Introduction
On February 23, 1938, a Jerusalem Military Court convicted Mustafa Mansour of the unlawful possession of a weapon and for opening fire at a bus. The prosecution's key witness tying Mansour to the shooting was, however, not human but canine. Due to darkness the police could not pursue the “brigands” immediately following the incident. They returned at dawn accompanied by Doberman Pinschers. The dogs tracked footprints from the crime scene to the defendant's village, and then to his house, where the police discovered a few rounds of ammunition, some of which were spent.Footnote 1
Mansour's conviction was hardly unique in its heavy reliance on dog tracking.Footnote 2 Nor were such evidentiary practices confined to military courts. Despite their known shortcomings, Dobermans became a central feature of policing and proof in 1930s Palestine. Judges routinely relied on such evidence to establish guilt and in some cases—such as that of Mansour—to send defendants to the gallows.Footnote 3
The increased reliance on dog tracking was part of a broader shift in crime detection and proof in Palestine, and in the British Empire more generally. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, forensic sciences came to dominate trials in British- administered territories. The colonies often pioneered forensic innovation and its integration into the legal process. State-run forensic laboratories operated in British dependencies such as Ceylon and Egypt decades before they did in Britain.Footnote 4 As a result, when designing Britain's forensic laboratories in the 1930s, the Home Office drew on the expertise of colonial officials such as C.T. Symons, the Government Analyst of Ceylon and Sydney Smith, Principal Medico-Legal Expert to the Ministry of Justice in Egypt.Footnote 5 The colonies also pioneered particular forensic techniques such as fingerprinting, tool marking, and dog tracking. Some of these methods were employed in the colonies long before being introduced—if at all—in Britain.Footnote 6
Reliance on forensic innovations in the colonies was not always the result of advances in scientific research. Many novel forms of proof depended on unproven assumptions about the uniqueness of physical attributes (such as human scent, fingerprints and hair), and the ostensible distinctiveness of mass-produced objects (such as shoes or firearms).Footnote 7 Furthermore, some methods of proof were devised not by “men of science” in the laboratories of Britain's leading research institutions, but by “men on the spot,” administrators in the remotest corners of the Empire, grappling—often intuitively—with the pragmatic challenges of colonial policing in a desperate effort to maintain or restore order.
This article contributes to a growing body of literature that explores colonialism's role in shaping modern forensic culture.Footnote 8 Whereas in the imperial metropole introducing investigative innovations was often met with considerable resistance, there were fewer qualms about doing so abroad.Footnote 9 The inhibiting forces of public opinion were not as influential in the colonies, making experiments in law and policing easier to realize overseas.Footnote 10 Furthermore, at least from a British perspective, colonial policing presented certain exigencies not present—or at least not as forceful—in the metropole. Existing scholarship has convincingly linked the advent of forensic culture to growing social mobility, anonymity, and fears of mass violence.Footnote 11 Colonialism further compounded such metropolitan concerns. Cultural distance in the colonies rendered criminal motives opaque and incomprehensible to British minds.Footnote 12 Mutual distrust between colonizer and colonized bred fear of looming insurgency, native mendacity, and noncooperation. Coupled with the difficulty of cross-racial identification, such distrust meant that nowhere was anonymity so pronounced, and the fear of mass violence so profound, as in the colonies. These factors lent urgency to exploring new methods for investigating crimes; urgency they lacked in the metropole, where criminals—though occasionally ruthless—were at least presumed to act “rationally.”Footnote 13
Forensic science addressed such anxieties directly by rendering crime scenes legible. Perpetrators could be prosecuted even if no eyewitnesses had been present or were willing to come forth, and regardless of whether the police could comprehend the criminal's motives. Moreover, forensic evidence offered a semblance of objectivity and precision, which helped to legitimize an imposed colonial legal order. Forensic sciences also served Britain's “civilizing mission,” substituting European “science”—or pseudoscience—for native superstition, in the service of law and order.
Beyond these featuers, dog tracking also displayed some distinctive traits, which complicate and nuance our view of precisely how colonialism helped redefine the boundaries of forensic innovation. First, tracking relied on olfaction, a sense that to this day remains the least understood scientifically of the five sensesFootnote 14 Whereas this underexploration posed challenges to dog tracking's adoption at home, it did not hinder its use in the colonies. Second, unlike other trace evidence, scent by its very nature could not be preserved for fact finders to evaluate at trial, forcing them to defer entirely to testifying experts. Third, unlike other forms of forensic expertise, dog tracking employed an animal, which presented a host of other issues: beyond the difficulty of scrutinizing their method and the grounds for their opinion, dogs possessed a cultural significance and produced (or were believed to create) certain psychological effects, in both Britain and in its Empire. But whereas these effects hindered their use in Victorian Britain, they only enhanced the dogs’ appeal to colonial authorities endeavoring to curb native crime.
The article proceeds in four parts. Drawing on archival material from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Palestine, it compares dog tracking's trajectory in Britain and in two of its dependencies during the first half of the twentieth century. Part I examines the scientific and moral limitations that led Victorians to reject dog tracking as an investigative technique. Dog tracking was however, enthusiastically adopted in the Union of South Africa during the first decades of the twentieth century, which is the focus of Part II. Citing racial and environmental differences between Britain and its colonies, authorities in South Africa harnessed native superstition of dogs to curb criminality and to elicit confessions from suspects. Similar prejudices characterized dog tracking's adoption in 1930s Palestine, a process analyzed in detail in Part III. But whereas in South Africa canines were employed primarily to investigate livestock theft, in Palestine they were used mostly to address “political” crime. This tendency peaked during the Arab Revolt (1936–39): in the absence of willing and reliable eyewitnesses, canine evidence was routinely offered in court. Despite the reliance on dog-tracking evidence abroad, such proof was deemed insufficiently trustworthy for the metropole. Part IV explores the Home Office's failed efforts from the 1930s onward to establish dog tracking's scientific foundation in a manner that would satisfy English evidentiary standards. The story of dog tracking thus highlights the duality—in both moral and scientific standards—between forensic inquiries in Britain and in its empire.
I. Dog Tracking in Victorian Britain
A. Scents of Identity
Canine identification abilities have been the subject of literary celebration for millennia. In Homer's Odyssey, only Argos was able to recognize the disguised Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca.Footnote 15 In Sir Walter Scott's Talisman, a dog identified the thief of the royal standard.Footnote 16 Dogs also played key roles in Victorian literature, perhaps most notably in the tales of Sherlock Holmes. In The Sign of Four, Holmes enlisted the help of Toby, a “queer mongrel with a most amazing power of scent” whose assistance he preferred to “the whole detective force in London.”Footnote 17 Although Watson was skeptical Toby could follow a scent for kilometers, even through the well-trodden streets of London.Footnote 18 In The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, Holmes inferred from the black spaniel's bark that Lady Beatrice's brother had disguised himself as his late sister to fool his creditors.Footnote 19 In Silver Blaze, the dog's failure to bark indicated that the horse thief must have been someone familiar to the dog, thus providing the key to solving the mystery.Footnote 20
Unlike their owners, these literary canines were not misled by outward appearances. Because of their keener senses, they were able to accurately ascertain identity in ways unfathomable to humans. Especially in an era of ubiquitous disguise and social and geographical mobility, verifying identity proved elusive yet critical not only for policing but also for enforcing social boundaries.Footnote 21 As the work of Conan Doyle illustrates, the idea of using dogs to track criminals fascinated Victorians.Footnote 22 Still, dogs were not employed by the police to track perpetrators based on physical evidence found at crime scenes.Footnote 23 Although dog breeders and handlers were occasionally consulted in individual investigations, until the mid-twentieth century such joint ventures were rare.Footnote 24
B. The Scientific and Moral Limitations of Dog Tracking
One hindrance was skepticism concerning dogs' ability to reliably track humans, especially in densely populated cities.Footnote 25 Dog tracking's accuracy rested on three fundamental assumptions: first, that every human possessed a unique scent; second, that canines could accurately distinguish between individuals; and third, that dogs could be trained to communicate such distinctions to their handlers. However, comprehensive scientific experiments conducted in Germany and in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century challenged these assumptions.Footnote 26 As discussed in Part IV, British researchers struggled to establish them well into the 1950s.
