Cadaver Dogs - Page 2

Yes, a lot of folks have dual trained dogs. 

Our team, after realizing just what was involved in having a dog trained for water, shallow graves, disarticulated etc. decided that our "cadaver" dogs would be single purpose and that all the other dogs would have exposure to cadaver scent and some minimal level of training in the event the missing person, presumed alive,  had recently passed away.

There is no confusion - my dog knows to ingnore any and all living people under any circumstance.

it doesnt take a true k9 experienced trainer even 1 yr to get a cadaver dog to do his work....  can hardly imagine the price tag on that dog.    maybe a volunteer, ok, but where are you going to get the cadaver smell from for training?   surprisingly i found that on the net one day, yuk. 

dogs dont develop HD, they are born with it.  Anything after that is due to injury or erosion (age) and most times mis interpreted by our vets

all the best, its a very much needed training, but test the pup, as some dogs will not like that smell.

I worked for years with a trainer who trained and certified narcotics and explosive dogs. You can start training them as pups with excellent results as they quickly get imprinted on the scents you use.

This training while it sounds simple and easy , it is very easy to screw up a dog and takes alot of careful work and documentation to do correctly or you will have a dog hitting on food etc..

The 1- 2year statement I made was for someone training their first dog and not going through the same intensive training full time LE do.  I realize you can go through this much more quickly if you have experience.  Getting certified and being an experienced operational dog are two different things. There is no way in traing you can simulate some of the types of problems you will encounter.

I don't know what the heck you can find on the internet that is not bones or pseudo. 

True about gentics and HD, but most don't know until the dog is a bit older that they have it, else we would be not waiting for 2 year to OFA our dogs.

Nancy, we dig parts of the burn and place it in stockings which are stored in large tubes. Here though, the burns are really "intense" because of the heat so they have a lot of scent. The local hospital is also kind enough to supply us with an occasional placenta.  They have begun keeping the placentas for poss. blood transfusions for the infant.  But that is only for six months. Both work well for us.

We have found that the synthetic scent is useless once the dog makes a real find. Just not interested anymore so these are our most used scents.

Nancy totally covered all the important stuff here- but Agar - did the article say who the handler or team was and what their certification background was?

Probable cause searches suck in general for that reason. But - there should be some forensic evidence left if the suggestion is that the girl decomposed in the trunk. We have worked blood droplet cases - but there are blood droplets that the dogs find, therefore, you have proof the dog was right. 

Do they think the girl decomposed in the trunk? I know dogs can work residual scent (meaning a scent source was in a place and then removed) but I would be really surprised to see a dog trained to a level that a body could be in a trunk for a very short time right after death (not beginning to decompose yet) and the dog, a month later with the degrading sun, be able to hit the residual scent.  I am not even sure that can be done (or you could ever reach a level of proficiency making it worthwhile). 

If the girl decomposed in the trunk - I would think they could get decomp fluid. Particularly if the smell was what caused a dog to get called. 

I hate dumbass people who kill children. 

Incidentally - we would not use a cross trained dog for something like this. Our cross trained dogs are mainly live, with the idea that they know about cadaver if the person expired. Our cadaver dogs are single purpose.

Kerschberger - my group is all volunteers and we have brain, fresh bone, tissue, blood and all kinds of these available to train on. It just takes years of developing relationships. We don't use pseudo all. 

Shannon B

We do have some placenta [a godsend from another team because I could not even get my grandkids' placenta with my daughter's consent in my state, even though there are no laws against having it - I probably could have taken it if we told them we wanted to do some weird religious ritual with it  ] and we use it sparingly [trying to work as much as possible with the broad spectrum] but it is great because it is a relatively large source

 I think it is really important to train on the whole spectrum of scent - not just a few items that are easy to get.  I say this because I have met people who train exclusively on hair and teeth and that may train you to find a beauty shop or a dentists office but.........  You also have to be excrutiatingly careful that no human can unintentionally come in contact with your training aid and realize that even a screened product has a small chance of being infectious.  Whenever I go out I make a fresh 10% bleach solution and spray down my containers before I put them back in my transport box.

We very much try to avoid probable cause stuff, but I know folks who have been dragged into court where they had permission to search before hand. I have learned defense attorneys are another creature.

I have my training logs set up on Excel so it can automatically update my stats each time I train. I have tried sharing it before but it is not at all user-friendly for someone who is not proficient with Excel and Pivot tables.  At any point in time I can give you my reliablity stats.

auntievenom- I'm not sure who did the search with the cadaver dogs, they gave the name of the officer from the sheriff's dept. but I can't remember now who it was.  There were 2 different dogs used from 2 different counties.  Initially they dug up an area near the little girls playhouse in the grandparents yard, the dogs both hit on that same area.  Then the search led to the mother's abandoned car and those same 2 dogs hit on the trunk of the car that also had a "stain" picked up under the black light, some strands of hair believed to be the same color and length of the little girls, some dirt in the trunk and a very foul odor that investigator's are adament was decomoposition.  Their theory which makes perfect sense to me is that the body decompossed at the location of the house and then that body was moved to the trunk of the car to be dispossed of somewhere else. 

The grandfather of the missing little girl is a retired sheriff and the grandmother is a nurse.  With both their given backgrounds one would think they'd know the smell of human decomposition???  However the grandmother's explaination for the foul smell is that BOTH dogs are "confussed", they are wrong because the smell was from a pizza that was left inside the car for 15 days before it was removed and that is what the odor is not a human dead body.

Personally my thought is the grandparents are trying to help cover up for their daughter because that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard that the cadaver dog was "confussed with a rotted pizza" lol  I think at this point officers should just turn their focus on this being a "recovery" rather than a "return".  Hopefully more search crews will volunteer to bring more dogs and start searching other locations that they feel the mother may have buried the body.  I put my faith on the dogs telling what REALLY happend to this child.

I have a REAL problem with stories like this.  People doing horrible things to innocent little kids.  How could you hurt a precious child let alone kill your own baby???  It's beyond psychotic IMO.

The atrocities people can do amaze and sicken me. 

I have to remember when we go out, the goal is either to bring some level of closure to a grieving family or justice to a criminal. You have to think that way and not get overwhelemed by the overwhelming sadness of the whole situation.  Then go home and hug and kiss your own.  If I think about it all, I just start getting choked up.

I sure hope they find her. Sounds like they have a good start but gators and pigs in swampy areas [ a lot of that in Fla] could really make it tough.  I imagine they can match the dirt in the play area to the dirt in the trunck and find traces of human material in the dirt. 

Dirt with decomp in it is some of the stinkiest, raunchiest stuff out there. [Another one of those "broad spectrum" of training aids, and failry easy to come by after forensics is finished with an area where a human has died and decomposed - always have a shovel and some 2 gallon plastic bags in the truck.............]

 We frequently do that - call in a separate dog with separate training/ certs/ etc if for no other reason than piece of mind that the dog that is being worked isn't the ONLY reason the cops fixate on something. 

If they had alerts from dogs trained with different methods in different counties - I'd probably believe the dogs. 

I finally found the articles (I haven't been looking THAT hard, admittedly) and yeah - it doesn't look great for this poor little girl. 

Nancy- your post cracks me up  - I have been on the phone with a team mate, while I am looking around an area that has been released trying to figure out where the body was, hiking around with a shovel, creeping myself out.... we do really weird stuff in the name of helping people.