Post by oksaradt on Jul 14, 2008 10:01:00 GMT -5
One of the definitions of this is the mathematical version where an unknown is determined by comparing it to two unknowns of greater or lesser value.
What in the heck does this have to do with canine scent work?
This is what we actually demand of HRD and Tracking/Trailing dogs on actual searches. We blindly expect them to interpolate an unknown from the “knowns” we’ve shown them in the past. Trailing/tracking dogs sometimes get a little help in they get to scent off a scent article for comparison. The last bloodhound I laid a trail for got my OCME Photo I.D. to scent off of as it sits in my wallet on my butt most of the time.
So, what’s the big deal?
Invariably you will read or hear people starting to train in HRD asking, “What do I do with my sources as far as keeping them pristine?” Well, if it’s tissue, some of it needs to be frozen (even better, vacuum packed and frozen) to keep it pristine, but other samples of it should be allowed to do what’s natural, i.e. decompose. If some handler/trainer is lucky enough to get some fresh bone from someone that lost part of themselves due to calamity, part of it needs to be frozen and again other parts need to be allowed to degrade as nature intended us to do.
Why?
Because the more windows of human decomposition we can expose our HRD dogs to, the better chances we have that the dog will have an ”AH-HAH!” moment on a real search. So far the Body Farm types have identified over 460 chemical compounds that the body puts out in gaseous form during the decomposition process. I believe Narc dog handlers tend to train their dogs on 4 to 7 of the drugs they expect to find in their neck of the woods. Dr. Bill Bass has stated in radio interviews that he thinks dogs can probably detect 20 or so scents. The crux of it is that no one really knows how many compounds dogs’ noses can reliably detect.
Yet, we expect the dog to tell us when it finds human remains buried, scattered about, up in the trees, in concrete, in junk yards, behind the local Burger King, and so it goes. Imagine the nastiest place you can walk upon and HRD dogs are often expected to look there. The body may have been there a day or it might have been there two decades or two centuries.
To make matters worse, we expect the dog to be able to discern between human remains and all others. There’s a common thread on the K9 Forensic list right now about a team that was embarrassed because their three dogs all indicated/alerted on a fresh grave with the sign “Baby” over it. Turns out baby was someone’s pet and not the human kind. There could be several reasons this happened from the handlers talked their dogs into it (the ultimate fear of the responsible handler) to simply the handlers/trainers never thought to “proof” their dogs on non-human remains. The dogs had been taught to tell their handlers about decomposing mammalian remains and by gosh they may have done just that. If you recall in the last buried series that was set up for young Murphy, three of the buried holes he had to work had animal remains dropped down them. This sort of training has to be part of the dogs training through out, both the “tell me about this and I’ll be very happy” and the “Don’t you DARE tell me about this! I’ll be so upset!” So, more interpolation that we lay upon the canine partner.
So, what is the handler/trainer to do?
You decide what range of human remains you expect to be called to work your dog on. If you get calls for something you haven’t trained on, tell L.E. up front that you haven’t trained on it and any results your dog has could be very circumspect. Tell them this MANY TIMES as some times they will ask you to come out anyway. If it even remotely involves a possible criminal investigation (and it almost always does), just SAY NO if you haven’t trained on it.
So, you decide if you’ll be asked to work disasters with blood and burned tissue perhaps in many directions that your dog has to find and work around. NO? Just going to work the lost ten days to ….what?.....10 years dead? OK, then you will probably start with some fresh remains, but you should set part of them out somewhere where the insects can’t get to them and they can’t develop mold growth. You separate them into multiple samples and you write on the container when the decomposition started. You decide at what windows you want to expose your dog to and preserve each window by freezing that window (Knowing full well that freezing is going to affect your sample as well as it can possibly burst some cells from water crystal expansion). One window you will just want to leave out for all those future dogs to work as it’s going to take you 20 years to get out to that 20 year window.