Equally important, dog tracking also violated broadly held cultural beliefs.Footnote 27 In an age when “Menfolk… prefer to assume that odourlousness is the standard to be aimed at,” the fact that individuals possessed a unique scent was something that “no well bred person likes to think about or discuss.”Footnote 28 Moreover, scent itself was regarded to be a highly subjective sense. As Grant Allen observed in 1877, “Of all the senses of man, Smell is the one which is least intellectual and most purely emotional.”Footnote 29
Moral apprehension presented another difficulty. Aversion to stalking humans with bloodhounds stemmed in large part from their checkered past in the antebellum American South, as depicted in literary works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred,Footnote 30 and their role in suppressing insurrections in Jamaica and Cuba.Footnote 31 Though advocates of dog tracking in Britain distinguished the mongrel, savage, man-hunting Confederate “Cuban Bloodhound” (which some argued was no bloodhound at all) from its reliable and humane English namesake,Footnote 32 stalking humans still suffered from a beastly image.Footnote 33
Jack the Ripper's 1888 wave of murders represented a flashpoint in the public debate on employing tracking dogs in Britain, illustrating the moral dimensions of this issue. The slayings prompted Sir Charles Warren, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to test the bloodhounds’ human-tracking abilities in Hyde Park, with the intention of unleashing them in Whitechapel to track the Ripper.Footnote 34 The press, however, reacted with outrage. The Pall Mall Gazette deemed Scotland Yard's proposed use of the hounds “The reign of lawless law,”Footnote 35 whereas the Evening Telegraph regarded it to be the “perversion of justice and the oppression of liberty.”Footnote 36 Unleashing hounds in the empire's capital to stalk even the most brutal of murderers was considered repugnant.Footnote 37 Ultimately, even during the “Autumn of Terror,” bloodhounds were never employed.
The qualms that precluded dog tracking in Britain did not extend to its dependencies. Moreover, as in the Confederate South, racial distinctions allowed the necessary cultural, epistemological, and scientific space for dog tracking to thrive first in South Africa, and then in Palestine, Kenya, and elsewhere in the British Empire.
II. The Empire's New Dogs: Canine Tracking in South Africa
The Natal Police were the first to employ tracking dogs. In 1908 Detective-Sergeant Ker of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) imported “Rex” to assist him in criminal investigations.Footnote 38 In the following years, “Bashful” and several other bloodhounds joined Rex on the Natal force. Transvaal followed soon thereafter by establishing its own dog unit.Footnote 39
News of the bloodhounds traveled quickly throughout the newly established Union of South Africa. In 1911, one of the bloodhounds was summoned to Johannesburg to demonstrate its capabilities to the South African Police (SAP) authorities. Despite “perfect weather conditions” prevailing in Johannesburg that day, the hound failed miserably. Assuming that the “bloodhound might have been somewhat off-colour on that particular day,” another demonstration was scheduled in Pretoria a few days later; however, the bloodhound did no better the second time, leading Acting Police Commissioner H.C. Bredell to deem the entire affair “a complete fiasco.” Told that the “dog had done some good work” prior to his arrival, Bredell pondered why “the moment we appear on the scene, the dog will not or cannot do its work.”Footnote 40 In November, Bredell allowed the hounds a third opportunity to display their talents, but both dogs proved unable to follow the spoor of the white men who had laid it.Footnote 41 Officials explained that race was the true culprit: the handlers had been instructed “to train the dogs to track natives only.”Footnote 42 Still, the hounds failed even when put on the trail of a “native labourer.”Footnote 43
Dismayed by the English bloodhounds’ poor performance, the force turned to Doberman Pinschers instead.Footnote 44 The Dobermans were found to be the “most useful and reliable breed” possessing the finest combination of sagacity, stamina, and olfactory capacities. The SAP selected “outstanding trained dogs from a line of ancestors famed for brains, grit, and vitality, endowed with a strong scenting nose.”Footnote 45 These dogs, it was said, could reliably track even 72-hour-old spoors left by natives.Footnote 46
In 1911, a dog-training facility was erected at Quaggapoort, outside Pretoria, on the farm of General Jan Smuts.Footnote 47 During their 18 month training, the dogs were taught to obey, to retrieve hidden objects, and to follow day-old, several-kilometer-long trails, laid in dry veldt by “natives.”Footnote 48 For cases in which a trail led to a multioccupant dwelling, or where an object belonging to the suspect was found at the scene, the dogs were trained to match scents and to choose suspects at identification parades.Footnote 49 After successfully completing their training, the Dobermans were dispatched to outposts throughout the Union.Footnote 50 By 1920, the unit was sixty-five dogs strong.Footnote 51 In 1929, with thirteen trainers and 140 dogs in training, Chief of Police I.P. de Villiers noted that South Africa's dog training facility remained “the only state-owned institution of the kind in the world.”Footnote 52
De Villiers described some of the cases in which dogs solved otherwise insoluble mysteries. In one livestock theft case, the tracks were nearly a week old, and the trail more than 50 miles long. Still, “Trix” successfully led police to a man possessing “two sheep skins and some fresh fat.” Although purely circumstantial, the tracking and possession were found sufficient to indict and convict. The defendant was sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment with hard labor.Footnote 53
Still, some officers had misgivings about the dogs’ accuracy.Footnote 54 Following a 1918 case in which two dogs tracked the same suspect from the point of breaking and entering, the Deputy Commissioner of police for the Johannesburg District expressed his skepticism. “I contend that it is impossible for a dog to take the scent… and trace accused as was done in this case… I do not wish to convey that the dog handler is unscrupulous, but I honestly confess that I do dislike any person being deprived of his liberty by arrest under such conditions.”Footnote 55
For obvious reasons, such dissent, as well as the dogs’ failures, were actively concealed from the public. After the “fiascos” of 1911, public demonstrations were conducted sparingly, for fear of tarnishing the canines’ image. As one observer explained, “since no dog is infallible a public demonstrated failure will cause considerable harm.”Footnote 56 Now, such demonstrations focused on the dogs’ agility and “clever tricks,” not on their tracking skills.Footnote 57 However, not all mistakes could be concealed. A 1919 case that received considerable public attention strongly suggested that “dogs put on trails definitely gave wrong indications.”Footnote 58
A. The Dark Side of Canine Tracking
Why did dog tracking thrive in South Africa while failing to take root in Britain? Innocuous explanations—namely, differences in climate, urbanization, and industrialization—were offered by some. Discussing the great success of a dog picking up 4-day-old spoors in South Africa, dog expert H.S. Lloyd explained that in the bush, there was “no motor traffic with its oil leaks and petrol odour to overcome.” Similar achievements, he opined, “would have proved impossible in England.”Footnote 59 A 1937 SAP Report noted that even within the Union, “complete success with dogs cannot be looked for in towns or other thickly populated places.”Footnote 60
More sinister reasons, however, lurked in the shadows: racial difference—real or constructed—justified the Dobermans’ employment to address the distinctive challenges facing the SAP.Footnote 61 In 1910, the SAP's journal Nongqai noted that like some of its counterparts in the American South, the Natal force was using dogs to “hunt down bare-footed negroes.”Footnote 62 Nongqai displayed a keen awareness of the bloodhound's image, notimg that the breed was “sometimes regarded as a ferocious monster, endowed with miraculous attributes, and capable of pursuing his victim successfully under any conditions till caught, when he would certainly tear him limb from limb.” The journal conceded that this image was partly derived from the bloodhound's name, which was “calculated to inspire awe, and partly by recollections of slave-hunting tales in ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin.’”Footnote 63 But the dogs’ petrifying effect did not preclude their use. The journal concluded that “To anyone fond of hound work, man-hunting has an especial charm…and the pleasures of success are proportionately gratifying.”Footnote 64
