler. Someone should have taught him better. Vass explained it away that the dog was probably getting scent from a nearby location, but the sand was making it tough to locate. Perhaps Vass will pinpoint it with his new L.A.B.R.A.D.O.R.....his tool to emulate the cadaver dog by identifying certain chemicals known to be emitted by decomposing humans. Time will tell.

Just be careful and objective,

Jim

[rthonor]

Just to clarify my understanding of what you do with the grave detection, do you have a way to validate your finds? Does someone dig at the site? Do you report your finds to someone?
thanks,rt

[oksaradt]

If you are working graves just for training, then you thank the residents for allowing us to play in their home, take photos of your flags, collect them back, and move down the road.

If you are helping to reclaim a cemetery for a family, a genealogist, historian, or caretaker then you buy new flags at Home Depot (about $7 per 100 right now), map your finds, take photos, and ask the party if you've searched everywhere they were interested in. For example, many older cemteries may have people buried just outside the cemetery due to racial or cultural bigotries. The caretakers of today want to know if the stories were true or just BS, so they usually ask you to check other places.

If you want to confirm a grave where you are the only human out there, then you can use a plumber's probe to locate the seams of the grave as the soil of the grave will be softer than the soil around it. You want to do this as unobtrusively as possible out of respect if nothing else. Probing the grave will not tell you if someone is there though, just that a hole has been dug. The remains could have been moved. Sometimes when the dead are moved to a different resting place, the service doesn't get all of the remains (especially if they are very old and fragile).

Validation for training is where you are best served to hook up with a county historian and/or genealogist that knows the area and the cemetery. With my first dog, Dax, I worked every cemetery in Ellis county, Oklahoma. I worked with a county servant who was getting some reimbursement for all the time she spent with me to document all the cemeteries in the county accurately. She grew up there and had lived all of her 60-plus years in the area. It is farm country with a lot of towns that didn't survive the Dust Bowl, but the cemeteries remain.

Since then I've located multiple cemeteries over the years where I know where all the bodies are buried and can quietly go in to work them from time to time for training. As you get practices at this you also learn to pick up on other signs once the dog starts showing you patterns, but not always. I can rarely spot mass graves of children from epidemics. If possible I do gently try to pump the caretakers for all the information I can through stories and history of a cemetery. I worked a cemetery in Colorado with "bonefinder" and thought I saw in my dog the behavior from multiple child graves. I got an opportunity to talk to the caretaker and she confirmed there had been a measles epidemic (I think) back in the 1920s or so. Conditions change in the weather such that we were able to go back and I let Murphy run that area again, this time he was solid on there being multiple children's graves tightly buried together in one area. I was intent on finding the kid's graves as I think they often get forgotten due to rarely there being a headstone in such situations, but Murphy was the one that had to prove or disprove me right. Infant and children's graves are the toughest to find. Infants because they are more cartilage than bone, often buried without a coffin. They can easily be missed if they aren't massed together.
For me, reclaiming a cemetery is a nice thing to do for a community that also improves my dog, but allowing the children to come back to be remembered is something special.

To do a cemetery right, you either hook-up with historian/genealogist or you do the research yourself as to who might be there to find.

To train at first, it's absolute that you work with someone that knows where the bodies are buried such that you don't screw up your dog OR you follow behind experienced historic level HRD dogs with a proven track record.


Jim

[rthonor]

ok, thanks for explaining. rt

[rthonor]

Ok, I did some research on this cemetary, which is mostly my family and one other family. THere are about 80 graves in the section I worked. The part below the fenced area- the corner that she went to alot, has some marked and UNmarked graves. So, what would you suggest I do next?

[oksaradt]

Iwould suggest you slow down to focus on the target and alert on buried teeth. The cemetery isn't going anywhere.
Teach your dog what is expected of it as far as locating buried teeth and this should translate to the skulls. If the dog's foundation is more towards decomp then it will most likely decide to target the hips. Either way, you don't have an alert and you don't have precise targeting on buried yet, so let the graves wait until you give your dog tools to work with in communicating with you.

