December 4, 2018 • 50 mins
All dogs are great, but some dogs work harder than others. Or play harder, depending on your view. Learn all about the good boys and girls who find lost people and recover bodies to bring humans peace and closure.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and first time ever
guest producer Andrews. It's very exciting. Yeah, I thought you
(00:23):
were saying he was a ghost or something. We'll know.
He's right beside you, right, But I mean he could
be an illusion or one of those uh like the
ghosts that I saw that didn't look like a ghost,
that was just a solid form. Sure, hey k a ghost.
Yeah we could use more ghost producers, we could, you know, Yeah,
(00:46):
I don't have to time benefits. No, you do not
have to do anything. Yep. He just pretty great. Press
a button and die? Oh so um, Chuck. Yes, I
don't know if you remember. Several months ago we released
an episode and it was a good one if you
ask me. It was about search and rescue. Okay, do
(01:08):
you remember the episode right? And there was like you
saw urban search and rescue, wilderness search and rescue, and
in that episode I was like, man, we have to
do an episode on search and rescue dogs. Well, by god,
today is the day We're doing it. The only time
we've ever followed up on a promise in our career.
The prophecy has been fulfilled. It's right. So we're talking
(01:32):
today about search and rescue dogs and this, first of all,
this article is just genuine bona fide how stuff works,
quality from the olden days. Just checks all those boxes,
done in't it? Every box that's that's that's Mark one
in the favor of this episode that it's based on
that article. Mark two is that it's about dogs and
(01:56):
how much how great dogs are. And I just had
a really good time researching this one. Yeah, it's funny,
like during reading this whole thing and all this research
in my head, I just kept thinking, good boy, good girl.
I just kept saying that over and over. Yeah, just
petting them behind the ears in your mind. So, um,
(02:17):
when we're talking about star dogs, we're talking about search
and rescue dogs. Dogs that are trained to go find people.
Right there, they do two things. There's two components to
a search and rescue dogs job. It is to find
people and then to let their handler know that they
found the person. Right sure, because of a dog that
just find someone doesn't let anyone know. They'll just be
(02:40):
sitting around licking faces all day. Right, you're like, yes,
you you found me, know, go get help, and the
dogs like, I don't know, although I did like seeing
what was that one dog called that's trained to uh
to like stay there instead of going to to alert
everyone else victim loyalty? Is that behavior? Yeah? And I
think that's the case if there's if like someone is injured,
(03:02):
they may need that dog to just stay there and
start barking instead of saying, hey, I'm gonna run and
find someone and let and let them know that you're
not okay. Right. So, however they alert, as long as
they alert, that's good. That's the second part of the job.
As long as they don't wander off and like find
a craps game to engage in without telling anybody that
they found the person who's stranded in the wilderness, right,
(03:24):
which would not happen with the star dog because they
can focus like nobody's business right, right. So star dogs
are professional working dogs, right, just as much as like
a herding dog on a farm who actually does that
work um or a canine unit dog or one of
the Beagle Brigade we've talked about them before. It's a
(03:46):
it's a working dog. But the the article that Julia
Layton wrote points out and I think really just kind
of changed my perspective on things and opened up my
eyes that what the dog is really doing is playing. Yeah, right,
so I mean the dog is not taking work seriously
even though it appears to be. It's taking place seriously.
(04:08):
And I just love that. Yeah, And and it really
hit home to me too, like when it pointed out that, um,
if you've ever had a dog that will like run
till their paws are bloody to get that tennis ball
or that coong, right, I guess I just name checked
a brand they should throw some dough for that. It's
(04:28):
a good brand. Uh loves the little those tiny ones
are so cute. Um that that that would make a
good star dog. And I have had two dogs in
my life that would be great uh search and rescue dogs.