The “charms” and “pleasures” of man hunting were reserved, however, for African quarries. The dogs had not even been trained to track Europeans.Footnote 65 Dog tracking data from South Africa confirms that canines tracked almost exclusively non-whites: of sixty-eight investigations before 1922 for which documentation survives, dogs identified European quarries in only four cases.Footnote 66 Further analysis links this racial imbalance to the crimes that the dogs investigated: primarily livestock theft, a crime allegedly perpetrated overwhelmingly by Africans against Europeans.Footnote 67
Authorities cited numerous factors to elucidate why Africans were supposedly inclined to steal livestock. A 1937 report explained that Europeans provided natives with insufficient meat rations, and the native's “craving for meat” was only intensified by the “kaffir beer” which “many farmers allow[ed] their natives to brew.”Footnote 68 Moreover, the report noted the “inherent propensity for theft in certain kinds of natives,” especially the unemployed who harbored “no love for work.”Footnote 69
With annual export values approaching £20,000,000, livestock farming was “one of the most important industries in the Union.”Footnote 70 Widespread theft threatened to destroy this trade entirely. From 1933 to 1937, white settlers reported between 18,000 and 21,000 thefts per year, of which between 2,000 and 3,000 cases annually remained “undetected.” Some farmers were forced “to give up the farming of sheep altogether.”Footnote 71 Stock theft was a persistent problem in other African colonies.Footnote 72 Perhaps more than any other crime, stock theft reflected tensions between Africans and European settler populations.Footnote 73 As one British children's book put it quite plainly, “since black people were not strong enough to drive white strangers out, they stole their cattle and ruined their houses whenever they had a chance.”Footnote 74
White farmers accused the SAP of inadequately responding to stock theft. They complained “that there are not sufficient detectives specially trained to investigate stock thefts in the areas particularly affected.”Footnote 75 Beyond the difficulty of patrolling large swaths of countryside, prosecuting native stock theft posed unique challenges. First, according to police accounts, stealing from Europeans was not stigmatized in indigenous communities, which made witnesses difficult to procure.Footnote 76 Second, culprits proved particularly elusive. As one magistrate explained, the “efficient pursuit of Bushmen” required “superhuman powers”: “Bushmen when fleeing pursue such devious paths that the direct distance between places is about trebled in following their spoor and to follow this latter at all requires a practical skill which seems almost miraculous to the uninitiated. Traveling in the cool of the night the Bushman can cover almost as much ground as a mounted man can by day.”Footnote 77
Stock theft also challenged colonial governments seeking to introduce British notions of justice. Frequently unable to pinpoint an individual culprit, the government often had to impose, collective punishment—which undermined Britains claim to moral authority—or allow such crimes to go unpunished.Footnote 78 Tracking dogs offered a partial solution to such quandaries: even if they could not identify the true culprit, the dogs helped isolate an individual defendant. Police dogs were, therefore, dispatched to the Union districts most affected by stock theft.Footnote 79 The white man's best friend was thus bred to be the colored man's worst enemy.
B. The Psychological Effects of Dog Tracking
Substantiated or not, the conventional wisdom was that Africans feared dogs and believed they possessal supernatural powers, a belief that the SAP was only too happy to exploit.Footnote 80 The SAP consciously drew on the dogs’ effect on local criminals to justify their use. Police reports noted with satisfaction the Dobermans’ “great impression upon the natives”Footnote 81 and how “half the effect” was in the “influence they produce on the native mind.”Footnote 82 An experienced handler, who came to realize the dogs were “a hopeless failure” in identifying perpetrators, observed that Africans selected by the dogs often confessed falsely out of fear.Footnote 83 This was not necessarily a reason not to use canines: if natives believed that dogs possessed such powers, their employment alone could help reduce crime.Footnote 84
That colonial authorities would exploit superstition in this manner was particularly incongruous, given Britain's proclaimed “civilizing mission,” which aimed to eradicate witchcraft and traditional medicine and replace them with European science and reason.Footnote 85 Law in particular was trumpeted as “a primary avenue through which the state sought to discipline and deny witchcraft.”Footnote 86 The use of dogs only reinforced superstition, further strengthening perceptions of colonial policing and governance as forms of witchcraft.Footnote 87 As a result, dogs in particular came to symbolize European colonialism itself, in both African struggles for independence and in postcolonial literature.Footnote 88
C. Of Human and Canine Trackers
British reliance on superstition highlights the Doberman's dual nature: it was simultaneously modern and primitive, appealing to both the scientific (or pseudoscientific) sensibilities of colonial officials, and the superstitions and fears—real or attributed—of the native. In the liminal space between science and superstition, culture and nature, domesticity and wilderness,Footnote 89 colonial approaches to dog tracking paralleled British Portrayals of the African and Australian Bushman, American-Indian, Maori, and Bedouin trackersFootnote 90 : all fluctuated, perhaps paradoxically, between quasi-human and superhuman, “Shaman” and “Sherlock.”Footnote 91 What they supposedly lacked in intelligence they made up for in keener instincts and intuitions. Being more deeply in tune with their environment, they were capable of observing even the minutest signs in nature.Footnote 92
Court decisions in South Africa drew an explicit analogy between indigenous and canine trackers. When considering the admissibility of dog-tracking evidence (a topic I will address shortly), judges pondered whether such proof could have been admitted had it been offered by a native tracker who was unable to communicate his findings verbally. Sir Thomas Graham, Judge President of the Eastern Districts Local Division, urged his readers to “Conceive a case where the police possessed the services of a native whose language no one in South Africa understood.”Footnote 93 However, there was nothing inherently significant about the tracker in Graham's analogy being indigenous; the point would have been equally valid had he chosen a non-native illustration.
Comparisons between canine and native trackers carried over to other locations and contextsFootnote 94 : as one visitor to the dog training depot in South Africa observed, “The South African police dog is, with the possible exception of the Maori Aboriginal, the most wonderful tracker in the world.”Footnote 95 British colonial authorities used native trackers alongside canines to reinforce one another. In 1950s Kenya, British forces employed Kikuyu and Sudanese trackers alongside canines to form “Tracker Combat Teams” (TCT) charged with “deep penetration tactics.”Footnote 96 Particularly challenging tracking was left, however, to canine rather than native trackers implying the superiority of the former.Footnote 97
Such comparisons between native and canine, as well as their joint employment, bore additional symbolic value. For Britons, one aspect of African savagery was their wanton violence and cruelty towards animals.Footnote 98 By implying that dogs were equal or even superior trackers, British authorities signaled that dogs (and animals more generally) were worthy of the natives’ respect and fear. Moreover, dog breeding and training to track—like colonialism itself—symbolized Britons' ability to tame, master and harness nature.Footnote 99
D. The Questionable Admissibility of Dog-Tracking Evidence
Though used broadly by the SAP, dog tracking raised considerable evidenting issues. Not all investigative methods used by the police necessarily yield admissible evidence. Lack of sufficient scientific foundation, for example, might lead to exclusion, effectiveness in investigation notwithstanding. When dogs uncovered physical proof (e.g., stolen goods), such evidence possessed probative value, independently of the fact that dogs had led to it, making its admissibility uncontested.Footnote 100 But could the dog's tracking itself prove a criminal's identity?
The legal debate turned largely on evidentiary classifications. If the dogs were direct witnesses, or experts testifying (by barking and pawing) about a match between spoors detected at the crime scene and the unique scent of the defendant, the admissibility of their “testimony” would have to include cross-examination. If instead they were regarded as sophisticated olfactory devices operated by expert dog masters, their handlers would have to substantiate the scientific principles upon which they operated, with special attention paid to their training and methods.
