Dog Edition Episode 62: Dogs Recovering Precious Remains
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Transcript
James Jacobson: [00:00:00] Every year, we hear in the news about horrible wildfires that are spreading across landscapes, destroying everything in their path. Wildlife perishes, homes are burned, and human lives are lost.
News Clips: A series of explosive new wildfires. Very rapid-fire growth and very, very explosive fire behavior. You could see the hills glowing. The facility was on fire. They kept repeating there was no time to get out, there was nothing we could save.
Clare Mansell: Throughout this tragedy, some people are losing loved ones twice. Families that have urns filled with precious cremains often don't have time when evacuating a rapidly approaching fire to rescue the urn, and so those urns of ashes are lost in the devastation.
James Jacobson: Here's a question. Can dogs recognize the scent of a person even after they've been cremated? And can a dog find those ashes in areas devastated by a wildfire?
Hello, I'm James Jacobson in Maui, Hawaii.
Clare Mansell: And I'm Claire Mansell in London, England.
James Jacobson: Welcome to Dog Edition.
Clare Mansell: Where voices from around the world consider all things.
James Jacobson: Dog Edition is the first show designed for you to listen to as you walk your dogs.
Clare Mansell: In this episode, we'll hear from a dedicated team who found a way to provide some solace to victims of wildfires by harnessing the power of Dog's Noses.
James Jacobson: We certainly will, and [00:01:30] we'll also hear from someone who's had their father's ashes returned to them after a wildfire destroyed their home.
Clare Mansell: And we share a story that seems to indicate that a dog can recognize our personal scent even after we've been cremated.
James Jacobson: That and more on today's episode. So, if you love dogs as much as we do, paws what you're doing, leash up your pup, and let's go for a walk, because we've got a lot to talk about on today's episode of Dog Edition.
Hey Pepper, wanna go for a walk?
Wildfires are devastating in so many ways. When you have a wildfire coming at you, you better get out of there really quick because the flames are spreading so quickly. Get out, go to safety.
Clare Mansell: And it's not easy in that circumstance to think of what those things are that are incredibly valuable and personal to you that you want to grab.
James Jacobson: Yeah, things like photo albums or antiques or cherished heirlooms. But what happens when you leave behind an urn filled with cremains of a loved one?
Clare Mansell: Now I have to say that if I was in the situation of evacuating a house, I wouldn't necessarily think of grabbing the cremated remains of a relative because I would perhaps naively think that nothing was going to come to those ashes that hadn't already happened to it. You know, they are already cremated. They're going to [00:03:00] be in a wildfire. Nothing's going to change. But from my understanding, what happens is that the urn itself can disintegrate. And then the ashes become part of the devastation of the burnt house.
James Jacobson: That's right. And finding those ashes within the ashes of a burned building is almost impossible. Or is it?
Clare Mansell: We found a volunteer organization that uses, you guessed it, dogs to find these ashes within ashes.
James Jacobson: Makes you wonder, is there anything a dog can't do?
Clare Mansell: I do think their noses are incredibly powerful. How did all of this get started? So, I've never heard about them doing this particular thing of finding ashes after a wildfire. Is it a new thing?
James Jacobson: Well, that's because it has never been done before. And it all started with the Tubbs Fire in California in 2017.
Alex DeGeorgy: So, we had, uh, this massive wildfire, the Tubbs Fire, that came through. Ignited at night, traveled about 20 miles in a couple hours, and burned down about 8,000 buildings that evening. A big portion of our tower went up in flames that night. And it was a real shock to everyone. No one thought this was even possible. You know, that a wildfire could take out a city.
James Jacobson: That is Alex DeGeorgy. He is the principal investigator at Alta Archaeological Consulting. Unfortunately, one of Alex's coworkers had lost his home in the [00:04:30] fire, and in the chaos of evacuation, his father's ashes were left behind. He asked Alex, is there anything that you could do to help?