My dog Buckley, who was no longer with us, and
my current one of my two current dogs, Nico, And
(04:48):
they both had a lot of Staffordshire Terrier on them,
and they both from day one, if you threw something,
ran and got it, brought it back, dropped it at
your feet and looked at you as if if you
don't throw that thing again, I might keel over and
die right now. Staffords your terriers and that Spuds Mackenzie
And now I can't remember what kind of terrier that is,
(05:11):
but it was some kind of terrier, and I thought
it was an English countryside village name terrier. Huh. I
mean staffies are I think a lot of people throw
a lot of dogs into the pit bull category that
aren't pit bulls. That's kind of a a bone of
contention with pit bull owners is like, you know, a
dog attacks that has any a terrier in it and
they say it was a pit bull. Um, So staffies
(05:33):
are lumped in there. But I remember when we did
one of my great memories of being in Edinburrow on
our tour. I took a walk around Lovely, uh, the
lovely town, and I ran into a lady who was
walking one of hers And you know, when you're out
of town and you're not with your dog, you just
sort of like attack every dog you see. And so
I got down. I was with this dog and I
(05:54):
was like, I love this dog. Your you know, your
dogs are sweet or something, and she went, just a
wee staffy that's so Scottish. A wee staffy that was
a uh that like that town is magnificent. It's magic,
it really is. I can't wait to go back one day. Yeah,
we need to do that. We need to get on
another UK tour. I could not agree more. Dude. Heck, yeah, okay,
(06:18):
it's done. We're doing it in like two years or
three years if it's anything like our Australia tour. So
with the Star Dogs though, Um, we cannot emphasize anymore
how much time is of the essence because whether it is,
and we'll get into the various types of rescues, but
they're all pretty time sensitive. Whether it's a missing child,
(06:38):
god forbid, or a collapse building, God forbid, or an avalanche,
God forbid. None of these situations are awesome and the
clock is ticking, especially you know in in those cases
where you know there's maybe short of oxygen or they're
buried in snow, Like minutes count. Yeah, for sure. I
saw on a site for an organization that offers stur
(07:02):
dog training, um for your dog, Like if you think
your dog's got it, they say, come, we'll find out
if your dog's got it. They were saying, like, um,
you have to be out there, like you have to
treat this like you're an ambulance. Basically, when you get
the call, you gotta be out the door. And it's interesting.
You know, the dog doesn't have any job other than
search and rescue, so the dogs ready to go any time,
(07:24):
but you're their handler and they live with you, and
you have to be out there with them. So you
have to be able to leave your regular job at
the drop of a hat. And and Star dog handlers
are on call twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year,
so much that um the dogs go on vacation with
the handlers in case there's a call and you both
(07:46):
have to go show up somewhere together. So you have
to be very, very responsive. And it is like you're saying,
because time is of the essence. Because this article gives
the example of avalanche victims, Like if you're an avalanche
victor them, if you're covered in an avalanche, you probably
will not want to be thinking about these stats. But
most avalanche victims who are found within I think, is
(08:10):
it ten minutes or fifteen minutes? I think of the
victims are alive at fifteen minutes. Okay, great, what about
thirty five minutes. Uh So between fifteen and thirty five minutes,
sixty percent of the of those folks will be gone. Right.
And so you might say, well, okay, wait, wait, you
(08:32):
guys are talking about an avalanche. How's the dog going
to find you in an avalanche? Dogs can find you
covered in snow, Dogs can find you underwater. Dogs can
pick up your scent sometimes when you're five away, right.
It's amazing. I was surprised to hear that because you
always see in like those old timey chain gang movies, um,
(08:53):
you know that are my favorite genre. Obviously, when when
they're trying to elude the tracking dogs they cross a
river something like that, it's off the scent. And that
probably works for for tracking dogs, and we'll talk about
the difference between these dogs. But for for a scent dog, um,
they can they can be trained to find your scent underwater,
(09:14):
especially if you just happen to be decomposing. Yeah, and
especially if that dog is a bloodhound. Um. And in
those old timey movies that you love, it seems like
it's always a bloodhound or you know, a pack of
bloodhounds and the and the dude you know who just
escaped from prison. Is runs through the river, and usually
in the movie they're they're like, you know, drat it all.
(09:37):
They just threw us off the scent, right, somebody throws
their hat to the ground. It's because of those kind
of because of that whole thing, that whole um, that
genre whatever, that in prison escape thing. I unfairly associate
bloodhounds with scary backwoods like redneck police officials. Yeah, yeah,
you know what I'm saying, because they're always with them.
(09:58):
But that that doesn't mean that the bloodhounds are scary.
They're great, sure, good old hound dogs. Yeah, Elvis wrote
a song about him. Yeah, but it wasn't favorable. Uh,
that's true, you know, lying all the time. I wonder,
but Elvis wasn't talking about dogs, no, but he was
(10:19):
comparing somebody who he didn't have in a high opinion
or high esteem to a hound dog. I wonder who
that was about. And he probably had no idea that
he was giving them quite a compliment, right he was.