To support the argument that tracking dogs were mere instruments, South African dog masters emphasized the scientific nature of their methods. They highlighted the canines’ intersubject, temporal, and spatial consistency.Footnote 101 To this end, two dogs were brought to every crime scene to ensure that both followed the same trail.Footnote 102 If identification parades were conducted, participants were rearranged to demonstrate the dogs’ consistency.Footnote 103 Handling protocols also dictated that “[the handler] should not be informed of the name or the whereabouts of any suspects, nor of the direction in which an offender may be believed to have left the scene of the crime.”Footnote 104 However, such precautions could not fully control for systemic failures whereby, for example, both dogs consistently—but mistakenly—followed a stronger or fresher scent from the crime scene.Footnote 105
Early on, South African courts generally admitted dog tracking evidence to prove identity. They accepted the position of South Africa's Solicitor General that dog masters were experts who had “studied as a science the movements and habits of police dogs” (emphasis added), rendering the dogs “mere instruments.”Footnote 106 Based on this understanding, some defendants were convicted based solely on canine evidence.Footnote 107
The first fissures appeared in R. v. Kotcho, a 1918 stock-theft case in the East Cape.Footnote 108 The defense attorney argued that dog tracking was inadmissible hearsay: “The dog indicated the prisoner by pawing him. That was the dog's equivalent of speech; it was information conveyed to the police by the dog and subsequently related by them to the Court. It was not evidence on oath, there was no possibility of cross-examination, the dog was not produced and if it were it could not be cross-examined.”Footnote 109
To illustrate its argument, the defense provided an analogy of a deaf, dumb, and blind human tracker with a keen sense of smell, who behaved like a police dog. “Supposing such a man followed up a scent, could it be said that the police would be able to give in evidence the indications this man had given to them?” Moreover, it was argued, even if a dog could speak, its evidence would arguably remain inadmissible, because the animal had not been present during the crime: “the dog was put on the scent in the absence of the prisoner. It was clearly not part of the res gestae as the crime had been completed.” Finally, even if the dog was considered an “expert,” its evidence was “given second-hand and without any testimony whatever that the person giving it was qualified.”Footnote 110
Judge Graham excluded on two grounds: first, the dogs’ incompetence and second, the court's inability to independently assess their proof. Graham reasoned that “lunatics and persons in state of intoxication were not competent to give evidence on the ground that they were not in a rational state.” Therefore, he explained, “an irrational creature like a dog” should be subject to the same standard. He noted that “It would be a dangerous innovation to allow the introduction of the evidence of irrational animals which were actuated by instincts of which we knew but little and could regulate only in a limited degree.”Footnote 111
Graham went on to explain that even if dogs were considered “rational,” with scent there “was something intangible that could not be tested,” which distinguished it from other visible and conservable trace evidence (such as fingerprints or footprints). Other trace evidence could be documented and presented in court by experts, for fact finders to form an independent opinion. The ephemeral nature of scent, however, meant that courts had no opportunity to independently evaluate it, forcing them to defer entirely to the dog and its handler. Because the dog master's “testimony was clearly hearsay,” even the usual safeguards for ensuring a direct witness's credibility were unavailable in this instance.Footnote 112
Kotcho did not however, deal a final blow to the judicial admission of dog-tracking evidence in South Africa. Such proof was offered in legal proceedings until 1920, when the High Court addressed the matter in R. v. Trupedo.Footnote 113 The defendant was charged with entering a girls’ hostel with the intent to commit a crime. He escaped through a window after one of the three girls in the room awoke. A dog rushed to the scene led its master to a hut in the hostel's yard where eight natives were sleeping. After sniffing all of them, the dog barked at the defendant, who was in bed with a blanket over his head.Footnote 114
In his decision to exclude the dog's evidence, Chief Justice James Rose Innes departed from Graham's reasoning.Footnote 115 Canines’ lack of rationality was not, in his opinion, an obstacle to admissibility, but rather quite the contrary. In some cases, Innes wrote, “inferences may be quite properly drawn from the behaviour of animals.”Footnote 116 For example, a dog's failure to bark upon the entry of an intruder (as in Conan Doyle's Silver Blaze) could lead to a proper inference that the trespasser was someone familiar to the dog.Footnote 117 This was not, however, the case when prosecutors sought to introduce tracking and identification of someone previously unknown to the dog. Distinguishing permissible from impermissible inferences drawn from canine behavior, Innes contrasted behavior that was “instinctive and invariable” and skills for which animals “must be carefully trained before they can be relied upon.”Footnote 118 Whereas the former were founded on the “instinct of self-preservation,” the latter involved “processes closely akin to reasoning.”Footnote 119 Reasoning and analogous processes were prone to risks of error and, perhaps more significantly, the insincerity of either dog or handler, which rendered them inadmissible.
Innes added that dog's behaviour was exceptionally prone to “misunderstanding between the animal and its keeper”, further compounding the general risks of hearsay. Dog tracking also lacked scientific foundation. “We have no scientific or accurate knowledge as to the faculty by which dogs of certain breeds are said to be able to follow the scent of one human being, rejecting the scent of all others.” Properly analyzed, he ruled, dog tracking belonged in the “region of conjecture and uncertainty” rather than science, and must therefore be excluded from judicial decision making.Footnote 120
Ironically, judicial exclusion only paved a path toward more sweeping and troublesome uses for dog tracking. During the 1920s, the SAP continued to employ dogs broadly throughout the Union to recover stolen stock and to elicit confessions.Footnote 121 Moreover, soon after the High Court excluded dog-tracking evidence, the government introduced the Stock Theft Act, which reversed the onus of proof in such cases. The new statute provided that “being found in possession of stock reasonably suspected of being stolen and being unable to give a satisfactory account of such possession” was sufficient to convict.Footnote 122 The Act thus deemed it unnecessary to present the dogs’ identification in court.Footnote 123 Additionally, dog spooring could lead to punitive extrajudicial measures. In some provinces “Spoor Laws” allowed collective fining of entire kraals to which dogs had tracked stolen stock. In 1937, such measures were recommended throughout the Union.Footnote 124
Despite the inadmissibility of their evidence, the SAP's Dobermans were a sought-after crime-detection technology throughout the British Empire. From South Africa, the Dobermans performed cross-border tracking of criminals into neighboring Batusoland, Swaziland, and Bethuanaland.Footnote 125 Wishing to establish their own canine units, between 1918 and 1939 police forces in Southern Rhodesia,Footnote 126 Kenya,Footnote 127 Palestine,Footnote 128 India,Footnote 129 Burma,Footnote 130 New Zealand, and AustraliaFootnote 131 requested that the SAP provide them with dogs and handlers. Inability to complete the demanding handler training, prohibitive costs, and a shortage of trained canines, however, meant that other police forces were seldom able to maintain their own units. Rules pertaining to handlers imposed an additional hurdle: displaying yet another racially discriminatory dimension of dog tracking, only white members of colonial police forces were admitted to South Africa's dog-master training.Footnote 132
III. Dog Tracking in Palestine
A. From Rifles to Notebooks
One of the first police forces outside South Africa to successfully integrate tracking dogs was Palestine. The 1935 establishment of Palestine's Dog Section must be considered against the backdrop of broader reforms that took place in the Palestine Police following the 1929 “disturbances.”Footnote 133 Claiming nearly 250 lives and leaving an additional 500 injured, the disturbances led authorities to rethink their policing approach. Palestine's government had not only failed to prevent the violence; it had also been unsuccessful in bringing perpetrators to justice. In as many as 420 indictable offenses, the accused remained “unknown.” Furthermore, crimes that were prosecuted resulted in a 40% acquittal rate.Footnote 134 Critics attributed the government's failure to several factors: the force's size (especially its British contingent of a mere 175) was deemed inadequate, its intelligence service deficient, and its leadership wanting. All these allegedly contributed to the outbreak and escalation of violence. As for the failure to secure convictions, Zionist leaders accused Arab witnesses—including policemen—of perjuring themselves and thwarting justice.Footnote 135
Following the disturbances, Herbert Dowbiggin—inspector general of the Ceylon Police and a renowned authority on colonial policing—was dispatched to Palestine to advise on reforms.Footnote 136 His recommendations were counterintuitive: rather than reconstituting Palestine's militarized gendarmerie (that had been disbanded in 1926), Dowbiggin advocated a further move toward a civilian or “blue” police force. He proposed modeling the Palestine Police on the Metropolitan Police, rather than on the Royal Irish Constabulary that served as the blueprint for most colonial police forces.Footnote 137 According to Dowbiggin's vision, Palestine's policemen would be more educated and better integrated among themselves (Arabs, Jews, and Britons) and within the communities they served.Footnote 138 They would be equipped with notebooks rather than armed with rifles.Footnote 139 Such reforms were part of his broader vision for bridging the gap between state and society, making the colonial police at least appear less coercive or external to the population that they policed. Critics sarcastically commented that such reforms replaced “old mounted warriors” with “pimply-faced youths from the training school.”Footnote 140
A major component in Dowbiggin's reform was the restructuring of the CID by enhancing its intelligence-gathering and scientific-analysis capabilities.Footnote 141 Drawing on Ceylon's pioneering experience with employing science in policing, in 1932 a forensic laboratory was established at Palestine Police Headquarters. New technologies allowed the Palestine Police to conduct ballistic, fabric, blood, and semen analyses, and to identify firearm markings. New recruits were trained to collect such specimens from crime scenes.Footnote 142 Edward Horne's claim that “Palestine had one of the first police forces in the world to explore the possibility of forensic science as an aid to detection and conviction” is perhaps overstated.Footnote 143 Forensic laboratories operated for decades in other parts of the British Empire, including in Ceylon and neighboring Egypt.Footnote 144 However, it bears mentioning that the laboratory in Palestine was established before its British counterpart, further suggesting the relationship between colonialism and the development of forensic culture.Footnote 145
Forensic science helped address many of the deficiencies that impeded investigation and prosecution during the 1929 disturbances. It provided the colonial state with direct access to crime scenes, unmediated by the indigenous population, thus freeing it from reliance on native eyewitnesses. The universal language of science also provided a semblance of precision, objectivity, and evenhandedness. This proved particularly significant in Palestine, where British authorities were often accused (by both Arabs and Jews) of partiality. With fresh memories of the police's ineptitude during the 1929 disturbances, and with mounting British fear of recurring unrest, such unmediated access to evidence was deemed critical.