Alex DeGeorgy: He was really distraught, you know, having gone through this traumatic event, and having lost his parents’ ashes, and not having this chance to follow through and what their wishes were. So, he asked, you know, knowing that I'm an archaeologist, is there something that I can do? And I linked him up with the Institute for Canine Forensics. They're the doggy teams. Their dogs are specifically trained on detecting human cremains.
Clare Mansell: The Institute for Canine Forensics is just as cool as it sounds. They specialize in locating prehistoric remains, like ancestral burial grounds and historic cemeteries. They have even worked with National Geographic to locate the remains of Amelia Earhart.
James Jacobson: Amelia Earhart?
Clare Mansell: Yes, there is an amazing National Geographic article about it which we'll share a link to in the show notes. They're pretty sure that they found her burial site but they have no way to test It's an amazing story. The whole Amelia Earhart thing is an amazing story and they've used highly trained and certified dogs and dog handlers like Lynne Engelbert and her border collie, Piper.
James Jacobson: Lynne and Piper met with Alex and his friend early on a Sunday morning to see if they could do the impossible.
Lynne Englebert: We went to his house, which was literally eight inches of ash, [00:06:00] just ash, eight inches deep, that the fire was so hot and burned so completely. And so, he had a rough area where he, you know, thought his mom and dad might be. And, uh, so I got Piper out of the car and told her to go to work and within two minutes she had alerted on an area.
So, I went in and started brushing fluffy ash off and I said, you know, what else was on the shelf? And his wife said both of our mother’s good china was on the shelf. Well, there were two sets of good china, crunched and all broken. So, we started removing that, brushing a little bit more ash away, and then I saw the cremated remains laying there on the ground.
I was not prepared. I mean, you walk up and here's a man who is totally devastated because when they come to clear the debris of his home, it's all going to go to a toxic dump. And the thought of his mom and dad's ashes not being scattered where they wanted to be scattered together, but in a toxic dump, he was devastated. And when their son drove up, his wife hollered, they found grandma and grandpa, and the joy in her voice was palpable.
Clare Mansell: That is an incredibly moving story. The fact that they were able to find those ashes and did [00:07:30] so within two minutes.
James Jacobson: And Lynne had seen Piper in action before, but apparently Alex was pretty skeptical. Even after the dog had made that alert signal that it does when it finds what it's supposed to find.
Lynne Englebert: Alex comes over because he's an archaeologist and this is what they do. He got down on his knees and he's picking up and he's going through this and he goes, "Oh my God, there's a tooth fragment. There's a piece of bone". And he told me later, he said, I thought this was all smoke and mirrors. I didn't think that dogs could find this, and now I know they can.
Clare Mansell: That's amazing. And after his first successful recovery, they suddenly realized that, wow, this could be a revolutionary application of archaeology and canine forensics.
Alex DeGeorgy: And we realized, hey, you know. This might not be an isolated event and so we founded a nonprofit Alta Heritage Foundation which is specifically geared towards helping folks after wildfires and working with canine teams. And since then, we've been in 18 national disaster wildfire areas and excavated over 300 homes.
Clare Mansell: I'm amazed that 300 homes would need this service. Is this a cultural thing, Jim? You know, coming at this as a Brit, I don't know anybody who keeps the ashes of their loved ones in their house. Do you know anyone as an American?
James Jacobson: I do. I know someone intimately, [00:09:00] myself. Um, I, I have a little sacred Buddha cabinet where I have cremains of both family members and four-legged family members. I think it's increasingly common these days, at least here in the States, maybe not so much in the UK.
Clare Mansell: A lot of the people in this story that we're hearing from, they have the remains of loved ones because their loved ones had had very specific requests about how their ashes should be scattered. Do you mind if I ask, is that the case for you? Is there something, is there like a bigger plan, or are you keeping those ashes close to you because you want to keep them there indefinitely?
James Jacobson: I do have a bigger plan, but I think there's also I think this is fertile ground for a psychologist, but I think there is a like a resistance a little bit to like getting rid of those ashes There's been a lot of death in the last few years that we've all experienced and I just went to an ash scattering for my Hanai mom and that was a beautiful thing here in, in Maui, but Molly and I have certain plans for our family of dogs and we are going to do that.