With bones and teeth, sometimes you get lucky and impress someone in the academic community or anthropologist who come into contact with dirt that was all around a centuries-old or millennia-old corpse and give you some of that dirt with the knowledge that there is probably bone dust in it that they just can’t use. So, if you are into Historic work, you have another window for your bone samples. If the body was mummified, you may be lucky enough to have extremely old tissue samples. Such is the world of the HRD handler. You might find yourself ooooing and ahhing with anticipation over a jar of dust handed to you from someone in the know. To cover your butt, you send samples to other dog handlers that work this specialty and ask them to confirm if their dogs can hit on it. If you really want to cover your butt, then you send them a blank sample of clean sand and ask them to tell you which samples are good and which got no results. THEN, and only then, do you try your dog on it and hope to the canine powers that be, that your dog recognizes FROM INTERPOLATION that this could possibly fall into the realm of human remains that you get all excited when it tells you about it.
On the reverse side of bone, if you have dried bones from one of the bone suppliers then you might rub one down with some adipose tissue as that’s what tends to leech into the bone during decomposition. Heck, you might rub some blood into it, too. You keep that bone separate and consider it “sort of decomposition material” and know that over time it will dry out completely in the sun and you may have to re-animate it. In the mean time your dog gets to see all the natural windows of bone and fat tissue in nature. With your teeth, if you are lucky enough to have a dentist or oral surgeon that takes pity on you and supplies you with teeth, you can keep some as he/she gave them to you and consider these as decomp. The others you will clean, inside and out of any tissue and use only the teeth to teach your dogs with. Some you will keep in water as those will be stronger and some you will dry out to the point where they crumble when you touch them.
And, finally, though I shouldn’t have to mention it after this as it should be obvious, but your HRD canine handler trying to get their dog “proofed” off non-human remains……. Well, we all have some container handy in our vehicles and possibly a hatchet for when we come upon those road kills. We will slam on our brakes, run out excitedly with hatchet in hand, and whack off a raccoon road-kill tail, a decomposed lost canine/feline left on the side of the road (their death wasn’t completely for nothing), or a squashed turtle. If we are out hiding for area search dogs, you’ll often see us walking out afterwards smiling with a bone from an animal that met with calamity. We are happy as it means we can proof our dog off something else and perhaps in a different window. We will tease the area search dog handler when their dog rolls in dead armadillo (a truly gawd-awful smell) and then quietly pick a piece of it up as we walk on past to save to train your dog off of. Yes, we are a gruesome lot and sometimes it’s the small things that make us happy…..oooo, like an animal toe bone…yea….sweet!
Jim
What in the heck does this have to do with canine scent work?
This is what we actually demand of HRD and Tracking/Trailing dogs on actual searches. We blindly expect them to interpolate an unknown from the “knowns” we’ve shown them in the past. Trailing/tracking dogs sometimes get a little help in they get to scent off a scent article for comparison. The last bloodhound I laid a trail for got my OCME Photo I.D. to scent off of as it sits in my wallet on my butt most of the time.
So, what’s the big deal?
Invariably you will read or hear people starting to train in HRD asking, “What do I do with my sources as far as keeping them pristine?” Well, if it’s tissue, some of it needs to be frozen (even better, vacuum packed and frozen) to keep it pristine, but other samples of it should be allowed to do what’s natural, i.e. decompose. If some handler/trainer is lucky enough to get some fresh bone from someone that lost part of themselves due to calamity, part of it needs to be frozen and again other parts need to be allowed to degrade as nature intended us to do.
Why?
Because the more windows of human decomposition we can expose our HRD dogs to, the better chances we have that the dog will have an ”AH-HAH!” moment on a real search. So far the Body Farm types have identified over 460 chemical compounds that the body puts out in gaseous form during the decomposition process. I believe Narc dog handlers tend to train their dogs on 4 to 7 of the drugs they expect to find in their neck of the woods. Dr. Bill Bass has stated in radio interviews that he thinks dogs can probably detect 20 or so scents. The crux of it is that no one really knows how many compounds dogs’ noses can reliably detect.
Yet, we expect the dog to tell us when it finds human remains buried, scattered about, up in the trees, in concrete, in junk yards, behind the local Burger King, and so it goes. Imagine the nastiest place you can walk upon and HRD dogs are often expected to look there. The body may have been there a day or it might have been there two decades or two centuries.
