What the Dog Knows

The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs

By: Cat Warren

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Cat Warren is a university professor and former journalist with an admittedly odd hobby: She and her German shepherd have spent the last seven years searching for the dead. Solo is a cadaver dog. What started as a way to harness Solo’s unruly energy and enthusiasm soon became a calling that introduced Warren to the hidden and fascinating universe of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers.

Solo has a fine nose and knows how to use it, but he’s only one of many thousands of working dogs all over the United States and beyond. In What the Dog Knows, Warren uses her ongoing work with Solo as a way to explore a captivating field that includes cadaver dogs, drug and bomb-detecting K9s, tracking and apprehension dogs - even dogs who can locate unmarked graves of Civil War soldiers and help find drowning victims more than two hundred feet below the surface of a lake. Working dogs’ abilities may seem magical or mysterious, but Warren shows the multifaceted science, the rigorous training, and the skilled handling that underlie the amazing abilities of dogs who work with their noses.

Warren interviews cognitive psychologists, historians, medical examiners, epidemiologists, and forensic anthropologists, as well as the breeders, trainers, and handlers who work with and rely on these remarkable and adaptable animals daily. Along the way, she discovers story after story that proves the impressive capabilities - as well as the very real limits - of working dogs and their human partners. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, Warren explains why our partnership with dogs is woven into the fabric of society and why we keep finding new uses for their wonderful noses.

©2013 Cat Warren (P)2013 Simon & Schuster

as captivating as a novel

a beautiful story, well many great stories. informative and inspiring. read beautifully. makes me want to train my dog.

Dog lovers will learn a thing or two

Cat Warren does an amazing job relating her life with dogs to her studies and skillfully illustrates them to the reader throughout her story. Great listen! Perfect for long road trips!

Wonderful and delightful to listen to.

Excellent storyline. Great narration Not too overwhelming But engaging. I have listened to her twice Each time is it Better experience.

Wonderful for a dog training enthusiast.

I'm not even sure where to begin. I typically find myself extremely picky with narration, but Campbell was top notch.

The book itself was great. Hearing about the negative parts of raising a working dog felt like it will help with future training of dogs. I wouldn't change a thing. To handler and handler hopefuls, this is a must read!

My All-Time Favorite Dog Book (non-fiction)

This book is a must read for serious dog lovers and those that aspire to be involved with "working dogs". At first I thought I may not like it, as it was chock full of details and statistics on working dogs, while I had hoped for lots of search, rescue and find stories involving the author's dog, Solo.

While there are some working dog stories, this book is much, much more in that it explores so many issues related to training and working with a cadaver dogs. I hesitate to use that term, "cadaver dog" as it has negative and icky connotations and this book is neither icky nor negative.

Expect to learn SO much about the field of working dogs--how they are chosen, the necessary personality traits, the downside of singletons, dog behavior, trainer behavior, fraudulent trainers (oh, yes), various working breeds and their characteristics, the different agencies that train and use working dogs, private agents, and of course, lots about the author's own dog, Solo.

This is a book that got better and better as it went on. I felt a tiny tear in my eye as it ended, not because of the ending content but because it was over. I wanted to know more!

The narrator also got better and better as the book went on, as she adapted to who the author was as the subject material got more relevant and intense. Bravo to Cassandra Campbell for doing such a great narration.

And bravo to the author, Cat Warren, a former professor who found her true calling in life and has shared it so well with us.

Fascinating on various levels

This is a great story of the author's experience in training her dog as well as descriptions of how other service dogs are trained--particularly those that focus on using a dog's keen sense of smell. I loved this story, and the only thing I found objectionable was the reader's tone and interpretation of the text. She so often came across as condescending in many passages that were not intended to be sarcastic or ironic. The author uses irony and sarcasm to good effect but the reader was over the top throughout the story in a way that made me wish I could switch narrators to truly enjoy listening to a wonderful story. I would recommend this book to dog lovers who also find training and animal behavior to be of special interest to them.

Great book

I loved it from page one till the end. If you want to know more about cadaver dogs and their handlers, this is a great start.

slow at first but then...

this books turned out really slow about how she got her dog and kind of some of her back ground but once it gets into the nitty-gritty of actually doing the cadaver dogs and what dogs know and what's that studies or what everybody's heard is wrong and what we've actually proven things like how strong a dog's nose actually is on what a dog can actually do it's amazing to think that dogs can find Civil War era and Vietnam era bodies have been buried for years overall great book

A good narrative that hooks you and somehow you learn all the details of cadaver dog training

As a dog owner I am always eager to learn more about their amazing abilities. I am also on the lookout for jobs I could train my dog for to help her use her brain and body to keep her happy. I was expecting the first but got the second as a bonus. Warren does a remarkable job of making the science interesting by interweaving it in dog history and her personal experiences, mainly with training and working with her cadaver dog Solo. I had to remind myself of how squeamish I am when after an particularly riveting chapter I found myself online searching for cadaver sent training aids.
We will find a more suitable job for my dog while awaiting Warren’s next book.

Loved it

I thoroughly enjoyed this book during my long commutes back and forth with work. Great narrator!