Looking For Black & Indigenous Burial Grounds: Bonus Episode with Cadaver Dog Expert Cat Warren

Dog search team expert Cat Warren’s current work focuses on historical research, specifically: searching for abandoned or hidden burial grounds. This fascinating branch of search work combines history, racism, grief, and social reckoning.

In this episode we cover:

• How dogs let us talk about historical acts of violence in ways that seem impossible otherwise
• Are there bones in the highway you’re driving? Probably yes.
• Where to even start looking for burial grounds someone wanted to keep hidden
• How Cat’s atheism intersects with searching for remains
• Cat’s version of hope: is it ugly, or is it beautiful? Hard to say.

About our guest:

Cat Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. The book tells the story of learning to work with her impossible young shepherd as a cadaver dog to find the missing and dead. It won critical acclaim and was long listed for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She taught science writing, journalism, and creative nonfiction at North Carolina State University for 26 years before retiring in 2021.

Additional resources

All of Cat’s information is at her website

NY Times article on cadaver dogs and archaeology

African American burial grounds & cadaver dogs

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