Post by oksaradt on Apr 5, 2008 12:06:30 GMT -5
This post is a mixture of a teaching, experience, and a little brag.
During Dax's training when she was about 4 years of age, I was lucky enough to hook up with a county historian who was in charge of all the cemeteries in her county. Her cemetery caretakers were beginning to complain of digging new graves and finding bones already there. For judeo-christian cemeteries this is an inconvenience. In New Orelans they use mausoleums and shove your ancestor's bones to the back with a broom where they fall down upon all your other ancestors. Now there's room for your body....joy joy.
Native Americans take a much dimmer view of disturbing their ancestors. Through providence and reputation, a nation contacted me to see if we could help. Dax did specialize in historic work for three years and she's been burnin' up Murphy's buried problems, so I felt confident she still had it in her to work cemeteries. Some native American burial grounds can be very difficult as some cultures would have nature clean the flesh from their dead's bones first, then bury their loved ones in parabolic graves; Thus, the dog is only working skeletal and maybe dental.
I live in a state of multiple native American nations and I consider it a great honor if I'm asked to help with their dead. Ya see, I'm about as European descent as they come. My lines have been researched back to the 16th century. There's miners, bankers, preachers, lawyers, soldiers, Irish, Cornish, Germanic, and some Scott but no native american blood. Believe it or not, descending from a Ross (scot) can actually be a good thing with some native American nations. For some native American nations, having no native American OR having known "Indian Fighters" in your line is just not acceptable, so I'm always up front about my lines. One of the dog handlers I used to work with was a descendant of Custer.....bad ju ju. In Oklahoma, it's more common to have some native American blood in you than not. I have several ancestors that came in with the Land Runs. Why go into all of this? If you work native American burial grounds, it helps to know your lineage as many will ask. It's important to them and you are there with their permission. Did I do all that research? No way. My wife is one of those obsessive genealogist types. She does my lineage when her lines get boring. She's actually working on a 2nd journal publication. She's good.
So, what's the advantage of training extremely old buried remains if you want to do Search and Recovery work with your dog? If your dog can work 100-140 year old buried remains, a clandestine grave.....not so hard.
So, my fee in working cemeteries? I ask for gas as it's gotten so high and I ask that my younger dog be allowed to train on the finds once we're done. I consider doing this as community service. I don't do this to make bucks. Hey, in my opinion the native American people got the supreme shaft from people of my cultures from routine breaking of promises to biological warfare (some of those blankets came off disease-ridden dead....). I help identify their ancestor's last resting place....a very small payback.
So, working cemeteries is not quite the same as working area searches unless you aren't sure if there is a cemetery there. And, in this case, our first time with this nation was as much a test for Dax and myself as it was anything else. A GPR (ground penetrating RADAR) had been used in the past, so they had a good idea of what was where, just not specifics as their markers had gotten destroyed. We did do a cemetery, but Dax also worked another area where several bodies had been located using GPR and were known to be very spread out and in an urban setting. As a handler, all you can do is let the dog work and hope your training was correct. Apparently, Dax was spot on with her tests as she located three very old clandestine graves (though deep) and our host was happy.
Working a cemetery is a mixture of working a scent-rich environment (they've been there for a very long time) and overlap (they usually aren't very far apart). Doing such work requires that you and your dog (we call it) can dance. Basically, the dog and you have worked out a routine to grid an area in narrow alleys that allows the dog to come across the scent and then target the strongest point. For my dogs, as I prefer to do the bulk of my buried training with teeth, they tend to target the head....most teeth and bone all in one point. I've worked with dog teams that target the pelvis for adipocere (a soapy substance that develops from body fat and chemicals in the soil/water). As long as your dog is consistent and you know why, it doesn't matter which.
Without directing or cueing your dog, you have to tightly control your dog's work area. What I like to do is basically let the dog wander the area for about five minutes to let her acclimate. If she makes a find during this time, then it's game on. If she doesn't, I wait until she starts to entertain herself, then I direct the gridding. You have to be able to do this without giving the dog the impression that there is anything to find. Bascially, the scent work is still up to her.
