How dogs help us By Joel Davis There are many kinds of Assistance Dogs extant in the world. Of course the most the commonly known are Guide Dogs for the Blind. But there are also those who help those who cannot hear properly, cannot move about by themselves and their larger dogs help pull their wheelchairs for them. But then there are those of us who have what are known as "invisible disabilities". I should know. I am one them. In my case, it is epilepsy. And I rely on my miniature Dachshund, a black and tan beauty named Alex. He has literally saved my life uncountable number of times. He only weighs 8.8 pounds, yet this little teeny tiny Dachshund, despite the fact that I weigh 187 pounds to his 8.8 pounds, when we're walking, if he senses a seizure coming over me can stop me dead in my tracks. That's right, you heard me, I can't even budge him, and then he pulls me back towards our apartment building, so I'll be safe and sound. Talk about security, if we're in a car or bus and Alex is sitting on my lap and he gets the same senses that a seizure is coming on, he will jump up and lick my face frantically, as opposed to his normal affectionate kisses. These frantic kisses tell me that a seizure is forthcoming and I reach into a pocket and take a pill, which miraculously stops the seizure before it becomes full-blown. And should we be at home, in our apartment, and Alex detects an on-coming seizure, he will circle around me like a herding dog, until I am either down on the ground, the couch, or the bed, and stay with me until the seizure has passed. What more could a person ask for in a canine assistant? The trouble is, we don't give our dogs enough credit for what they do for us. We never have, and it's about time that we show them just how important they are to us. That's what National Dog Week is all about. Proving not only to the world, but to our dogs, that we appreciate them, that we love them, for we know that no matter how much we love our dogs, no matter how much attention we shower upon them, a day will come when, sadly, with tears in our eyes, that we will outlive our dogs. That is the nature of owning and loving a dog. It is also the cruelty that nature has placed upon this Earth, that we will outlive our dogs. For if all went according to the poem, we will someday be reunited with our beloved dogs somewhere over Rainbow Bridge. At least, we can hope. THE END Joel Davis is the author of a touching, charming, informative book about his Dachshund called "With Alex By My Side" ------ Captain Haggerty Service dogs By Jorjan Powers Assistance Dog Institute The concept of service dogs was developed by Dr. Bonnie Bergin, an educator, in 1974. She was in Turkey having lunch and looking out the window when she happened to observe a disabled man hold on to a donkey in order to drag himself across the street. This moment sparked an idea in her mind that perhaps she could work with animals in the United States and assist people with disabilities. She worked with a woman who was a quadriplegic and together they developed a series of commands which a dog could do to assist her. Over the years, service dog skills have been expanded and perfected into a series of 90 different commands. They are “unobtrusive helpmates”, there to assist someone but not cause them problems by being hard to manage. Therefore, they are calm, well behaved, and very skilled in their job of being a working dog. Teaching service dogs is a very specialized, unique type of training. It is more than obedience, more than being well behaved. It requires teaching skills that literally someone’s life may depend on. Dr. Bergin now heads a program at the Assistance Dog Institute where people can get a college degree in Assistance Dog Education and learn to be a service dog trainer. There is now usually a 3-5 year waiting list for people wanting a service dog. With the Institute’s program, the goal is to have more trainers to open more agencies, providing more and more service dogs for people who are in need of one. Service dogs aid people with mobility problems, such as paraplegics, quadraplegics, people with diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebral Palsy, Spina Bifida, etc. Most people who receive a service dog use a wheelchair, but some can walk with the help of a cane, walker, or by using the support of their service dog! Weak muscles and balance problems are also conditions that would benefit from having a service dog. Some of the commands taught involve pulling a wheelchair, retrieving items, opening and closing doors, and turning on and off lights. Specialized commands may include tugging off a person’s socks and pants, nudging their arm up to lay on their lap, or pulling clothes out of a dryer. There are also social commands such as “snuggle”, “lap” and “kiss” which involve bringing the dog into closer contact with a person who may not be able to lean down to pet their dog. In addition to the working commands, a service dog also provides comfort and emotional support to people, which is also a very valuable service. Their assistance, comfort, and companionship to people with disabilities is of great value. They even help other family members