Follow The Trail w/ Cat Warren

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The Fascinating World of Cadaver Dogs

About The Episode

Cat Warren grew up in Oregon, where animals played a role early on in her life. As a child, her mother was wheelchair-bound, so her father mostly took care of her while maintaining his academic, professional career. He was a serious person and took almost no time for himself. However, their family had several Irish Setter dogs, and Cat would notice that her father would decompress by sitting back in his chair and having one of the dogs' heads lay on him. She still feels appreciation for how the dogs were able to help him unwind.

Cat was working as a newspaper reporter and was moving around a lot for work. While living in France, Cat got a dog that would change her life as an adult. That dog was named Tarn, a German Shepard, which was with her for more than 12 years over many location changes. Each time, Tarn would adjust without a hitch. He was, as Cat says, an "I'll go where, and do anything, with you" type of dog.

After Tarn, another German Shepherd named Solo came into Cat's life and opened up a new perspective. Solo was a singleton, meaning he was the only pup in a litter and also didn't have litter mates to learn how to properly communicate with other dogs. He showed little empathy, and was not great with other dogs or people. However, when Cat introduced him to a trainer friend, they suggested training him as a Scent Detection Dog and specifically as a cadaver dog (dogs who are trained to pick up the scent of deceased humans), also known as a Human Remains Detection dog (HRD). Solo had a great nose and needed a challenge, plus Cat knew he wasn't suited to work as a therapy dog, so she decided to explore this dog detective service role with him.

In this process, dogs help to search and smell out the scent of human remains, including in active ongoing cases for missing persons. Dogs are trained to not give a false alarm, but only if they truly find something, which is crucial to a successful detection process. The humans who accompany them are there to help guide and steer the ship, while still maintaining a balance for independence and space that are needed for the dogs to be able to concentrate and do their job. The dogs serve not just to please humans, though, these scent detection dogs are actually doing what comes naturally, which is hunting with their noses. The dog's energy is simply directed to specific purpose that serves a shared goal like finding a missing cadaver to help solve a crime. The dog gets its reward from the scent search itself but also from celebrating with the human for successfully completing its mission.

Currently, Cat is working on historic human remains projects where she concentrates and collaborates with archeologists, public historians, and community activists on locating historical burial grounds, such as those connected to the history of Native Americans and African-Americans in the United States. Scent detection dogs assist in this process by narrowing down an area and helping pinpoint a hidden burial location that humans can then corroborate with any combination of history, maps, community, verbal knowledge, and ground-penetrating radar.

About The Guest - Cat Warren

Cat Warren is a New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. The book tells the story of learning to work with her young shepherd as a cadaver dog to find the missing and dead. The Young Readers Edition was published in October 2019. Cat also worked as a newspaper reporter for many years and then taught at North Carolina State University until last year. She currently lives with her husband and their large German shepherd, Rev, in Durham, NC.

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