Headstones tend to be scent sponges, so young dogs tend to like them and indicate on them. Many stones may have bodies on four sides, so it doesn't do you much good to know the headstone smells. This is what all those buried progression problems the dogs go through come into play. You should have created a command word that the dog understands means "check the ground." I tend to use the Schutzhund track command because I started out doing groundwork trailing and you stick with what's comfortable for you. You can also have the situation in conventional cemeteries where the headstone stayed, but the body got moved to another cemetery.
Also, with native Americans, they are very sensitive about not distrubing remains. They don't care if they are there. The prefer Nature to deal with them in its own time. They don't want the remains disturbed by man, so they are senstive to new construction as well. Dax and I also had to work 4 acres of new construction that the builders forgot to notify the nation on. A point that you need to keep up with those negative searches as well as you never know where they will bite you. Our negative search showed where someone had bled on eletrical PVC, but nothing else. If we had found graves, NAGPRA would have gotten involved. NAGPRA stands for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. So, even finding old graves can get stickey in the courts.
So, with that, Dax located a total of 48 graves, 45 in the cemetery and 3 elsewhere. Time worked in the cemetery was about an hour, give or take. Conditions were excellant: Overcast, soil temperature was about 4 degrees warmer than air temperature, high humidity. The scent was lofting about 8-12 inches above the ground by the way Dax was working. She only had to put her nose down if I asked her to pinpoint.
Murphy located six graves that Dax already had and one she didn't as they were only interested in a specific area of the cemetery. Murphy was on longline and wandered over there while I was talking to my host. He became very adament and began barking. I recognized from the chest collapse depression that he had one and verbally praised him. He wouldn't stop barking till I placed a flag. He pawed the spot he liked three times to make his point. I think he'll do just fine.
The cemetery has been in place since 1869. Graves of this area were suspected to be from 1869 to 1910.
Regards,
Jim Delbridge
During Dax's training when she was about 4 years of age, I was lucky enough to hook up with a county historian who was in charge of all the cemeteries in her county. Her cemetery caretakers were beginning to complain of digging new graves and finding bones already there. For judeo-christian cemeteries this is an inconvenience. In New Orelans they use mausoleums and shove your ancestor's bones to the back with a broom where they fall down upon all your other ancestors. Now there's room for your body....joy joy.
Native Americans take a much dimmer view of disturbing their ancestors. Through providence and reputation, a nation contacted me to see if we could help. Dax did specialize in historic work for three years and she's been burnin' up Murphy's buried problems, so I felt confident she still had it in her to work cemeteries. Some native American burial grounds can be very difficult as some cultures would have nature clean the flesh from their dead's bones first, then bury their loved ones in parabolic graves; Thus, the dog is only working skeletal and maybe dental.
I live in a state of multiple native American nations and I consider it a great honor if I'm asked to help with their dead. Ya see, I'm about as European descent as they come. My lines have been researched back to the 16th century. There's miners, bankers, preachers, lawyers, soldiers, Irish, Cornish, Germanic, and some Scott but no native american blood. Believe it or not, descending from a Ross (scot) can actually be a good thing with some native American nations. For some native American nations, having no native American OR having known "Indian Fighters" in your line is just not acceptable, so I'm always up front about my lines. One of the dog handlers I used to work with was a descendant of Custer.....bad ju ju. In Oklahoma, it's more common to have some native American blood in you than not. I have several ancestors that came in with the Land Runs. Why go into all of this? If you work native American burial grounds, it helps to know your lineage as many will ask. It's important to them and you are there with their permission. Did I do all that research? No way. My wife is one of those obsessive genealogist types. She does my lineage when her lines get boring. She's actually working on a 2nd journal publication. She's good.