The Dog Section fit neatly within this brave new vision of policing. In his correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Colonies concerning the establishment of a canine unit, High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope explained, “I think that there is no question that the use of dogs would assist the Police considerably in their work, particularly where the investigation of political crime is concerned… [where] information which might be given by members of the public leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminals is often withheld out of fear and a misguided sense of sympathy.”Footnote 146
The forensic turn, was, however, double edged: by reducing the authorities’ reliance on native cooperation, it risked further alienating the local population by rendering them passive objects of surveillance rather than active participants in policing their own communities. Similarly, the expansion of the British web of informants (also advocated by Dowbiggin) bore the potential of unraveling Palestine's social fabric by spreading fear and distrust.Footnote 147 The turn from rifles to notebooks was, therefore, not entirely consistent with the effort to bridge state and society.
B. Breeding Injustice
Although the Dog Section must be considered within the context of the broader Dowbiggin reforms, the precise impetus for its founding can be pinpointed to a particular failure by Palestine's human, Bedouin trackers in solving a highly charged political crime: the murder of Dr. Haim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency.Footnote 148 The prosecution relied on Bedouin trackers’ testimony to corroborate the widow's identification of the two defendants. At trial, however, both trackers—Abu Ruz and Abu Irgaig—were impeached by defense attorney Horace Samuel, who laid bare the fallibility of their methods: they had breached identification-parade protocols by inspecting the soles of the defendants' shoes after the widow had identified the two suspects. Moreover, rather than following the alleged murderers, the trackers divulged on cross-examination that they had possibly followed footprints left by the policemen who arrived at the scene before them.Footnote 149 Chief Justice Michael McDonnell concluded that the trackers’ evidence should be given no credit.Footnote 150 The acquittals were a painful setback for the Palestine Police. The high profile case placed Bedouin tracking skills under considerable public scrutiny, raising profound doubts concerning their reliability.Footnote 151
Inspector General Roy Spicer (Dowbiggin's protége who was appointed to head the Palestine Police in the wake of the 1929 disturbances) took the exoneration as an opportunity to introduce a canine unit. Weeks after the Supreme Court's acquittal, Sergeant John Kenyon Parker and Constable Alexander R. Pringle of the Palestine Police were dispatched to Pretoria for a dog-master training course.Footnote 152 They returned on Christmas Eve, 1934, with three Doberman Pinschers: Ria, Gift, and Mayer.Footnote 153 Spicer had long awaited a chance to introduce dog tracking: in 1927, while serving in Kenya, Spicer visited the SAP kennels and remained captivated by the Dobermans.Footnote 154 Although he sought to adopt dog tracking in Kenya while serving there, he could not justify the expenditure.Footnote 155 When transferred to Palestine, however, “finding [himself] in a country where the Treasury coffers are full,” his plans could be realized.Footnote 156 The failed prosecution in the Arlosoroff case provided the opportunity to import the canines, and make Spicer's “dog dreams… come true.”Footnote 157
To enhance their public image, Palestine's press was enlisted to disseminate favorable accounts of the canines' successes.Footnote 158 Journalists from Palestine's leading English, Arabic, and Hebrew newspapers were summoned to Palestine Police Headquarters in Jerusalem for a public demonstration of the dogs' skills.Footnote 159 On March 1, 1935, The Palestine Post and Davar's front page reported the Doberman's first investigative triumph. According to the article, Gift and Mayer were brought to sniff a jewelry box from which £P.15 (Palestine Pound) were stolen.Footnote 160 Each leading their handlers separately, the two dogs followed identical trails to Dir Yassin, a few kilometers away from the crime scene, where both chose the same individual out of an identification parade.Footnote 161 The Dobermans also conducted demonstrations for incredulous spectators at crime scenes: the dog-masters asked skeptical audience members to hide objects for the dogs to retrieve.Footnote 162
By May 1935, the dogs had assisted in solving twenty-four cases, including four murders, two attempted murders, eleven crimes against agricultural property, one case of stock theft, and three cases of forced entry.Footnote 163 In their first year of operation, the three dogs worked at ninety-nine crime scenes, leading a number of suspects to confess.Footnote 164 They were reputed to have followed 72-hour-old footprints,Footnote 165 and tracked distances of up to 6 kilometers from the initial spoor through terrain bereft of any visible tracks.Footnote 166 In its annual report to the League of Nations for 1935, His Majesty's Government reported: “The Police dogs have frequently been used in detecting the perpetrators of agrarian or other crimes, with an efficacy which has established their value as an aid in the apprehension of offenders and has created a very useful deterrent impression in the minds of villagers.”Footnote 167 The dogs’ fame spread beyond Palestine's frontiers: French authorities in Lebanon soon requested their assistance as well.Footnote 168
Racial prejustice played a less significant role in justifying the dogs’ use in Palestine. Not only were the dogs employed in urban areas to track shoed quarries, but Spicer also noted “so far as I know, the Palestine criminal is not more odiferous than criminals in other parts of the world.”Footnote 169 As a result, Spicer fostered a vision to not only “spread the police dog cult into other Colonies” but also “into the British Police Forces themselves.”Footnote 170 He urged his colleagues to “adopt the Doberman Pincher, see that every country and county has its quota of dog-masters and trained dogs, and you will be able to detect crime in a manner beyond the wildest dreams of Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace.”Footnote 171
As in South Africa, however, one of the dogs' significant appeals in Palestine was their perceived psychological effect on Palestine's population. In 1935, Spicer noted with satisfaction the “moral effect” that the dogs possessed over the “criminal classes in Palestine,” both primitive and sophisticated: “They are regarded with superstitious fear and dread by less educated offenders while the really intelligent criminal realises that they are possibly the most dangerous servants of public security that has yet been encountered.”Footnote 172 Not understanding the dogs’ mysterious ways, “primitive” Palestinian criminals reportedly tried every trick, including the wrapping of rags around their feet.Footnote 173