Ya gotta walk before you can run. Perhaps Bonnie can provide her opinion. She took a short cut with Porter on cemeteries and then compared his performance to Murphy's. At that time she was heavily contemplating going back to working more buried teeth. I don't know if she followed through.

Map out your cemetery on paper and when you think your dog can work the unmarked graves due to consistent performance with buried teeth, then go try just the unmarked graves. A whole grave will always be easier than buried teeth, but the teeth give you a method to teach your dog grid searching techniques.

Always train beyond the job to produce a dependable, honest dog.


Jim

[rthonor]

I hear you. I agree. I just wondered it I could sometimes vary her work up....the fascination with the old cemetary is only recent.....I dont completely understand it so therefore, it is interesting.

She gets bored easily. She had fun yesterday. She was very proud- if dogs get proud??? I think she felt she did good. She laid beside me afterwards and played with me. Thats new. I think I almost interested her.

I guess the greatest thing for me in all of this, is that I now believe (despite what I have been told about her play drive- hence lack of reward system ) that she might can do this after all.

Her foundation is teeth and a scrap of bone. I only do decomp when I train with the SAR group or police. At home- its all teeth.

Just curious- dont shoot me- do you ever use psuedo scent? where can I get a bone?

[rthonor]

Reading back at a post you commented on a plumbers probe and in one thread you had a photo of it.
Can you explain how its used? thanks. rt

[oksaradt]

Sources for legal human bones are
www.skullsunlimited.com
www.boneroom.com

Bones have become very expensive in the past year because China suddenly shut their doors to emptying out their cemeteries to build factories. Prior to that, India's unclean sold their bones as it was not acceptable for them to be buried on India's soil, but that stopped as well.
Those that wanted to work "greasy bones" complained that the bone room's bones were too clean. For historic work, there's no such thing as "too clean". Besides, you can always rub an historic bone down with adipose tissue if you wish to make it "greasy".

As for Pseudo Scent, NO, I don't use it to train HRD dogs. I think it's ok for narc dogs as most narcotics are man-made chemicals anyway except pot, hashish, peyote, etc. Most of the narc dog handlers I know locally are training on 4 sources per dog per what's popular in their area.

For HRD, pseudo has only two of the 478 chemicals currently known to come off of a decomposing body and it's in an accellerant carrier. It trains a dog to alert in scent pool as there is no source for the dog to target. Water psuedo is the same way and I've personally observed the crappy targeting it creates in dogs trained on it (not mine). Rebman and Koenig used to be totally sold on it as Rebman helped Sigma design it, but over the years they've softened their stand to say it's an ok way to imprint. Sorry, I don't think there is any place for psuedo in the HRD dog world.

Running your dog through a cemetery periodically is ok to give both you and the dog a nice warm fuzzy, but if you keep taking her back to the same cemetery then it will become useless as a training ground. Orthodox Jews do not believe in embalming, wish to be buried within a day of death, and the coffin is designed to return them to the earth as they decompose. For HRD dogs, it's a dream come true. When Bonnie's Porter first got to experience one he was truly like a kid in a candy store. Bonnie had no idea what had come over her dog as he was dancing around the area, rolling in the grass, and basically in love with all the vegetation as it ALL had absorbed HR's scent. The hard part for her was settling him down to focus on unique graves. And.....Porter rocks in HRD. He's a natural.

A plumber's probe is the poor man's version of a geological soil probe. We don't need to take a soil sample with it, so it works very nicely. It's basically a steel rod with a perpendicular handle at one end to support our hands. If your dog indicates on an unmarked grave and you just aren't sure then you can use it to define the edges of the grave as the soil in the grave will always be softer than the soil outside the grave due to less time being compacted. The rod is usually about three foot long and made of steel. Back when I started, dog handlers thought one should probe suspect clandestine grave sites to bring the scent up for an easier find. The FBI likes to use them to determine if the ground is soft enough for a grave to be possible......ground too hard then your dog sucks if it indicated on that spot. The FBI doesn't recognize that your dog may have been hitting on 200 year old native american bones instead of their 10-year old grave they were hoping you'd find. All they cared about was it wasn't what they were looking for; Therefore, your dogs sucked. *grin* Gotta love the "feebies".