So yeah, I think it's a temporary thing, but, uh, that's where they are right now.
Clare Mansell: Yeah, and that's so common of all the stories that we're hearing, isn't it? And it would be devastating for you or for anybody if those plans that you had in mind were suddenly disrupted by a wildfire. And I can see that it's a really important part of the closure when you've lost somebody. [00:10:30] And for these people who were finding the ashes within the ashes, when they started out, it must have been slightly trial and error.
James Jacobson: Alex says it was a lot of trial and error because they had never done this before.
Alex DeGeorgy: So, we've had to really kind of innovate the methods over the course of doing this several hundred times. And we've gotten good at it at this point. I mean, at the beginning, we made lots of mistakes. And the sad thing about making a mistake in these situations is you get one chance to find someone's daughter's ashes. And if you don't do your job right, you lose an opportunity to provide solace to this person.
Clare Mansell: Wow. That's a lot of pressure. So, what is this process? Where Do they even begin trying to find the ashes?
James Jacobson: Well, I asked him. The recovery team gets together, which is all composed of volunteers. They don't get paid, and often some of these volunteers have to do it over the weekends outside of their normal work day. The first thing they do is they meet with the wildfire victim at the burn site, but it's not quite as simple as just driving up to a burn foundation.
Alex DeGeorgy: The thing you should understand about a wildfire, these wildfires that we're dealing with, it's not like a house fire, where the fire department comes and puts out the house and there's a skeleton of a house standing there. These events are so massive that there may be a million acres burning at once and whole towns are being obliterated. And no one goes and puts out the fire for days. So, these homes will burn for days and days. And you may have a two-story stucco building that is now reduced to four inches of [00:12:00] ash. And everything is gone. I mean, refrigerators are turned to dust.
Clare Mansell: I've seen some of the images on news reports, but it must be surreal to actually be on the site. It's a completely apocalyptic landscape.
James Jacobson: It is. And when the recovery team is going out there, it's often the first time that the homeowner has seen their property former home and they themselves are often in a state of trauma.
Clare Mansell: I can't imagine how awful it must be because there aren't even those usual landmarks to follow There's no kind of turn left at the tree that's at the start of their driveway It's just all gone. The entire land is just scorched earth and then once they get to their home, they have to put all of that grief and shock aside and work with the recovery team.
James Jacobson: Yeah, it really is an investigation. They ask who the person is that they're looking for, where in the house the urn was located, what kind of vessel they were in, was it ceramic or metal or something like that? Because ceramic urns tend to survive fires as they've already gone through an intense heat process in their production. Once all these clues are gathered, they send in the dogs.
Lynne Englebert: Our dogs train on cremated remains because a lot of the native cultures that we work with. Practiced cremation and not inhumation. So, wherever the dog chooses [00:13:30] to alert, they're trained to alert on the strongest sensors. And if they can find a homogenous pocket of ash, then we collect that.
Clare Mansell: So, when Lynne says. A homogenous pocket of ash. I'm kind of curious, what does she mean?
James Jacobson: Well, in the wreckage of the burned building, there is a, a mixture, a whole bunch of ash of all different kinds. Bits of drywall and metal and stucco and furniture. And this creates this mélange of different colors and textures. But with human ash that has been processed at a crematorium, it's more like a fine ash that is just one color. And before you ask, Claire, yeah, human ash can actually be different colors.
Alex DeGeorgy: It can range from a light grey to almost a salmon hue, or tan, and it'll be a it'll be a loaf.
Clare Mansell: I am not entirely sure I want to know that, but I can see how helpful it is to the investigators to find the ash, and loaf, I don't really like that either.
James Jacobson: Yeah. Well, you never know what you learn on dog edition. Once they have recovered the ash, however, they give it to the family. But sometimes Lynne says the recovery teams can't find the loaf whole like in areas where they've been disturbed or maybe the urn was on a second story of a house and fell during the burning of the building.