Official correspondence was less explicit about the dogs’ religious significance for Palestine's inhabitants. Still, many of those serving in Palestine were keenly aware of the fact that “Muslim Arabs considered dogs to be unclean.”Footnote 174 Herbert Samuel, Palestine's first high commissioner (1920–25), forbade the entry of dogs into his official residence for precisely that reason.Footnote 175 Despite their imputed impurity, however, the Arabic press—including newspapers known for their critical stance against the British government, such as Al-Difa'a—applauded the dogs’ import (at least initially) as a welcome effort to combat crime.Footnote 176 Crime victims—Arabs and Jews alike—soon began demanding that dogs be brought to crime scenes to investigate.Footnote 177
Although imported to address “political crimes,” dogs were initially used mostly to address common but otherwise difficult to investigate “agrarian crime” such as tree cutting, crop burning, and animal maiming.Footnote 178 The latter in particular was considered by colonial authorities to be one of “the most loathsome habits in this country.”Footnote 179 To British observers, animal maiming epitomized the cruelty and irrationality of the Levantine delinquent and distinguished him from his British counterpart: such crimes provided no gain, satisfying only base, vengeful instincts through wanton cruelty toward innocent creatures.Footnote 180
Dog tracking, therefore, met a distinctly imperial necessity. Through the prism of Orientalist criminology, the inability to comprehend motives required and justified innovative investigative techniques.Footnote 181 As the Palestine Post noted, crimes such as animal maiming displayed “beastliness of conception with great difficulty of detection and proof,” thus rendering them “outside the pale of ordinary police methods.” Dogs provided a practical solution complemented by a symbolic significance not lost on contemporaries: “Brutality in humankind is confronted by a super-human intelligence in brute creation. Better still, one dumb creature has it in its power to avenge another.”Footnote 182
C. Let Slip the Dogs of War: Suppressing the Arab Revolt
Palestine's Dog Section reached its heyday during the Arab Revolt (1936–39), which began 16 months after the Dobermans’ arrival and claimed thousands of lives.Footnote 183 To meet increasing demand for canine assistance during the Revolt, “aeroplanes were used in order to transport them expeditiously from one part of the country to another.”Footnote 184 “Arthur's Dogs” (named for Palestine's High Commissioner, Arthur Wauchope) could be instantly transported anywhere in Palestine. Despite its small size, “To the rural villager who decided to break the law, the new dog section now began to appear ubiquitous.”Footnote 185 Thanks to the Royal Air Force (RAF), from their kennels atop Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, the Dobermans could sniff out criminals in Palestine's most remote districts; that prospect alone—it was hoped—would keep criminals at bay. The British thus merged two powerful technologies of imperial control: dogs and aircraftFootnote 186 (a combination they would repeat in 1950s Kenya).Footnote 187 In 1936, the dogs were reportedly “successful” in solving 87 of the 172 cases that they helped investigate.Footnote 188
One such tracking took place following an ambush of the York and Lancaster Regiment on August 29, 1936. A search party discovered the dead body of an Arab in possession of a rifle and a clip of cartridges. The dogs were “brought to the scene by aeroplane” and given scent, after which they followed an 8 kilometer trail. “He gave tongue in the house of an Arab villager. In the house was found a large stock of explosives, powder and lead, together with a photograph of the dead man.”Footnote 189 If the official report is to be believed, more compelling confirmation of the dog's tracking accuracy could hardly be imagined.
As the Arab Revolt entered its second, more violent phase in September 1937, the Secretary of State for the Colonies dispatched Charles Tegart (former commander of the Calcutta Police), and David Petrie (director of intelligence for India and subsequently Head of MI5) to advise the Palestine Police. Titling the fourth section of their report “Dogs,” Tegart and Petrie deemed the Dobermans indispensable for combatting “Arab terror.”Footnote 190 “The trained instinct of these animals achieves results which are quite beyond the highest human intelligence,”Footnote 191 they observed. Tegart and Petrie were relying not only on second-hand accounts or the dogs’ reputation but on an investigation that they had themselves accompanied: in January 1938 archeologist J.L. Starkey was murdered outside Hebron by “Arab bandits.” Tegart and Petrie saw the dogs lead detectives from the murder scene on a 22 kilometer trail through mountainous terrain, from Beit Jibrin to Kharass, ultimately leading the police to a weapon concealed in a wall.Footnote 192
Noting the shortage of Dobermans in Palestine, Tegart and Petrie recommended increasing the size of the Dog Section. Even with the RAF at their service, the Dobermans could not meet demand.Footnote 193 Tegart observed that in 1937 only ten of fifty calls for assistance from Hebron were met.Footnote 194 As a result, many crimes went unsolved. “Consideration of time, economy in transport and escort, as well as the health of the dogs themselves” required increasing the number of dogs significantly and spreading them more evenly throughout the country. The report recommended that there “be a complete and self-contained establishment in Nazareth” with the aim of eventually establishing independent dog units in Nablus and Haifa as well.Footnote 195
Tegart and Petrie linked the need for more dogs to declining public cooperation, thus underscoring the particular necessity for novel detection methods during periods of colonial unrest. “In every case where tracks are left, there is, with dogs, a good chance of success and without them a virtual certainty of failure, assistance from the public being rarely forthcoming.”Footnote 196 Dog tracking replaced eyewitness accounts, which grew scarcer as public support for the colonial government declined.Footnote 197 “There is nothing more likely to put an end to acts of sabotage and violence than tracking by dogs,” the report determined. Tegart and Petrie concluded: “The question of dogs we regard as of the utmost importance and urgency in the matter of restoring law and order.”Footnote 198
To implement Tegart and Petrie's recommendations, the Palestine Police acquired eight Dobermans and commissioned two South African dog masters at great expense.Footnote 199 A new kennel was built in Affula, which “greatly increased the efficiency of the section. Dogs can now arrive at the scene of a crime in any part of the country within two hours of being requisitioned.”Footnote 200 The investment seemed imperative: with waxing anticolonial sentiment and waning public cooperation, police dogs had become indispensable.