He was trying to do the opposite. It was like
that Simpsons where somebody calls somebody else a chicken and
it chicken, and the top head appears and goes, he's
insulting the both of us. They Elvis should have said,
(10:41):
you ain't nothing but a hound dog, which is actually
the most talented scent dog of all time. That would
have fit too. You ain't nothing but a hound dog.
I hold you in deep admiration. And there goes the
career of Elvis Presley. Uh So, smell wise, dogs have
a sense of smell about forty times stronger than a human.
(11:03):
And this is all dogs. It doesn't mean all dogs
make good star dogs. But just because a little Momo
is uh, you know, like a little curly, cute lap dog,
doesn't mean that Momo may not be a good star
dog for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean Momo can't
smell a dead body in the ocean. No, and she does.
(11:24):
She just she goes and finds a game of craps
instead of telling anybody. That's because that's how you've trained her. Sure, now,
Momo would not be a very good star dog. She
would be a little sketched out on the scene of
a search and rescue mission. But she could she and
she does. I'm sure pick up on the rafts are
a T I'm sorry r A F T S which is, uh,
(11:46):
it's gross. But these are the dead skin cells that
are constantly flying off of our body that smell only
like us, Yeah, like every individual. Apparently this is not proven,
but they think they know that humans shed skin cells rafts,
and that they do have a sense human specifically human scent,
(12:08):
and that is specific to each person too, which is
all totally believable. Yeah, which is why they You know,
like in the movies, they give somebody an old sweatshirt
that that person wore the day before, and that's how
they know how to go look for that person. Right,
They'll they'll do that, they'll mash it in the dog's
face and then go find it and they find the whatever,
the person that smells like that. So they think that's
(12:28):
how dogs are able to find specific human sense or
any human scent, is that the rafts, the skin cells
that were shedding are being picked up. We leave them
behind on the ground. They follow the ground. Um. If
we run up against a bush or something, a bunch
of them get scraped off, or they're just kind of
floating in the air, and depending on the type of
dog um, they're going to pick up those skin cell
(12:50):
rafts and and it's probably about here that we should
say that there are two types too general umbrella categories
of UM search and rescue dogs. There's the tracking dog
and there's the air sent dog. And they do the
same thing, they find humans, but they do it in
two very different ways, one super targeted and one super general.
(13:13):
And depending on the situation that you're faced with, you're
going to call it one dog or the other, or
maybe both. If you're just a county that's just flushed
with extra taxpay or cash that you don't know what
to do with, sure dog, county. Uh Yeah, so a
tracking dog. They also call those following dogs. Those are
like when you think of a bloodhound with their nose
down on a trail. Uh. They're the ones who who
(13:36):
know and this is what these dogs need. They know
the last scene point of this person. So like you know,
if you went hiking in the woods and you parked
your car at a trailhead, Uh, they know that that
is your last if that is in fact your lasting point.
That is the last sing point. Here is a sweater
that they wore yesterday, and uh, go at it right,
(13:58):
And we talked about the nuts and bolts of that
kind of stuff on the Search and Rescue episode. So
go listen to that because we talked about the last
same point, and we talked about how searchers like fan
out from there. Sure there's like a quick response team.
The dogs are the ones that are brought out first
because a scent, if it's a tracking dog and they're
(14:19):
following the scent that was specifically laid down by that person,
that tracking dog needs to be there very quickly, and
they need to um, they need to be there before
everybody else because once a bunch of searchers get into
the area and start searching for the person, they don't
know where the person's scent trail is, so they might
be crossing all over it and ultimately ruin it for
(14:40):
the dog who can't pick it up anymore. So that
tracking dog is going to be among the first searchers
on the scene. That's right. Uh. The air scent dogs,
like you said that, these are a little more like
when you don't know, like somebody's just lost in the
forest or somebody is buried in the snow. They don't
have that last scene starting point, uh, and they basically
(15:01):
just say go out there and stick your nose in
the air instead of on the ground and see if
you can inhale some of those So some of those
airborne rafts like fine seventies cocaine, right, the finest Quervo
gold and the fine Columbian uh and those you know,
(15:21):
that's basically basically their deal. Um. You know, if it's
a little more general, um, you're you're probably some sort
of a well, they're all kinds of dogs, but you're
not small. You're medium sized or larger. You may be
a German shepherd or like a lab believe believe it
or not, it's probably not a Saint Bernard um, just
(15:41):
because they're they're just a little too big these days. Yeah,
cumbersome as how this article put it. Border collies are good. Uh,
And of course the bloodhound because they're those big old
ears and all those cute folds in their faces actually
concentrate scent particles right into those uh, stinky, stinky, drippy nostrils. Yeah.
