THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 25
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MAN’SBESTFRIEND
SNIFFPAT RO L
D
ogs don’t brag, and you rarely see
them pontificating on news shows,
so it’s up to humans to act as their pub-
licists. Last month, a Belgian Malinois
named Conan chased Abu Bakr al-Bagh-
dadi down a tunnel in Syria, before the
terrorist leader blew himself up. Back
on the domestic front, a yellow Labra-
dor retriever who goes by Hannah is
one of fourteen dogs who have been
trained by Connecticut police to sniff
out child pornography. One day recently,
Hannah and her handler, John Hyla, of
the Putnam County Sheriff ’s Office, in
New York, were in an abandoned office
building in the town of Southeast, look-
ing for flash drives, cell phones, hard
drives, and micro S.D. cards that had
been hidden in cabinets, vents, and, in
one instance, a secret compartment in-
side a water bottle stashed behind a fire
extinguisher.
“Seek, seek, seek,” Hyla told Han-
nah, drawing each word out into two
syllables. He is thirty-five and has close-
cropped dark hair and a kind, serious
face. He studied information systems at
Pace University and has been a police-
man since 2007. Hannah and her fellow
canine snoops went through a ten-week
training course to learn to identify a
compound called triphenylphosphine
oxide. This chemical envelops the mem-
ory chips in all electronic-storage de-
vices, reducing the risk of overheating.
Although dogs trained in electronic-stor-
age detection (E.S.D.) can, theoretically,
work on any kind of cybercrime, they
are almost always used to track down
sex offenders. “Hannah is able to find
G.P.S. trackers on cars and Bitcoin wal-
lets,” Hyla said. “But most of my cases
are child porn.”
It was mealtime for Hannah. “She’s
learned that food is available to her only
if she works, so once or twice a day I
hide some devices, and each time she
finds one I reward her with a handful
of kibble,” he said. (Dogs schooled by
the Connecticut police are typically
Labradors, mainly because of their bigappetites.) Hannah, svelte and busi-
nesslike, hoovered her nose over the in-
dustrial carpet. “Dogs can smell all the
components of something,” Hyla said.
“The way they explained it during train-
ing”—he and other handlers attended
the latter five weeks of the program—“is
that, if there’s a McDonald’s cheese-
burger on a plate, you and I would just
smell a cheeseburger. A dog smells the
bun, the burger, the cheese, the sesame
seeds, the lettuce. The smell of a mem-
ory device is equivalent to the smell
of the lettuce—the faintest of all the
scents.” Hannah stopped in front of an
oven and nudged its bottom door. “Show
me,” Hyla said, opening it. Hannah
pointed with her snout to an old Nokia
phone inside. She looked up expec-tantly at Hyla, who obliged her by offer-
ing a dainty portion of Royal Kanin
dog food from a pouch on his belt.
“Good girl, Hannah, grease and all,” he
said, referring to a smudge of oven grime
on her head.
Before being recruited by the Con-
necticut State Police K9 Unit, Hannah
was a dropout from the Guiding Eyes
for the Blind school. “I don’t know the
exact reason she didn’t complete train-
ing,” Hyla said. “I’ve heard—and I don’t
know if it was accurate—that she
couldn’t keep a straight line, so she was
basically afraid to push the blind per-
son back to keep on course.” (Accord-
ing to the Guiding Eyes Web site, each
dog “chooses its own career.”) Hyla
looked down at Hannah. “Ready to
work?” he asked, leading her into a largeHannahkitchens. “She was the first person to
do the bleached-pine look,” Newman
said.) After “S.N.L.,” she went to rehab,
and, in the nineties, owing to “a pho-
bia about the camera,” she moved into
voice work.
Reubens started at the Groundlings
in 1976, after Newman had left for New
York. “The Groundlings added char-
acter work to improv,” he said.
“Character-driven improv is a whole
different thing,” Newman agreed.
“When Laraine would drop in, we
would all be, like, ‘Oh, my God, La -
raine’s here!’ ” Reubens said. The work-
shop had migrated from its original
home, in a dicey part of Hollywood,
to a permanent space in a sketchy part
of Hollywood. Newman’s parents do-
nated sixteen thousand dollars toward
renovations. “They didn’t have a per-
mit to open the theatre, so it was just
a company,” Reubens said. “I was there
for three years when we never had an
audience, ever. It was a pure workshop.”
Newman brought up an old Reu-
bens character, Jay Longtoe, a politi-
cally incorrect Native American lounge
singer, who, with sequinned loincloth
and feathered headdress, would not cut
it today. Reubens crooned a few bars
of one of Longtoe’s numbers, “Soon
It’s Gonna Rain,” from “The Fantas-
ticks.” He and Newman cracked up.
“It was all so wrong,” Reubens said.
“And I grew up in the South. I was re-
ally, really attuned to racism. But Na-
tive American stuff went right over
my head.”
Reubens said, “I don’t know what the
Groundlings does anymore.” The work-
shop, now a school that trains eight thou-
sand students a year, is viewed by some
as a cog in the comedy-industrial com-
plex. “I just got an e-mail about the forty-
fifth anniversary.”
“I’m doing a couple of panels,” New-
man said.
“N.A.—not available,” Reubens said.
“When they wait till, like, three weeks
before the show, I’m not available.”
The friends said good night. Reu-
bens had a pile of cards to sign for fans
of the “Star Wars” character he voices
at Disneyland and Disney World. “I’m
the robot-droid d.j. in Star Wars Land’s
bar,” he said. “I’m signing cards that
somebody’s doing something with.”
—Paul Brownfield