At Texas State University’s Decomposition Facility, Dogs Learn to Detect Death and Save Lives

The dog won’t go near the dead man’s toes.

The skittish German shepherd is one of 26 dogs learning to detect human remains during a spring weekend at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility,  a 26-acre outdoor human decomposition lab at the Freeman Center northwest of San Marcos. The dogs and their handlers have come to Freeman Center from across the country for the seminar, which is organized by TXST in coordination with the nonprofit group F.I.R.S.T. Detection K9 (Furthering Investigations, Research, Standards, and Training).  

The shepherd’s handler cheers and waves a colorful toy, trying to coax the dog closer to a pair of human feet protruding from beneath a tarp in a grassy clearing. Instead, she turns her head and cowers behind her handler’s legs, an aversion that doesn’t surprise Dr. Ben Alexander, an instructor and K9 training coordinator for TXST’s Forensic Anthropology Center, known as FACTS. 

“These dogs have never been exposed to anything like this before,” says Alexander, who’s also a lead instructor for F.I.R.S.T. Detection K9. “It’s new and sometimes overwhelming.”

While sometimes jarring for dogs and their handlers, exposure to whole, fresh human bodies is essential for search and rescue, Alexander says. “A dog who’s only been working little pieces of human tissue won’t recognize a whole body,” he explains. “They’ll walk on past it like it’s not there.”

That’s one thing that makes Texas State so important as a training facility for search-and-rescue dogs. “There’s no place else in the United States that you can have access to more than one body,” Alexander says.

Dogs who have trained at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, the largest of its kind in the world, have gone on recovery missions after mudslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other disasters, including last summer’s devastating July Fourth Guadalupe River floods. They’ve also searched for missing persons and worked homicide cases.  

Dr. Daniel Wescott, an anthropology professor and the director of FACTS, says the Freeman Center body farm is primarily a research center, but it also provides training for search-and-rescue dogs and various branches of law enforcement and military.  

“Normally K9s are trained on small pieces of tissue like teeth and placentas, but that’s very different from a real-world scenario,” Wescott says. “We have human remains that are at various stages of decomposition, depending on the training they want to do. We can set them up in more realistic scenarios that you’d be more likely to have in an outdoor scene.”

Under gray skies during the seminar in March, handlers and their dogs move through short grass, past prickly pear cacti and stands of oak trees typical of an idyllic Hill Country ranch—if not for the tall double fences surrounding the facility. The hesitant German shepherd is given a reprieve, and the next handler, Chris Westminster, steps forward with her dog, Arely.

Arely, a German shepherd-Malinois mix, bounds after a toy, seemingly oblivious to the donated remains of an older man who died less than a week earlier. 

“Play, play, play, play!” encourages canine trainer Gregory Strickland, a retired police officer from South Florida and lead instructor for F.I.R.S.T. Detection K9. His oddly upbeat tone is intentional, meant to ensure that Arely doesn’t develop a fear response to human remains.

The moment she sniffs the man’s feet, playtime starts.

“Now back away and give her a treat,” Strickland says. “Play her out.”

Westminster rewards Arely with praise and a small treat. “I love dogs, and I love search and rescue. It becomes a part of you,” says Westminster, who volunteers with her county’s search-and-rescue squad in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  

Arely, a rescue, is her fifth working dog. “This is how I give back to my community,” she says, “and I depend on her to do that.”

With repetition, Arely quickly learns to associate the scent of fresh human remains with a reward. Over the course of the three-day seminar, the dogs are also trained to detect people in other stages of decomposition, from buried and burned to mummified remains. 

Freeman Center workshops are held several times a year in cooperation with F.I.R.S.T. Detection K9, drawing volunteers and law enforcement officers from around the country. The program also trains an increasing number of handlers who work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Because dogs’ sense of smell is vastly more sensitive than that of humans, many people wrongly assume any dog can perform this work. That’s not the case, Alexander says. Successful cadaver dogs share traits that trainers call “hunt drive,” a willingness to search for items they can’t see. They also have “high drive,” a strong, sustained motivation to earn rewards.

“They work for a paycheck just like we do,” Alexander says. For most dogs, the paycheck is a toy. For others, it’s food. All dogs respond well to praise.

Alexander’s path to this work began in childhood, showing German shepherds raised by his parents. After college, he was teaching obedience classes when he and his then-wife happened to watch a TV news report about cadaver dogs recovering bodies in North Texas.

“You could do that,” she told him.

Alexander was given a border collie named Pete, and the pair completed their first successful mission in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But Alexander noticed that some teams struggled. The dogs missed targets, and their handlers were frustrated.  

That experience shaped Alexander’s academic interests at Texas A&M University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on search dog performance, and his Ph.D. work focused on soils beneath decomposing bodies, which led him to Texas State, where he established the canine human remains detection program in 2013.

FACTS receives about 70 human corpses a year. Some are donated by family members; others come from people who pledge their bodies before death.

Heather Wisner, a cadaver dog handler and advocate, describes body donors as “silent teachers.” She describes herself as “one of the crazy dog people” who once used her own mom’s amputated leg to train her cadaver dog, a border collie named Rey.

In recent years, Wisner has repeatedly traveled from her home in northern Wisconsin to Texas State to assist with seminars and train with Rey. Ongoing training like this is essential for teams seeking certification from the National Association for Search and Rescue, and handlers often describe their dogs not as pets but as partners. The relationship is built on trust.

“You’ve got to have enough trust in your training that you can stand back and get out of the way and let your dog do their job,” Alexander says.

Support from experienced teammates is just as critical, he adds. Many cities in Texas have search-and-rescue teams, most of them staffed by volunteers. Alexander encourages prospective handlers to get involved with their local teams, but the work is not for everyone. Most handlers train their dogs nearly every day of the week.

“This is not a hobby,” he says. “It’s a way of life.”