(16:03):
It just kind of slaps the skin cells of humans
right into the dog's nostrils. Amazing. So let's take a
break and then we're gonna come back and talk about
different specialties that a search and rescue dog can have. Okay, Wolf, Sorry, Okay, Chuck,
(16:42):
so we're back. We're talking now, if you'll follow me
in this line of thinking, Okay, about the different specialties
search and rescue dogs can have. Yeah, this one is
sort of the saddest specialty. But the cadaver dog UM
very very important though, because, uh, you know, people need
(17:04):
closure in their lives. And if you've lost a loved one,
uh literally lost a loved one and you don't know
where they are and they end up not surviving that ordeal,
then you would still like to give them, um a
burial of your choice or you know, however you want
to do things in your family. But that that was
a lot well I was saying a proper burial, but
(17:24):
that means a lot of things to a lot of people.
Sure it could be a sky burial, Sure it could
be remember those Oh yeah, that was a great one.
I don't remember what that was on, but that was
a good one. Buzzards right, just picking at your body yep.
Up in the Himalayas. Uh So they are they are
specifically trained to search for human remains and those uh
(17:45):
decomposition gases uh and those skin rafts. Still. But that
that is pretty amazing because these dogs can find. It, says,
a single human tooth or a single drop of blood
they can detect, right right, because you know, first of all,
they're they're truly um able to detect that kind of stuff.
But then the training they receive really kind of narrows
(18:07):
and and focuses that that natural ability they have. But
when when I was looking up cadaver dogs, as of
course they did, I was like, how would you train
a cadaver dog? What are you? Where are you getting
the dead bodies? Weren't. Apparently if you are training cadaver dogs,
you can't apply to get like decomposing human tissue. You
(18:28):
have to you have to like get a license for it,
I believe, or a license to have it um. But
apparently it's hard to come by. So trainers will like
use their own blood to train dogs to fine blood.
There's also a company UM that makes a scent of
an artificial training scent called Sigma Pseudo Corpse Scent, and
(18:51):
it comes in three flavors recently deceased, decomposing, and drowned.
And you can train a dog on the UM on
this sent It's close enough approximation that they will learn
to follow the set and find decomposing human remains. So
two people by those creeps creeps and uh star trainers,
(19:14):
right and like, but just two people by the bottles.
They're like a million dollars each Yeah, and they go
out on a tender date and they're like just a
little dab of drowned body behind each year. I'm all set, Yeah, alright.
Water dogs are the next, and those uh search for
drowning victims. Obviously, Uh, they are generally in a boat
at some point, and we'll talk about their training, but
(19:35):
one of the one of the big parts of training
is to make sure that these are dogs can ride
in helicopters and ride in boats, and ride on a
snowmobile or whatever you know. And a t V one
are those things called, yeah, a t V four wheelers?
Remember they had three wheelers when we were kids. Man,
those are so dangerous. Everyone's like, man, they sing, surety
(19:57):
tip over a lot, right, Maybe we should add a
fourth wheel. Yeah, there you go, and then now it's
stable and it's a man. Those were so dangerous that
I remember when they came out and it was like
twelve year olds dying all over the place with those things.
I never read one of those. I didn't either. My
mom would would not have let me near one of those.
I was a go carter. Oh lucky I had. I
(20:19):
didn't have one. You know, we never had any of
that stuff because my parents are teachers, so they were like,
draw a picture of one. Um. But my my really
good friend growing up lived out in the in the
woods in the country, and he had two sort of
homemade go carts. Um, not sort of homemade. They were
totally homemade. Uh. They weren't like the you know, the
super sweet things you could buy. But they had the
(20:40):
land where their dad built like a dirt track and
it was the most fun thing I ever did as
a child. That's awesome. It was awesome. Yeah. It was
always the friend out in the country that had the
go carts. Sure, yeah, not a city folk, right. So
I mean, if you have a really specialized um sar dog,
maybe it is used to hiding in a go cart too,
(21:01):
but it's gonna definitely be trained to ride in on
just about anything that it will be called in for.