Lynne Englebert: We have a very high rate of recovery. But if they can't find a [00:15:00] homogenous pocket of ash, we've learned to give the client where the dog's alerted, the client is right there watching. So, we tell them this is a memorial sample. Your loved one's essence is there. And we've not had anybody be upset with that.
Clare Mansell: So, between the color and the texture and the location, it sounds like they can be fairly certain that they've found the cremains they were looking for. But for something which, as we've discussed, is of such huge importance. Is there anything else that they can do to make absolutely sure that the ashes the dogs alerted on are really the human that they were looking for?
James Jacobson: Well, there are a couple of things because most crematoriums, at least here in the United States, include an identification medallion, which is a small little metal disc that is stamped with an ID number that is identifiable. To the individual and that is either included in the cremains or on the urn So every person that goes through the cremation process they have this medallion.
It's kept with them throughout the whole process So if they find the medallion then they know for sure Exactly, and the second thing they can do is sometimes when they don't find that characteristic loaf and they're not totally sure, there is another test that they can do. Here's Alex to explain that.
Alex DeGeorgy: The dog will alert, we'll collect some of the ashes in a bag and take it off site, and then we'll run the dog past it, and if it alerts on the bag once it's been taken away, some essence of that person is still in the bag, and [00:16:30] usually that's enough for the family member to feel better about the situation.
Clare Mansell: So, I can imagine that there are other environmental factors that also affect how successful the dogs will be on their search as well, like weather, I guess.
James Jacobson: Well, Alex says that wind and heat can make it particularly difficult for dogs to do their jobs. He gave us two examples from the same dog that show just how much that can affect how these dogs detect odor.
Alex DeGeorgy: The woman had a keepsake herb. So, what we were looking for was like less than a teacup of ashes, which to me, you know, from the outset, I said, "Hey, you know, this is an impossible feat". And it was a massive building we're in, too. And she wasn't certain where the stuff was. So, the dog does its surge and gives a really hard alert.
And it lays down, puts its nose on the ashes. And I look down and the, you can see the ashes right where the dog's putting its nose. Like, that was incredible. Absolutely astounding. Same dog on a different site. We were looking for someone's ashes and they were kept in the garage. And we walk up to this garage that's, you know, just melted wreckage, and I can see the pile of ash laying there on the floor of the garage.
I'm like, great. And it was a really windy day, and it was just a flat surface. There was nothing to cool the scent. And the dog would run across the side, run right over the ashes, get downwind, and there'd be scent wafting through the air, being blown right downwind. It'd run downwind, hit a fence line, and run the fence line. And it did this. It's three or [00:18:00] four times. This is like the worst situation for the dog to try to do his job. And it's actually picking up the scent and running it out over and over. But it's downwind. I mean, there's certain situations where they are going to be more successful than others.
Clare Mansell: And this kind of proves that as amazing as the dogs are, it really is about the human-dog teamwork, isn't it?
James Jacobson: It is. We're going to take a quick break right now, but after the break, we'll hear more from Lynne about how the dogs are trained to find the ashes. And we will also hear from one lucky woman who had the ashes of her father returned to her through this process. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to Dog Edition.
Clare Mansell: So, Jim, we've been learning about the amazing capabilities of these dogs, but how on earth does one go about training a dog to find cremated remains? Because normally in similar things, they train them on animals’ stuff first, but this is specific to humans. They've got to use human remains.
James Jacobson: Well, let's go back to the Institute for Canine Forensics and see what Lynne has to say.
Lynne Englebert: Well, we start off using old bones, human bones, that we get from osteological supply houses. These are the houses that supply for educational purposes. You know, everything from articulated human skeletons to different, different types of bone. But so, we get [00:19:30] old human bone. And these osteological supply houses know. That we don't care what that bone looks like. So, if they have broken bones or bones that are all corroded, uh, we don't care. We'll take those. And they give us a good start and a good discount on them because human bone is not, is not cheap.
Clare Mansell: Every day on Dog Edition is an education. That is not a sentence I ever thought I would actually hear someone say.