because there is less of a need for them to assist a person, since the service dog is now doing things for them. What kind of differences do people have in their lives upon receiving a service dog? Ask any recipient, and they will tell you in glowing terms what their dog means to them. Some dogs have literally been life savers by bringing a phone to call for emergency help, easing depression, and assisting people to get out of their home and back into the mainstream of an active life. For more information about service dogs or how to become a service dog trainer, contact the Assistance Dog Institute at (707)537-1960, or e-mail Assistdog@aol.com. Search and rescue dogs By Captain A. Haggerty This article appeared in "Dogs in Canada" and was a finalist in the Dog Writers Association of America 2002 Feature Article in an All Breed Magazine. It gives a good idea of the varied work done by Search and Rescue Dogs. With the recent events that occurred in the States our minds immediately turn to enormous disasters in large metropolitan areas. Disasters come in many shapes and sizes and they do not only apply to metropolitan areas. Even the terms urban and wilderness can be misleading. What is the difference between Urban and Wilderness search work? Search and Rescue Dogs can be cross-trained for both Urban and Wilderness work but often are not. Now the dog's nose----the star of the entire work is used ''roughly'' in the same fashion in both urban and wilderness work. The training and deployment of the dog is different. Cross training is possible. Some feel that a dog should be specialized in their work and generally I'd say this is true. SAR work is, I believe a different dynamic. The truth of the matter is that dogs and handlers will start to gravitate to wilderness or urban searches for a number of reasons. 1) Where the dog and handler lives will have a bearing on the type of work they do. 2) The handler's individual nature will also dictate what type of work s/he wants to do. More on that below. 3) Those living in a rural area are closer to training areas for wilderness training. 4) Conversely the city dwellers are closer to urban training areas. 5) Most people live where they like to live and that is the search work they gravitate towards. 6) If training with a group that group will determine the work they are to do. In all cases these handlers are generally pretty hardy people. The training is long and arduous with no payment in sight. You must be prepared to not only work under difficult conditions but also live and survive on equally miserable conditions. Luxury would be grabbing a 20-minute nap curled-up with your dog in a van. A hot meal consisting of a cup of coffee and a buttered bagel that will fortify you as you gulp it as you return to work. You are rushing because there are people out there that need your immediate help. They are three people buried under a collapsed building in the middle of no where. That strangely makes it urban search and rescue. The dog must use his nose to find people trapped under the building. They may still be alive trapped under tons of steel and concrete. If they were lucky they are in a void where than can breathe. How long will there be air there is questionable. The possibility of the debris shifting and crushing them is a constant danger. That is why speed is so important. And there could be more than three people in the collapse. The wilderness side of SAR may have a small child lost in some wild and woolly area. You know t five-year-old is out there but you don't know where. Or it could be an elderly demented person that has wondered off and become confused. It is all search and rescue but each one is different and handled differently. Even categorizing them definitively is an impossibility. The collapsed three-story building is in a remote hunting area in the northwest. The area would certainly qualify as wilderness but the building collapse is urban in a non-urban setting. Three different situations needing three different approaches and perhaps three different dogs, three different handlers with three different training backgrounds. The young boy, Brian wandered off from his parents when they stopped at a petrol station-restaurant area. They have no idea which way or where he went. The elderly gentleman was in a suburban area. The elderly gentleman had a starting point and a Bloodhound is sent in to smell his bedding and clothes. Clothes from the hamper. Not clean clothes. In a suburban area there, hopefully aren't too many crossed trails and there is a need to find him before nightfall. The lost boy is more problematical. We probably can't find a starting point although there is his jacket and cap in the car. An attempt will be made to pick-up his trial. If a good SAR team with a good search director is near by there will a dog trying to pick up his trial and the director analyzing the area for lines of drift. As soon as the director figures likely areas for Brian to be in she will bring in wind scenting dogs to quarter these areas. The collapsed building needs dogs with good noses to work with people carefully removing the debris. When a dog picks up someone it is necessary to clear away