The canines’ success, however, brought professional risks. Fear of poisoning meant that tracking dogs were generally prohibited from taking food from strangers.Footnote 201 During the Arab Revolt, the Dobermans increasingly became targets of attack.Footnote 202 The police responded by providing the dogs with armed escorts and thoroughly investigating any harm suffered by them. Migdal's death prompted an autopsy to determine whether the dog had been poisoned. He was found, however, to have died of “heart failure following a chill.”Footnote 203
The demand for Dobermans increased in 1938. Following Migdal's death, Tegart recommended the purchase of four more Dobermans.Footnote 204 But South Africa could spare no more, declining requests not only from Palestine but from other parts of the Empire as well.Footnote 205 The Secretary of State for the Colonies’ personal appeal to then South African Deputy Prime Minister Jan Smuts—whose farm initially housed the dog depot—proved futile, and other alternatives had to be explored.Footnote 206 Importing dogs from Germany posed both practical and political challenges: as a memorandum to the Secretary of State pointed out, the dogs “would have been trained in German.”Footnote 207 More importantly, by 1938, for Britain to request the assistance of Nazi Germany was no trivial matter, with tensions mounting over the fate of Sudetenland. As one Colonial Office official noted, there was great irony in the “rather curious position that we should be seeking the aid of the German Government in acquiring animals designed to track down Arabs who murder Jews.”Footnote 208 But as the Arab Revolt intensified, His Majesty's Government overcame its qualms, ultimately purchasing three trained dogs from a breeder in Hamburg.Footnote 209
Dog tracking often justified extrajudicial punitive action in Palestine.Footnote 210 As one British soldier reported home, “You may follow the police dogs into one village and upon this vague clue you may smash the village and burn it down.”Footnote 211 His account was not hyperbole. Following the November 5, 1937 killing of two “Black Watch” soldiers near Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate, Dobermans led the forces to Silwan, where soldiers beat twelve civilians to death with rifle butts.Footnote 212 Similarly, after rebels ambushed and killed an RAF officer in February 1938, a dog led British forces to a house in the village of Ijzim, but when put on the scent again, the dog led to a house opposite the one it had originally marked. Rather than allowing the inhabitants of both homes the benefit of the doubt, both houses were reduced to rubble and the entire village was fined.Footnote 213
D. Trial by Canine
When first introduced, the Palestine Police announced publicly that the dogs’ “function is not so much to produce evidence, as to corroborate the circumstances of crimes, as naturally dog testimony is admissible in no court.”Footnote 214 Even dog enthusiasts such as Rudolfine Menzel, founder of the Palestine Canine Research Institute, expressed skepticism about dog-tracking's “scientific foundation” (wissenschaftliche fundierung).Footnote 215 In her 1938 book on dog training, Menzel observed that dogs typically followed the most recent—and hence strongest—scent that they encountered. It was therefore not uncommon, she noted, for a dog to follow tracks for kilometers, finally leading to the home of a policeman who had investigated the crime scene. Contrary to laypersons’ beliefs, she noted, even the most talented dog could not simply sniff an object and lead its handler to the criminal. At most, dogs might retrieve other clues that could in turn help the police identify the culprit or yield other admissible evidence.Footnote 216
Menzel's own experience with the Palestine Police Dog Section provided grounds for skepticism concerning their reliability: in at least two instances in which Menzel arrived at murder scenes (often hours before the Palestine Police), her tracking dogs followed entirely different trails than the police's Dobermans. This suggested that a dog's training and handler significantly influenced the path followed and the person identified.Footnote 217 Other incidents provided additional grounds for doubts: in one robbery case, the dogs identified an old blind man, who clearly could not have committed the crime.Footnote 218 Critics alleged that at identification parades the canines always picked out someone, even if the perpetrator was not present.Footnote 219 Given their lack of verbal skills, the dogs’ choice of a suspect could not be adequately explored. Once a person was selected, however, police were accused of invariably “discovering” additional incriminating evidence.Footnote 220
Despite the Palestine Police's commitment not to offer canine evidence in judicial proceedings, prosecutors soon began relying on such proof at trial. Neither the novelty of the method nor skepticism concerning its reliability led the judiciary to exclude it. Two dogs could corroborate each other's identifications. Houses were demolished and some defendants were sent to the gallows based solely on dog identifications.Footnote 221
Adding to concerns regarding their reliability, those interpreting the dogs’ behavior in court were often not even their handlers.Footnote 222 Given the high demand for their skills, Parker and Pringle—Palestine's only certified dog masters for a number of years—were often unavailable.Footnote 223 Instead, rank-and-file policemen who took part in the investigation offered their accounts of the dogs’ behavior at the defendant's home or during an identification parade; whether they pounced on the defendant or barked.Footnote 224 These policemen could not speak to the dogs’ pedigree, training, or reliability; nor could they testify concerning adherence to dog-handling protocols in the particular investigation. At most, they could attest to compliance with general lineup requirements, thus limiting the value of their cross-examination.Footnote 225 Yet the inability to challenge their evidence proved to be one of the dogs' greatest advantages over human trackers: the scent that the dogs followed could be neither observed nor preserved, and unlike Bedouin trackers, the dogs’ methods could not be scrutinized or undermined in court.
Palestine's courts admitted dog identifications even when the police had clearly breached handling and tracking protocols.Footnote 226 In a 1936 murder trial, dog master Parker divulged on cross-examination that before conducting a two dog, ten person identification parade, he had permitted “a suspect person to come near the place in which there is a trace related to the crime.” This raised fears of contamination and the possibility that the dogs—much like the Bedouin trackers in the Arlosoroff investigation—had followed spoors left at the scene after the crime. Although the judge deemed this breach “extreme negligence,” he nevertheless admitted the evidence. The defendants were convicted despite the testimony of an eyewitness who named three other suspects.Footnote 227
How did judges in Palestine justify the admission of dog-tracking evidence especially given dog tracking's exclusion as insufficiently reliable in South Africa, and the Palestine government's initial pledge not to rely on such evidence in court?Footnote 228 Although Dobermans may not originally have been expected to furnish evidence, political unrest soon after their arrival may have led the government to renege on its commitment. As the Tegart Report noted, during the Revolt the police were often unable to procure willing eyewitnesses; they could muster little more than the barking or pawing of a Doberman Pinscher to tie defendants to a crime. When dogs supplied the only proof linking alleged rebels to a crime, judges in Palestine may have been disinclined to exclude it.
Judicial reticence to exclude may have also stemmed from mounting pressures on the judiciary to help quell the unrest. A rare 1937 instance in which a magistrate declined to indict based on dog-tracking evidence resulted in parliamentry criticism of the government's mishandling of the Revolt. The criticism prompted the Secretary of State for the Colonies to demand a detailed report on the case from Palestine's High Commissioner.Footnote 229
Pressures on the judiciary materialized in two concrete ways. First, the looming threat of removal for judges who proved too critical of the government. Chief Justice Michael McDonnell, who was deemed by Palestine's High Commissioner to be “unhelpful” in quelling the Revolt, was forced to resign in 1936. This sent a clear message to his brethren on the limits of judicial independence in the colonies.Footnote 230 Second, the threat of martial law, which would allow the executive to bypass the civil judiciary altogether, was imminent.Footnote 231 Judges may have therefore considered the admissibility of canine evidence to be a lesser evil.
Once admitted in Palestine, dog-tracking proof became admissible in other parts of the British Empire as well.Footnote 232 In 1953, the East African Court of Appeals deemed dog-tracking evidence admissible in all of British East Africa, provided that the dog master was available to testify regarding the dogs’ training and about “the nature of the test employed.”Footnote 233 Judicial acquiescence in such questionable investigative practices contrasts sharply with the treatment of canine evidence in Britain during the same period.
IV. The Hounds Come Home
A. The Limited Relevance of Colonial Experience
On August 25, 1937, London's Daily Express ran a sensational story: “Secret Bloodhounds Imported for ‘Yard.’” According to the article, two American bloodhounds were secretly imported and privately quarantined in Newbury. Closely guarded, the hounds were visited by Scotland Yard officials; however, an anonymous source informed the paper that their “duties cannot be disclosed.” The newspaper reported that the dogs were “expected to alter completely present methods of tracking criminals in this country.”Footnote 234
The article prompted the Home Secretary to demand a report on the matter. He was informed that the article was “founded on fact, but most of the details are wrong.”Footnote 235 The American bloodhounds were part of an experiment commissioned by the Home Office in late 1934, just as the first Dobermans were approaching Palestine's shores. As part of a Committee on Detective Work under the chairmanship of Arthur Dixon (undersecretary in charge of police) a subcommittee was assembled to consider the police's employment of canines.Footnote 236
When considering dog tracking, the British Home Office looked to their dependencies’ experience. The subcommittee sought the opinions of de Villiers in South Africa and Spicer in Palestine.Footnote 237 However, the subcommittee decided that to fully assess the method's suitability for Britain, it would conduct its own rigorous experiments in breeding, crossbreeding, and tracking. Foreign “successes” in other parts of the world were deemed only sufficient to make inquiry into dog tracking “worthy of pursuit,” but insufficient to lead to the method's wholesale import.Footnote 238 As the report to the Home Secretary noted, “After consideration of the use made of dogs abroad” the subcommittee members were “satisfied that an exhaustive study of this question would be well worth while.”Footnote 239 The need to experiment locally had a nationalistic tinge as well: “the Committee did not lose sight of the possibility that it might be necessary to import some of these animals for experimental work under British conditions, but they thought that it would be well, in the first place, to explore the possibilities of using British breeds.”Footnote 240
In 1935, Herbert Summers Lloyd, “one of the best known and most experienced trainers in the country”Footnote 241 was “commissioned to carry out…a systematic programme of experiments in breeding and training.”Footnote 242 Granted £500 per annum for 4 years, Lloyd was commissioned to explore the use of dogs not only for tracking but also for other police work. The aim was to “evolve a dog which would have as good a nose as the bloodhound but would be more robust and less expensive to maintain,” that could track, patrol, and protect. Fellhounds and Labradors were initially crossed for these purposes.Footnote 243 It was under this program that the more “robust” American bloodhounds—so deeply implicated in slave hunts just a few decades earlier—were secretly brought to Britain.Footnote 244
Despite its colonial successes, of more than thirty pure and crossbred dogs held at the Newbury kennels there was only a single Doberman, which Lloyd deemed “a failure.” Still, he allowed, one could not really “form an opinion on this breed by this isolated case.”Footnote 245 Given the South African experience, Lloyd allowed that in the future he “would be quite prepared…to give [the Doberman] an extensive and thorough trial.” Perhaps reflecting an enduring preference for British breeds, his experiments focused primarily on the bloodhound. However, the fact that the standard imperial police tracker received such limited attention in Lloyd's experiments strongly suggests the inapplicability of colonial policing methods for the metropole.
