Cat Warren

Looking for a way to harness the energy of an unruly German shepherd puppy named Solo, English professor Cat Warren started training him as a cadaver dog. The two have spent the past seven years as volunteers searching for the dead.

In her book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs, published this month, Warren tells of her journey into the field of “on the job” dogs and reveals how science is unraveling the secrets of the canine nose.

Not everyone who has a high-energy dog like Solo decides to train him to become a volunteer cadaver dog. What made you decide to teach Solo to look for the dead?

I took Solo to a trainer when he was four months old and asked her what I could possibly do with this dog.

Gray and black mud coats everything. The mud is 70 feet deep in places, shot through with huge shattered evergreens, splintered houses and outbuildings, twisted cars-pushed together by the force of the slide. A river has backed up and flooded parts of that mile-square pile. Scattered somewhere beneath it are the still missing and dead. And it keeps raining.

The search continues in that purgatory, created almost two weeks ago when part of a mountain sheared off and roared to the bottom of a river valley in Oso, Washington. It will probably go on for weeks….

There are many reasons to seek help from a dog trainer, and Cat Warren confronted almost all of them when a new puppy came barreling into her life. Even a seasoned dog person like Warren wasn’t prepared for Solo. Born to a litter of one, Solo hadn’t learned many of the things that a dog in a litter of many would pick up, like bite inhibition. Once in Warren’s home, Solo had a hard time learning “Ouch!”, and instead excelled at dog aggression. A real gem….

Jaco pulls me hard past the cars in the driveway, slowing to run his nose across the seam of each trunk. The Prius, the Leaf, the old Mercedes, our Honda Civic covered with road dust and acorns. It’s an obsessive-compulsive habit from his early adolescence in the Czech Republic, where he had started to learn to detect explosives. I keep him moving. Someday, however, he may have to search car trunks for the scent of human remains. Because I’d like him to do that, I don’t actively discourage his vestigial nose sweeps.

Jaco is two years old, a compact sable German Shepherd…

At K9 Magazine we’re kind of obsessed about what dogs know that we don’t yet know they know, if you know what I mean.

It seems like there isn’t a year that passes where we don’t learn something new about man’s best friend and ways in which he can transform lives. And we love it.

Harnessing the power of the dog, not only as a companion but for their intuition and ability is what makes them truly wonderful and we can’t wait to discover what they know next.

Luckily, it seems we’re not alone in our eagerness to learn more about the dog’s natural ability, as we discovered when Cat Warren, author of ‘What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World’ shared her story with us…