that debris and dig down to where the person is located. The handler and the support personnel have to disassemble the rubble to minimize shifting ad get to the person that are trapped ASAP. Before we return to our lost people let's see some of the different ways that dogs work. There is a difference between wind scenting and tracking. Now in its purest sense a wind scenting (scouting) dog will tell you where the person is while the tracking dog will tell you where the person was. The scouting dog is working off wind-borne scent and the tracking dog follows scent that is on the ground. This can best be visualized in a wilderness area. Let's start with the tracking. We have the picture of a Bloodhound pursuing a criminal over hill and dale. The dog with its nose to the ground smells the odor left by the lost person or bad guy. The dog can selectively follow the correct person's trail even if it has been crossed with someone else's aroma. The dog is checking out where the person was in hopes of catching up and finding out where that person is now. In tracking it is necessary to locate someplace that person walked. In scouting it isn't necessary to locate a place where the person walked. An area can be searched and the dog can tell if some one is in that particular area. Knowing where a person is NOT is the flip side of what we want but is a valuable search tool. The dog supplies the nose and the handler or the search director supplies the brain that determines what areas are to be checked. Now for maximum effectiveness the dog should have the wind blowing toward it at a 90-degree angle. Bear in mind these two distinctions because we will visit them again. The important thing is getting the dog to use its nose. This is not a problem with the trained search dog. The more the dog uses its nose the more he loves the work. When we have him loving it we can start to do all sorts of neat things with the dog's nose skills. Breeds are genetically programmed to track or scout. Now that doesn't mean that you can't re-program your dog to use his nose the other way. How do you determine a breed's genetic pre-disposition? It isn't in the breed standard and it isn't inn the breed books. You can run a quick test to determine which way your dog will hunt. Locate a grassy spot with two longish buildings on either side. The purpose of the buildings is to control and funnel the wind-borne scent while minimizing variables. Now if a hundred people have been traversing this strip of grass don't use it. Remember we are trying to minimize the variables so we can conduct a valid test. . Determine which way the wind is blowing and determine where your decoy (possibly you) is going to be hiding. A slight depression in the ground at the end of the buildings will work. Just make sure your dog can't see you. Have a bright friend hold the dog on the leash and tell him that he is to note how the dog is using his nose when you duck out of sight. Have him wait five minutes before coming to find you. You need a couple of minutes to duck out of view behind the buildings, scuff the ground at your starting point and then move upwind of the dog while scuffing your feet en route to your hiding place. An approximate starting point should have been selected without going in and fouling the area. It can be marked with a peg; a piece of paper held in place with a rock or any method so the one handling the dog knows where to start. Your dog will use his eyes looking for you as he approaches the starting point. Now when he gets between the two buildings the handler pauses at the starting point as the dog desperately looks around for you. The area is awash with your scent and we want to get the dog to select the scent he wants to use, the ground scent or the air scent. There's your answer. The dog has used his nose to find you and you can give him a good rubba-dub-dub or a treat---or even both. His two highest rewards are not the petting or the cookie. It is 1) using his nose and 2) finding you. This training is as positive as it comes. Now the dog ideally should never had been used for any of this work before. A dog with a TDX is surprisingly a poor candidate. He has already "learned" how to use his nose. Our purpose here was to find out his genetic pre-disposition. That little test has started your dog on the quest to become a SAR dog. You've done a number of constructive things. 1) You've given him the opportunity and pleasure of using his nose. 2) The dog is thinking this is fun. Let me try it again. 