James Jacobson: I know, right? Lynne says that she also gets teeth from oral surgeons. Of course, Lynne asks that they do not put those in any formula to clean them, because teeth, and I didn't know this, have scents. In fact, it only takes 10 to 15 minutes in a room for a tooth scent to fill that room for one of these detection dogs. And if a tooth is over a hundred years, 150 years old, the dogs are still able to sniff them out.
Clare Mansell: So, Jim, after the show, can I get Lynne's address? Because I have some of the teeth I had extracted as a child, which my parents kindly passed on to me and I have been looking for a way to get rid of them. And Lynne is clearly the woman to pass them on to.
James Jacobson: Clearly.
Clare Mansell: So, Lynne has all these teeth and bone samples and she uses them to train amazing dogs like Piper, but these aren't really burned bones and ashes, right? So how does she train them to find cremains if they're used to [00:21:00] finding fresh teeth and bones?
James Jacobson: That is a great question. Here's Lynne.
Lynne Englebert: Human is human, and we've just discovered that our set never seems to change. I'll tell you a little story, and this is a personal story, because I believe that we not only maintain the human scent, but we maintain the individual-specific scent. When my husband passed away in 2006, I was talking with the gentleman at the burial service. When it came time to go pick up my husband's ashes.
He said, bring your dog in. So, my daughter and I, and my dog went in, daughter sitting on one side of the room. I'm on the other side of the room. I'm holding my husband's ashes. All of a sudden, my dog leaps to his feet and starts to whimper and he came running over to me and he started sniffing that box. And he would sit down and he'd whimper a little bit, and then he'd sniff the little creases on the folded brown paper that it was wrapped in, and he'd whimper again, and the gentleman from the cremation service, he goes, oh my god, he knows who that is.
Clare Mansell: That is a slightly spooky but amazing story. I know. So, we've heard about how this incredible process works and how the dogs are trained, but we wanted to share with you a success story about a family that had lost their father's [00:22:30] ashes in quite traumatic circumstances. But thanks to the recovery team, they were able to be reunited with them.
Here is Molly Rich from Paradise, California.
Molly Rich: My dad had just passed away the previous July. We were going to have a military burial for him, but we couldn't because Redding was on fire and that's where the cemetery was. So, we postponed it. And then in November, my brother happened to be visiting my mom at the time. And she recalls opening the front door and looking out on a hill and seeing it just glowing. And we always said if Paradise caught fire, Paradise and Magalia, it's a one way in, one way out, and it would be devastating. And she just remembers telling my brother, we got to get out. We got to get out now.
And she went up, grabbed my dad's wedding ring and left. And I remember getting a call at work thinking, oh mom, you're fine. She goes, no, I'm in the middle of a Save Mart parking lot. Everything's on fire. I'm like, I'm sure, I'm sure you're fine. And then all of a sudden it went dead. And then I researched what was going on. I just talked to my mom. I just lost the phone call and this town is on fire. I didn't hear again from her for eight hours.
James Jacobson: I can't even imagine how terrifying that was.
Clare Mansell: It must be. Absolutely terrifying. These fires move so quickly [00:24:00] and destroy everything in their path. Molly's mother had been unable to get out of paradise on that one-way road. And instead, they found themselves corralled together with other families in the Safe Mart parking lot.
Molly Rich: Everything was like midnight black. Literally, she was surrounded by flames, by blowing propane, tanks, power poles, everything.
James Jacobson: Thankfully, those that took shelter in that parking lot made it out of the fire okay. But they were stuck there for hours while their homes and their neighbor's homes burned to the ground. Of course, they also had the risk of serious smoke inhalation from witnessing that.
Molly Rich: But when they did get to safety, I remember asking her, okay, mom. Okay. I'm so glad you're safe. Did you get dad's ashes? And it went silent and oh, I just, I just cried because being that it was a military memorial for him, it was very important for us not to leave a man behind. And to not bury an empty box.