And in addition, Chuck, this is amazing to me. They
are totally fine with being lowered down the face of
a cliff in a harness on a rope stuff like that.
Like they're trained to um as. We'll see their training
to basically keep it together in some very weird situations
(21:24):
for dogs. Yeah, and again with my dog, Nico the
staffy uh have you know, two dogs, and they've both
been on boats. And Charlie the uh the shelty mix
kind of just hides under seats, whereas Nico is we
call her the hood ornament. She just sits as tall
as possible front and center, and her nose is just
(21:47):
I mean, I can't imagine the amount of sense that
she's inhaling right, it's really impressive. Yeah, we took Momo
and a kayak to see what she would do, and
she loved it. She did not hide at all. She
was alert, bark at fish, and I think she could find.
She was like, yes, this is pretty great. That's pretty
fun stuff. So there was also, like we said, there's
(22:08):
avalanche um search and rescue dogs, there's also urban disaster
searching and rescue dogs, and we'll talk about them more
in depth than a little while, but suffice to say
that that is the UM, the pinnacle of search and
rescue dogs. That's the toughest one. There are something like
from what I saw. There's maybe a hundred search and
(22:28):
rescue dogs in the United States that are officially qualified
to search in a disaster scenario in an urban area. Yeah,
and I know we're going to talk about it in
a minute, but there was one part of that section
that just got me, like, these dogs operate on reward
for doing what they're doing, and uh in urban disasters,
(22:51):
like apparently a dog can get down if on themselves
if they just keep finding dead people. And so at
Own zero, they were firefighters and rescuers that would pretend
to be uh, people trapped just so that these dogs
that have been working long days could feel like they
had done something to help. Right. Can you believe that, dude?
(23:15):
I totally can. That's just such like a firefighter thing
to do. Oh my god, I love that too. All Right,
So there's wilderness dogs self explanatory, and then something called
evidence article dogs. Yeah, they can find like pieces of
clothing or or evidence in a crime. Yeah, got you,
So go find the bloody hammer, right right exactly? Wow,
(23:39):
that that turned dark all exec. So let's say that
you want to start training your dog. Um, there there's
it's actually training of search and rescue dog follows pretty
established training principles and first of all, it's all positive reinforcement.
We eventually need to do an episode on UM negative
(24:01):
reinforcement or dog obedience because it's just so fully discredited,
but most people think that most people don't realize it.
But you do not need to punish your dog for
not doing something right. You just praise and reward your
dog for doing something for when they do do something right.
That's how you train a dog and that's the basis
(24:21):
of search and rescue training is it's all positive reinforcement
and reward UM. And the whole thing starts out with
just basic obedience. And it's at this point that Momo
would wash out of search and rescue trail, just right
out of the gate. Momo is her own person, and
we treat her as such, like she's our child, so
we don't treat her like a dog. So she has
(24:43):
come to not see herself as a dog. UM. She's
very good dog, very sweet and loyal and takes good
care of us. But she Um, she would just get
distracted and again a little freaked out and sketched out
when the when the distractions came around. Yeah, Nicos stairs
at UM you know, we're living in a in a
rental house right now because we're doing work on our house.
(25:07):
So it's a very weird time for our whole family
to all of a sudden be uprooted in living in
a strange house out in the woods. But Nico just
sits and stairs in the window which overlooks a big
wooded lot, just movement, squirrels, birds or whatever. And the
second you open that door, she's so fast. She's like
(25:27):
a greyhound bolting for anything. And luckily she hasn't caught
anything yet. But um, I'm telling you, man, she'd be
a great star dog. Youlling reason I would not do
this because I want her around, not on location, helping people.
So I guess yeah, if I'm selfish, if it were
squirrel search and rescue, I think Mama would be excellent,
(25:48):
excellent at it. I agree, s S A R. Yeah,
maybe there is a call for that. We just don't
realize it because we don't speak squirrel. So yes, basic
obedience is level one, uh, just regular commands. Temperament is
super important. They have to be good with um strangers,
um other dogs. Obviously a lot of times there are
(26:09):
a bunch of dogs on the scene and they can't
be like I'm gonna go fight that dog or play
with that dog. Uh. They have to be good on walks,
on loose leashes, but be good with crowds, all of
that stuff, I imagine really roots out and training a
bunch of dogs right off the bat. Yes, for sure.