One last word on cemeteries, you've been training on little bits of historic human remains. A cemetery is A LOT OF HUMAN REMAINS....all in one place. It's like taking a teenager that's only had a hand-held transistor radio to a Deep Purple rock concert (ok, aging myself now...but my ears did ring for three hours after the concert was over). That's why she was so relaxed. That she likes it there, yes, that's a good sign.



Jim

[bonefinder]

Hi RT,
I've had a terrible signal ( on vacation) so I would have chimed in earlier. Personally, it seems like you are throwing an awful lot at your dog.......teeth, one bone, then right to buried, but no solid alert.
I would really think about backing up and working on a solid alert. The fact that you have a target is good but you still need the alert first before you start doing lots of graves. The graves aren't going anywhere. You should never feel bad about backing up with your dog. If something is not going well and things are 'hit and miss", BACK YOUR TRAINING UP. Don't ADD to it.
I can use myself as an example. My dog is now NAPWDA certified. This, to me, means little more than we have a certificate. Porter is very very good but he still messes up. This past two weeks, I realized I haven't proofed him off animal bones and cremains in a VERY LONG TIME. Guess what? He alerted on dog cremains this week. Bad handler. He can find a small human bone shard in a pile of ground up trees but he also alerted on dog cremains. So.......what to do? Back up to scent stations, easy problems with all kinds of sources out there, keeping it simple and quick, with a quick reward. So simple, yet I hadn't been doing it.....not in a long time. That's on ME, not the dog.
In a nutshell, if your cohorts think you are cueing your dog, you probably are and just not realizing it. How close a proximity are you to your dog when working him? Are you under foot? Leading the way? Using your arms or pointing at all? Could your dog still work if you had a lasso tied around your arms and tethered to your side, and if you had a mask over your face? Are you standing too still? You should always be moving around as standing still can be a death sentence for cueing.........YOU stop so the dog thinks there MUST be something here.
You should be able to give your dog directionals to work from afar.......you could be 30 feet away and have the dog change direction on command. The dog should be able to work AWAY from you.
Jim is truly an expert in bringing out an alert and targeting in a dog, even OTHER peoples' dogs. I've watched him do it with my dog and I've watched him do it with other dogs, dogs who don't give a rat's butt who he is.......so if HE can get a strange dog to alert and to target, then the owner can do an even greater job of this. Your dog must have this.

I can't speak for your dog or his drive, but the dog must inherently have drive, high drive, or it is so much harder to do this. I have a very high drive dog and it has made training him much easier but there are pitfalls with this as well. I have to really be on my toes ALL THE TIME. He is known to pull a fast one on me, just to get his reward.
Jim's Murphy is, in my opinion, a much lower drive dog but Jim has superb training skills and he has used his expertise in bringing out the absolute BEST in this dog. He is slow, methodical, a real detail dog. He doesn't goof around alot. He is superb for grave work or as detail work.
By all means, buy more bone. One bone and a few teeth is a very small source pool to train from. My personal preference has always been the bone room. Some of the bones are VERY expensive but you can get some metatarsals/phalanges and some ribs for a fairly decent price. It is worth the investment. The really don't deteriorate and you can use them over and over. Also, I have found the bone room to be very helpful over the phone. They will sometimes have some broken bones to offer at a reduced price, so it pays to call them on the phone.
As Jim mentioned, I did skip the tooth field stage and went right to graves, but I would not recommend doing that to anybody else. I got lucky doing it. I have the world's best graveyard to work here so I was able to pull it off. I still plan on burying teeth this fall to use for targeting though. You just can't go wrong doing that.
Bonnie