So, what's the advantage of training extremely old buried remains if you want to do Search and Recovery work with your dog? If your dog can work 100-140 year old buried remains, a clandestine grave.....not so hard.
So, my fee in working cemeteries? I ask for gas as it's gotten so high and I ask that my younger dog be allowed to train on the finds once we're done. I consider doing this as community service. I don't do this to make bucks. Hey, in my opinion the native American people got the supreme shaft from people of my cultures from routine breaking of promises to biological warfare (some of those blankets came off disease-ridden dead....). I help identify their ancestor's last resting place....a very small payback.
So, working cemeteries is not quite the same as working area searches unless you aren't sure if there is a cemetery there. And, in this case, our first time with this nation was as much a test for Dax and myself as it was anything else. A GPR (ground penetrating RADAR) had been used in the past, so they had a good idea of what was where, just not specifics as their markers had gotten destroyed. We did do a cemetery, but Dax also worked another area where several bodies had been located using GPR and were known to be very spread out and in an urban setting. As a handler, all you can do is let the dog work and hope your training was correct. Apparently, Dax was spot on with her tests as she located three very old clandestine graves (though deep) and our host was happy.
Working a cemetery is a mixture of working a scent-rich environment (they've been there for a very long time) and overlap (they usually aren't very far apart). Doing such work requires that you and your dog (we call it) can dance. Basically, the dog and you have worked out a routine to grid an area in narrow alleys that allows the dog to come across the scent and then target the strongest point. For my dogs, as I prefer to do the bulk of my buried training with teeth, they tend to target the head....most teeth and bone all in one point. I've worked with dog teams that target the pelvis for adipocere (a soapy substance that develops from body fat and chemicals in the soil/water). As long as your dog is consistent and you know why, it doesn't matter which.
Without directing or cueing your dog, you have to tightly control your dog's work area. What I like to do is basically let the dog wander the area for about five minutes to let her acclimate. If she makes a find during this time, then it's game on. If she doesn't, I wait until she starts to entertain herself, then I direct the gridding. You have to be able to do this without giving the dog the impression that there is anything to find. Bascially, the scent work is still up to her.
Headstones tend to be scent sponges, so young dogs tend to like them and indicate on them. Many stones may have bodies on four sides, so it doesn't do you much good to know the headstone smells. This is what all those buried progression problems the dogs go through come into play. You should have created a command word that the dog understands means "check the ground." I tend to use the Schutzhund track command because I started out doing groundwork trailing and you stick with what's comfortable for you. You can also have the situation in conventional cemeteries where the headstone stayed, but the body got moved to another cemetery.
Also, with native Americans, they are very sensitive about not distrubing remains. They don't care if they are there. The prefer Nature to deal with them in its own time. They don't want the remains disturbed by man, so they are senstive to new construction as well. Dax and I also had to work 4 acres of new construction that the builders forgot to notify the nation on. A point that you need to keep up with those negative searches as well as you never know where they will bite you. Our negative search showed where someone had bled on eletrical PVC, but nothing else. If we had found graves, NAGPRA would have gotten involved. NAGPRA stands for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. So, even finding old graves can get stickey in the courts.
So, with that, Dax located a total of 48 graves, 45 in the cemetery and 3 elsewhere. Time worked in the cemetery was about an hour, give or take. Conditions were excellant: Overcast, soil temperature was about 4 degrees warmer than air temperature, high humidity. The scent was lofting about 8-12 inches above the ground by the way Dax was working. She only had to put her nose down if I asked her to pinpoint.
Murphy located six graves that Dax already had and one she didn't as they were only interested in a specific area of the cemetery. Murphy was on longline and wandered over there while I was talking to my host. He became very adament and began barking. I recognized from the chest collapse depression that he had one and verbally praised him. He wouldn't stop barking till I placed a flag. He pawed the spot he liked three times to make his point. I think he'll do just fine.
The cemetery has been in place since 1869. Graves of this area were suspected to be from 1869 to 1910.
Regards,
Jim Delbridge