To make matters worse, we expect the dog to be able to discern between human remains and all others. There’s a common thread on the K9 Forensic list right now about a team that was embarrassed because their three dogs all indicated/alerted on a fresh grave with the sign “Baby” over it. Turns out baby was someone’s pet and not the human kind. There could be several reasons this happened from the handlers talked their dogs into it (the ultimate fear of the responsible handler) to simply the handlers/trainers never thought to “proof” their dogs on non-human remains. The dogs had been taught to tell their handlers about decomposing mammalian remains and by gosh they may have done just that. If you recall in the last buried series that was set up for young Murphy, three of the buried holes he had to work had animal remains dropped down them. This sort of training has to be part of the dogs training through out, both the “tell me about this and I’ll be very happy” and the “Don’t you DARE tell me about this! I’ll be so upset!” So, more interpolation that we lay upon the canine partner.
So, what is the handler/trainer to do?
You decide what range of human remains you expect to be called to work your dog on. If you get calls for something you haven’t trained on, tell L.E. up front that you haven’t trained on it and any results your dog has could be very circumspect. Tell them this MANY TIMES as some times they will ask you to come out anyway. If it even remotely involves a possible criminal investigation (and it almost always does), just SAY NO if you haven’t trained on it.
So, you decide if you’ll be asked to work disasters with blood and burned tissue perhaps in many directions that your dog has to find and work around. NO? Just going to work the lost ten days to ….what?.....10 years dead? OK, then you will probably start with some fresh remains, but you should set part of them out somewhere where the insects can’t get to them and they can’t develop mold growth. You separate them into multiple samples and you write on the container when the decomposition started. You decide at what windows you want to expose your dog to and preserve each window by freezing that window (Knowing full well that freezing is going to affect your sample as well as it can possibly burst some cells from water crystal expansion). One window you will just want to leave out for all those future dogs to work as it’s going to take you 20 years to get out to that 20 year window.
With bones and teeth, sometimes you get lucky and impress someone in the academic community or anthropologist who come into contact with dirt that was all around a centuries-old or millennia-old corpse and give you some of that dirt with the knowledge that there is probably bone dust in it that they just can’t use. So, if you are into Historic work, you have another window for your bone samples. If the body was mummified, you may be lucky enough to have extremely old tissue samples. Such is the world of the HRD handler. You might find yourself ooooing and ahhing with anticipation over a jar of dust handed to you from someone in the know. To cover your butt, you send samples to other dog handlers that work this specialty and ask them to confirm if their dogs can hit on it. If you really want to cover your butt, then you send them a blank sample of clean sand and ask them to tell you which samples are good and which got no results. THEN, and only then, do you try your dog on it and hope to the canine powers that be, that your dog recognizes FROM INTERPOLATION that this could possibly fall into the realm of human remains that you get all excited when it tells you about it.
On the reverse side of bone, if you have dried bones from one of the bone suppliers then you might rub one down with some adipose tissue as that’s what tends to leech into the bone during decomposition. Heck, you might rub some blood into it, too. You keep that bone separate and consider it “sort of decomposition material” and know that over time it will dry out completely in the sun and you may have to re-animate it. In the mean time your dog gets to see all the natural windows of bone and fat tissue in nature. With your teeth, if you are lucky enough to have a dentist or oral surgeon that takes pity on you and supplies you with teeth, you can keep some as he/she gave them to you and consider these as decomp. The others you will clean, inside and out of any tissue and use only the teeth to teach your dogs with. Some you will keep in water as those will be stronger and some you will dry out to the point where they crumble when you touch them.
And, finally, though I shouldn’t have to mention it after this as it should be obvious, but your HRD canine handler trying to get their dog “proofed” off non-human remains……. Well, we all have some container handy in our vehicles and possibly a hatchet for when we come upon those road kills. We will slam on our brakes, run out excitedly with hatchet in hand, and whack off a raccoon road-kill tail, a decomposed lost canine/feline left on the side of the road (their death wasn’t completely for nothing), or a squashed turtle. If we are out hiding for area search dogs, you’ll often see us walking out afterwards smiling with a bone from an animal that met with calamity. We are happy as it means we can proof our dog off something else and perhaps in a different window. We will tease the area search dog handler when their dog rolls in dead armadillo (a truly gawd-awful smell) and then quietly pick a piece of it up as we walk on past to save to train your dog off of. Yes, we are a gruesome lot and sometimes it’s the small things that make us happy…..oooo, like an animal toe bone…yea….sweet!
Jim