July 24th, 2019

Mu searched for another calico today. There were two other cats missing in the neighborhood. We found coyote scat in five places around the trails around the neighborhood. Although the scat didn’t contain cat fur, it still seemed a bit ominous, that so many coyotes were around. Mu spent a good long minute sniffing one particular spot. He has done this before when a cat was taken by a coyote at a particular point. In this case, I couldn’t see any sign of fur in that area. My guess is that he was smelling blood. About ten minutes later, Mu stopped in the middle of the trail and went and sat by the owners of the cat. He leaned into them and asked to be petted. This was unusual. I got the impression that Mu had decided the cat was probably dead, and that he was comforting the cat’s owners. I didn’t say that to them because this isn’t something we have trained for. Mu is trained to find decomp, but there’s no ethical way to train him to find a spot where a cat has been killed but no evidence was left behind. I just had to base my interpretation on his behavior in previous circumstances where we were able to verify the location a cat was killed using the Luminol test.

I was pretty sure their cat was taken by a coyote, but I wasn’t certain. There have been just a couple of times that I thought the cat had been killed, based on trace evidence and Mu’s behavior, but then the cat was found alive and well. I didn’t want to discourage them from looking. Mu and I continued the search, looking for any cat we could find, or remains that could make us more certain of the outcome. We never did find anything. Mu seemed to be slowing down because he was hot. We took a quick break for him to fetch a stick in the creek and cool off, and he seemed to be invigorated by that. I ask a lot of Mu. He likes his job, but it’s a remarkable thing for a dog to remain focused on a task for four hours.