What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren Page A

only a brief role one freezing day and night, tasked with standing by in case more injured victims, or bodies, were recovered. Reporters and investigators came to understand that something had gone disastrously wrong with a construction system hailed as an efficient, economical way to raise a building. After the accident, lift-slab construction was temporarily banned. The ban is no longer in place; nonetheless, lift-slab construction is rarely if ever used in the United States.
    That Andy and I didn’t meet during those terrible days in Bridgeport probably didn’t change the course of my life. I doubt I would have decided, at that point in my newspaper career, to start training dogs to do search work. That would wait until I was solidly middle-aged.
    The odd connections didn’t end there. As I was finalizing my research on SwRI and its role in dog research, I discovered an unrelated invention of its founder. Tom Slick Jr. filed a patent for “Apparatus for Erecting a Building” in 1948. As the old pen-and-ink drawings filled my computer screen, I saw the original outline of a construction system I had grown to know by heart in the aftermath of L’Ambiance Plaza: its pulleys and jacks and pumps and concrete slabs. Slick had invented lift-slab construction.
    Andy said it best: “What a coincidence! He funded the type of dogs that would work to locate victims of a disaster caused by the failure of his invention.”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Andy, to no working-dog person’s surprise, ended up writing (along with Edward David and forensic anthropologist Marcella Sorg) what is considered the bible of cadaver-dog trainers and handlers: Cadaver Dog Handbook , published in 2000.
    â€œRemember I warned you about being too brain-oriented. The Andy Rebmann book is good, though—he’s the guru,” Nancy Hook told me in an e-mail.
    Andy’s wife, Marcia Koenig, a famous volunteer handler and trainer in her own right, helped write and edit and provide illustrations for Cadaver Dog Handbook . She had been doing search-dog work since 1972. Andy introduced her to cadaver-dog work. Marcia became very good at it. She and her German shepherds have deployed to look for missing homicide victims, suicides, lost hikers, dementia patients, and victims of tornadoes and hurricanes. She’s worked in wilderness, in snow, and on water. She and her sable German shepherd, Coyote, spent four days in August 1997 crawling through mud on the island of Guam after Korean Air Flight 801 crashed and tore a ragged hole in the side of the mountain.
    â€œThat area was so saturated with the smell of decomposition and jet fuel that none of the dogs could alert on anything specific,” Marcia recalled. “Each one looked up at the handler in frustration and basically said, ‘It’s everywhere.’ ” She and Coyote, as well as the other dog teams, were knee-deep in wet clay during the entire search. Despite the challenges, stubborn Coyote helped find bone, tissue, and a femur. Toward the end, when the mud was too deep and Marcia exhausted, Coyote, a wild and crazy dog gone good, laid an object at her feet.
    â€œShe was so gentle,” Marcia said. It was a child’s foot, nearly the last thing found on the search. Retrieving wasn’t standard operating procedure for Coyote, but that little foot gave the searchers and the family great comfort.
    Across the country dozens of handlers and trainers have trainedwith Andy, then followed in his footsteps, training their own dogs, and also training other handlers. In law enforcement in the United States, Jim Suffolk started the legacy of body-recovery dogs. Andy kept it going and developed the training system considered the gold standard today.
    Andy is in his seventies now, still traveling worldwide with Marcia: to train dogs and handlers, to create better training protocols, to testify in legal cases. He still goes out on both