The subcommittee's attempts to develop a single breed fit for both tracking and patrolling failed and were ultimately abandoned.Footnote 246 More significantly, after 3 years of research, the subcommittee concluded that the “experiments with tracking dogs” had been “disappointing.” Still, subcommittee members remained hopeful that “by judicious selection” they could eventually “evolve a strain of bloodhound, or a cross-bred hound…with a higher standard physique than that of the average English bloodhound” (which had been “bred for looks,” rather than stamina or “inherent scenting powers.”Footnote 247 ) As a result, although Labradors began assisting the Metropolitan Police in patrol in 1938, the force did not incorporate tracking dogs until 1948.Footnote 248 The failed experiments in Britain did not, as we have seen, hinder the use of dogs in other parts of the Empire.
B. Changing Attitudes Toward Dog Tracking
Upon discovery that the Metropolitan Police was considering the employment of bloodhounds, The Times in 1938 pointed to the breed's enduringly dreadful image: “The popular conception of the bloodhound is of an awe-inspiring beast, strong, fierce, implacable; heedless of heat, cold, hunger or fatigue; demanding only a snatch of sleep and a hunk of raw flesh before starting off, with bloodshot eyes and swinging dewlap, in pursuit of its next victim.”Footnote 249 The Lloyd subcommittee's secretive nature and the newspapers' sensational headlines concerning the import of American bloodhounds attest to the enduring aversion toward using dogs—and bloodhounds in particular—to track humans in Britain.
The Second World War represented a turning point in public attitudes toward tracking dogs. During the Blitz, canines proved invaluable in locating victims under the ruins. For their assistance, several dogs were awarded the Dickin Medal for Gallantry.Footnote 250 This helped to recast dogs as rescuers rather than hunters, which contributed to the expansion of Scotland Yard's Dog Support Unit (DSU) during and after the war. The dogs’ heroism paved the way toward tracking dogs’ incorporation into the DSU: The Unit's first tracking dog—an “Alsatian” (more commonly known as a German ShepherdFootnote 251 )—formally joined the force in 1948.Footnote 252
During the postwar era, dogs were initially employed to pursue and tackle purse snatchers and to control hooligans and “subculture” rebellious youth such as Teddy Boys.Footnote 253 Here, too, the psychological effects of the dogs were not overlooked. As one police source noted, dogs were seen to be “particularly useful in handling hooliganism because being controlled by a dog involved loss of face.”Footnote 254 With time, the police began using dogs to follow spoors left at crime scenes.Footnote 255 By 1962, the Metropolitan Police was employing a “Flying Dog Squad” (“minivans connected by radio…containing two highly trained police dogs”) that could quickly arrive at crime scenes throughout London, while footprints were still fresh.Footnote 256
C. Dog Tracking's Scientific Foundation and Admissibility
Although Scotland Yard began employing tracking dogs in 1948, their evidence remained inadmissible in court. As the DSU expanded, however, both the Metropolitan Police and researchers convinced of the canines’ accuracy aimed to ground dog tracking scientifically in a way that would satisfy judicial standards.Footnote 257 By the early 1950s, John Rymer-Jones, Palestine's former Inspector General, was serving as Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police. He described the dogs’ extensive use and the admissibility of their evidence in Palestine to his colleagues, raising hopes that English courts might follow.Footnote 258 As Chief Inspector stanley Peck of New Scotland Yard observed,
The employment of dogs for Identification Parades was, I know, successfully used in Palestine when [Rymer-Jones] was Inspector General, but in this country, of course, such evidence is not accepted in the Courts. Knowing the infallibility of a dog's nose, I think the time has come to prove to the Justices that the selection of a human being by a dog is more certain than that made by another human being. There is no question of the human error creeping in with a dog.Footnote 259
In 1953, Professor Hans Kalmus, of University College London's Galton Laboratory, took up the challenge of providing a scientific foundation for dog tracking. Kalmus designed a study to assess dogs’ ability to distinguish between family members. Wishing not to raise false hopes, Kalmus warned that “While I am sure that such a study would be useful in this laboratory's search for factors concerning human individuality, I cannot promise that anything of immediate forensic importance will necessarily emerge.” However, perhaps trying to secure the Yard's cooperation, Kalmus articulated one way in which the study would not remain merely theoretical but might benefit law enforcement: “I am told that, as yet, identification by dogs is not admitted in British courts of law and that the police think it desirable that such identification should be admitted. An experimental treatment of the subject and its publication in a scientific journal might be the first step to establish such a practice in this country.”Footnote 260
To prove scientifically the uniqueness of human scent and dogs’ ability to identity and communicate it, Kalmus pursued a question first raised by Francis Galton in the nineteenth centuryFootnote 261 : exploring whether dogs could distinguish between the scents of identical twins, the ultimate proof of uniqueness.Footnote 262 To test his hypothesis, Kalmus recruited nine dogs: six Alsatians (four police dogs and two show dogs), a Doberman, a Labrador, and a Pointer. The thiry-one person sample of men, women, and children included only one non-Caucasian—an African. Although Kalmus did not explain this aspect of his methodology in detail, it may be inferred from his experimental design: focused on differentiating between family members, the sole African subject was used as a preliminary control to determine whether each of the dogs was capable of distinguishing between races. The lack of racial diversity in the sample might also suggest the enduring assumption that Africans—and perhaps other foreign populations—were more odiferous than Britons.Footnote 263
Kalmus's results exposed high inconsistencies in the dogs’ performance. During his preliminary trials, seven of the nine dogs could not even distinguish between the scents of unrelated strangers. Although the two most talented dogs were successful in following the correct twin's trail, even they failed Kalmus's “handkerchief lineups,” in which they were asked to retrieve the handkerchief of an individual they had previously sniffed.Footnote 264 Although Kalmus's results did not necessarily disprove his hypothesis concerning the distinctiveness of human scent, his experiments failed to establish dogs’ ability to detect and communicate it.Footnote 265 Inability to validate these aspects further delayed the admissibility of dog tracking evidence in the United Kingdom. Despite some support for its admissibility within legal academia in the following decade, the Metropolitan Police's stated policy remained not to rely on such evidence.Footnote 266 It would take dog tracking four more decades – until 1995 – to be deemed admissible in England.Footnote 267
Conclusion
The unique challenges of colonialism reshaped the boundaries of forensic inquiry in profound ways. Dog tracking spread as a method of policing and proof throughout the British Empire, even as it was rejected in the metropole. The stock thefts that plagued South Africa excused a practice deemed intolerable in contemporary Britain. Although racial difference played a lesser role in dog tracking's adoption in Palestine, admitting such evidence proved expedient in policing and prosecuting an uncooperative population during a period of anticolonial unrest.
Dog tracking's history does not fit neatly within the “empire as laboratory” paradigm of forensic science, whereby reformers in the metropole wishing to advance a novel technique advocated its employment first in the colonies or on others at home (such as convicted felons) to work out potential wrinkles and to make the method more palatable to the British public.Footnote 268 Although the idea of using dogs to track criminals loomed large in the Victorian imagination and was disseminated through fiction and sport, the impetus for introducing tracking dogs in policing originated and later diffused mainly in the colonies, independently of direction from the metropole. Moreover, even after decades of imperial experience, the lessons and insights of the colonies bore only limited relevance for Britain itself. Dog tracking's employment in the colonies did not alter its repugnant image at home. Nor did it relieve reformers from scientifically establishing dog tracking anew before offering such proof in English courts. Although it purportedly relied on scientific universality for its validity, dog tracking was a method that from its inception and throughout its implementation was predicated upon—and often constructed—colonial difference.