3) You've determined his genetic pre-disposition to hunting with the head high or low. Your test tells you which way would be the best way to use your dog but it is not an absolute. Should you want to pursue this work further find a good group in your area and hook up with them. They will come up with a training program that will fit in with their objectives and goals. It is a team endeavor and you want to join a good team. Their goals are the team's goals and you have to be ready to bow to that goal. The first time you return a lost child to a grieving parent you will know all that hard work and preparation was worthwhile. Now let's get back to our above victims. The collapsed building required heavy equipment to move the material but because of the buried people they couldn't go in there with bulldozers. They had to carefully investigate each ''find'' and remove the debris by hand. The first two people were found rather rapidly. The third person's odor causes the dog to act strangely and confused. The dog's owner, an experience SAR handler knew what was upsetting the dog. They were too late. The person was dead and the dog started to shut down. There are very few cadaver-trained dogs for obvious reasons. Often when they find their first dead body they become confused. They can tell the difference and never having worked on a dead body upsets them. It is good that it was the last lost body the dog located. If it was the first the dog might not have been able to continue working. The missing boy presented problems. The Bloodhound couldn't find his trail at all. There were a lot of people passing through the area to get food, tend their cars, ask directions and all the things necessary at that sort of a stop. This is a constant problem when tracker dogs are brought in on a case. They are brought in as a last thought---an after thought more than anything else. The trail has been fouled with all sorts of people including investigators. Bringing the tracker dogs in earlier produces the best results. This is not so for the wind scenting dogs. The search areas have to be cleared of extraneous people or the dogs will pick up on them. The search director had her act together along with a good typographical map of the area. She studied the map and reconnoitered the surrounding wooded area. Rapidly computing the time since the boy disappeared, the lines of drift (the boy would more than likely move down hill rather than up hill) and vegetation she selected a few key areas to employ her scouting dogs and she had two. She was hopefully assuming that she did not have a kidnapping case. Bingo! Within forty-five minutes of starting to work one of the wind scenting dogs found the Brian safe and sound. The older man was a different story. A Belgian Lakenois tracker dog was brought in seven hours after his disappearance. The Lakenois is genetically a wind scenting dog but it had received as lot of good heavy training in tracking. She was a tracking fool with a good cold nose. Fortuitously she was the only dog available and ideally suited for this job. The handler, while in transit, phoned the relatives and had them put some of the man's dirty laundry in a large zip-lock bag. Finding the house the handler put the harness on "Babette" as she brusquely grabbed the bag from the man's daughter on the way into the house. "Where's his room?" she asked at a fast walk. Babette was excited and hot to trot. The handler threw back the covers on the man's bed as she de-bagged his dirty laundry. Thrusting the dirty clothes under Babette's nose she used the command, "Search!" She didn't need it. The dog knew what she was there to do and took a full scent, went over to the bed sheets and put her nose to the ground. She was working it out. Running through the house with her nose on the ground, smelling where the man had been that day. Babette headed for the door and went flying out with her handler hanging on to the leash into the suburban area. She was working fast and then about 400 meters from the house she seemed to loose the trail. The handler slowed down to let the dog work it out. For some reason she couldn't pick up the trail. The handler started moving Babette out in a widening circle. She repeatedly cast the dog off to find the scent. Babette hit it and was on the trail again with her nose close to the ground. The handler knew Babette was getting closer as her head rose to chest height and she strained harder on the leash. The dog went up to a man sleeping under a tree and started nuzzling him. The handler finally had a chance to look up and see that she no longer saw the occasional house. She was in a wooded area. "We found him!" she said into the radio as she bent down to check the man out. He seemed fine and she helped him to his feet. Mission accomplished! We have three different situations all requiring different solutions and different dogs. The all-important similarity is TIME! Those buried alive in a collapsed building have limited oxygen. We want to find the lost child and lost man before nightfall. Colder temperatures could prove fatal to the man but Brian probably could survive but he might panic. There are some accompanying problems in working search dogs at night. The solution is to get the search dogs in as soon as possible. Awareness is the key to getting the dogs in on time. You have the emergency numbers of the doctor, police and fire departments at your phone. Don't you think you should have the number of the SAR team there, too? Author's biography: Captain Haggerty has been teaching dogs to find good and bad people over 45 years. His current book "How To Teach Your Dog To Talk" has a chapter on the subject called The Knowing Nose. His first paid writing assignment 43 years ago was on that subject for Harry Miller of the Gaines Dog Research Center. Right now the Captain is writing a booklet on "Behavior of Scent".