Clare Mansell: Molly says she tried hard not to show her emotions because she was so glad that her mother and her brother and her mom's Labrador made it out safely. And obviously, they were the most important things. And she didn't want to make her mom feel bad about not getting the ashes. I mean, I, I wasn't in that moment, you're panicking, you're like, I got to get out for safety. If you look at the [00:25:30] documentaries, there were literally moms covering babies on the side of the road because they couldn't get through. They actually say her house burned. Her whole life burnt in about eight minutes. That's how hot the fire was. She was so lucky to get where she was. I just internally, I just, I broke down after I got off the phone and I just thought, oh my gosh, that was the last thing of my dad. And I mean, I think it was hard because we literally had nothing physical left of him. Nothing. Because of the fire. And that was the only thing that we really wanted after that moment. I just went full bore and thought, what can we do?
James Jacobson: What do you do? Well, that's when they found the Alta Heritage Foundation. But by the time that the recovery team had met with Molly and her family to search for her father's ashes, it had been over two months since the fire.
Clare Mansell: The recovery team had to wait so long because, with all the houses, there was a serious asbestos risk. It had also rained, of course, in those two months, and they had all but lost hope. But of course, they had to try.
Molly Rich: I actually have video footage of Piper doing what he's supposed to do and circling where he's circling and I, and I'm whispering behind the camera saying, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Is he going to find it? Oh my gosh. And it was kind of circling where we kind of thought it would be. And all of a sudden, he sat. And I thought, oh my gosh, because there's no guarantee. There's no guarantee these dogs are going to find anything. The success rate [00:27:00] is very good, but there's still no guarantee.
So, to go through all of this and then have it fail would have just been so devastating. I mean, I literally just prayed. I was like, oh my gosh, please, please, please. And so, Piper sat. And that's when we saw, Lynne put like every team member on this house. And I remember her saying it was one of the more difficult houses because it was completely all stucco.
And when Piper sat down and then the archeologist came in and they were gathering the cremains. And I thought, gosh, I still, I don't know if I'm convinced. And then all of a sudden, they found the cremation tag. And that was just, it was completely right there on top of the ashes. So that was all the proof I needed.
I was like, oh my gosh, I have my dad. I have a little bit of house with him, but I have my dad.
Clare Mansell: So that's an amazing story. And I love the way these people are telling this tale with such, you know, good-hearted humor as well.
James Jacobson: And as someone who comes from a military background, your husbands in the military, that has certain resonance.
Clare Mansell: Absolutely. I understand the importance of, you know, making sure that those ashes are interned in exactly the way that the person wished them to be with all the right ritual behind it, as well. And because of the efforts of this amazing organization, Molly and her family were able to hold that proper memorial for her father. And Lynne even went along.
James Jacobson: These teams are absolutely incredible, and not only are they all volunteer, but no one has ever [00:28:30] paid for this service. And not only are they doing it free of charge, but they're also taking on those costs of getting to the search location site as well. And that can be really expensive. There's the hotel costs and the travel and the personal protection equipment that they need because often they're working a toxic environment. We talked about the asbestos at one of the sites earlier on in this show.
It is expensive. So, if you would like to donate, volunteer or request help, one of these recovery teams, you can go to their website. It's altahf.Org. And we have a link to that in the show notes, as well as on our website at dog edition. com. They are working to expand their reach outside of California to other geographic areas, but they need support to help make that happen. After all, what they are doing is really significant to the families that they serve. Here's Molly Rich.
Molly Rich: Like, they cared. This is their gift to people. And you know, people probably think, oh, you know, that's great. But when you actually have a loss like that and you feel at loss and then you have somebody bring you hope they were your angels at that moment.
James Jacobson: Well, that is all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us on your walk.
Clare Mansell: If you'd like to hear more about the Alta Heritage Foundation, hop over to our show, The Long Leash, to hear the extended conversation between Jim and Alex, and I [00:30:00] know we say it every episode, but it is so important. If you enjoy this show, then please follow along in your podcast app and tell a friend, one of your dog-walking pals. If you enjoy this podcast, then let them know about it as well. I'm Claire Mansell in London, England.
James Jacobson: And I'm James Jacobson in Maui, Hawaii. On behalf of all of us here at Dog Podcast Network, I'd like to wish you and your dog a very warm Aloha.