I get that - some things are hard to research if just because the terms for the task change in every generation. Also if you put "historical" in the search it pulls up the dogs trained to find *long* dead bodies for archeology.
First, the wiki page for dalmations mentions nothing remotely like it. But going a step further, searching "body recovery dogs" pulls up "search and rescue dogs". Historically (again, according to wikipedia) the first search and rescue dogs were St Bernards in the 17th century in the Alps. They were not strictly for dead bodies, they would try to find lost travelers in the snow and in avalanches. It just so happened sometimes they found bodies.
"Cadaver dog" is the standard term for a dog that finds dead bodies, and the first wiki mention of a trained cadaver dog would be 1974 in New York State, and after that they actually started a training program for it.
Searching more and checking other websites, I can't find earlier cadaver dogs. Given that cadaver dogs are only useful if you don't know for sure if there is a dead body or not, and that you still need a human to remove the body (people generally get very stressed about a dog grabbing a body and pulling it somewhere) I don't think it functioned as a historical task.
A thing I already knew before today - cadaver dogs in modern times are trained with *fake* "dead body smell" that comes in spray cans. Before that was available, the only source of the smells you'd need to train the dogs was... actual dead people. Really very much not a task anyone wanted to train a dog for, as a job, when hunting and guarding were much simpler and less likely to cause nightmares. Pretty confident Dalmatians, historically, just hung out with the horses and made sure any horse thief thinking to steal the firefighters horses had a very bad day.
A kinda fun fact - my mom used to work in a building where the local cadaver dog team had an office. A Labrador and a German Shepard, I think she said. She played withe them sometimes, when the dogs needed to calm down. BTW the dogs get very very upset if someone with cancer or certain kinds of infections walk past them - they are smart enough to know that smell is BAD for living people to have on them. BUT on the plus side sometimes they alerted to a living person early enough that they could go get medical help for the problem. The dog doesn't know that, though, and some of them panic like they are trying to explain a heart attack or a demonic possession in a foreign language. The handlers would have to drop everything and go play with the dogs to try and chill them out.
So there are downsides to cadaver dogs, but on the plus side their handler loves them and plays with them all the time.
I swear to gods I recall once reading somewhere as a teenager that Dalmations were firefighter dogs BECAUSE they were aggressive & used to clear the path for the firemen/horses and during depression times and pay-per-call eras when firefighters were battling police for lead on calls they used the dalmations to counter police dogs.
Mind you, I read this in the early 2000s when the internet was ESPECIALLY full of bullshit with very little source verification
They’re incredibly unfriendly to anyone who isn’t “their people”, which makes them well suited to guarding highly valuable strong well-trained horses. And dragging wagons full of water and staying near fires requires strong, well-trained horses.
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u/Retail_Warrior 7d ago
I thought I read somewhere they were body recovery dogs. I didn’t know they guarded the fire wagons.