Um so that's just basic obedience and you have to
(26:32):
you have to just knock that off the list out
of the gate. Sure, right, then you move on to
the you you move from you know, good well behaved
obedient dog too. Now we're starting to get into the
training a little bit, and you want to teach your dog,
um something really important that apparently comes up in search
and rescue that you are not the end all be
(26:55):
all in the world to this dog. This dog has
to be able to um to to take instruction from
people other than you, and to also show a tremendous
amount of concentration, self possession, non distraction. And the way
that they test this usually when they're training search and
(27:15):
rescue dogs is they will um take a dog over
to a crowd of other dogs, and there will be
other people milling about and all that, and um, you,
the handler will will ask the dog to to lay
down or stay or sit and the dog and then
you leave, You go away at least out of sight.
I think this article says thirty feet away, and so
(27:36):
the dog can't see you anymore. And then over the
course of ten twenty minutes, other handlers come in and
take over responsibility of tending to this herd of dogs
that are all sitting around. And if your dog will
listen to your command that you gave one time to
stay here or sit or lay down whatever, the whole
time you're gone until you come back and tell them
(27:57):
that they can get up or whatever, then it's apparently
the test for canine professionalism pretty amazing, and I'm sure
there's probably a lot of different tests. There's no standardization
for search and rescue dog training except for the Female
Certification for Urban Search and Rescue Dogs. Um so I'm
sure there's different tests all over the place. But that's
(28:18):
a pretty good glimpse of what you need to expect
from your dog to to surpass the the second level,
the second echelot, and move on to the third one.
The second the second one is tough. I think the
third one is genuinely tough, not not necessarily for you
training the dog. I think the third one is the
tough one on the dog. Yeah, this is just raw
(28:40):
physical and mental ability and agility. So I mean they're
going through like an obstacle course. Basically, you can go
through tunnels. You can climb uh and incline of more
than uh I think a minimum of forty five degrees
on each side, like up and down. You can get
into a a cherry picker like we talked about and
go up really high without jumping out, or be in
(29:04):
that boat or be in that snowmobile or a helicopter
and not get freaked out like you have to. You know,
they don't crank up the helicopter usually, like once you
get in that thing and we've all seen mash you
gotta run up to a helicopter whose blades are spinning,
a lot of people don't want to do that. No, no, so,
but your dog needs to be able to like, come on,
(29:25):
let's go, I'll all the man, all man the machine gun. Yeah,
or hey, get in this harness. I'm gonna attach you
to my chest and we're gonna repel down this mountain
and you just got to be a good boy. They do.
I mean once they reach a certain level of training
they do and then the final is is tracking. Obviously, um, well,
I mean this is this is after they passed those
(29:47):
three levels. But um tracking is urban tracking is level one,
like you talked about that is that's the hardest thing
to do in this test is just off the charts.
To me. What they have a person do is they
will be the target, like the you know, the whatever
they're looking for. So they will do a half mile
(30:07):
to one mile track from one point to another in
high traffic area of a city, Like they'll go to
like downtown New York and walk a half mile to
a mile. This dog is sitting there the whole time,
you know, with someone else. Uh, they have to cross
at least two intersections, make at least three right angle turns,
(30:28):
go down two blocks of alleyways, leaving you know, a
scent article along the way, like they're at least leaving
little nuggets shutting off skin cells, I guess, or maybe
dropping the comb in your back pocket. Uh. Then once
you have laid down that track, another person crosses that
track in at least one place, so they're adding scent
(30:49):
basically trying to throw this dog off. And then thirty
minutes later, after all of this, and after the target
is at the very end, they finally say, all right,
dog go and the dog has to find this target
and no more time than it took for the person
to lay down that track. Right and like you said,
waiting thirty minutes before they start after the person is finished,
(31:11):
that's impressive. That is super impressive. And there's distractions the
whole way to righte Like from from what I gathered,
this is actually done in like an actual city, Like
they don't have like a fake city built somewhere in
Colorado or something like that. Like this is a like
you your real town, this is happening in. So the
more distractions the better, yea. And they hire people who
(31:34):
are wearing like um, drecar no wir and just to
wander around everywhere to confuse the scent and everything. It's
it's a it's a crazy jam for the dog's gross.
So let's um, actually, man, when's the last time you
smelled dre car no are? Oh? I don't know. I
have smelled it within the last year, and I gotta
(31:54):
tell you it holds up, maybe even more than it
I realized before. You know, how I feel about cologne. Um,
So I say we take our second break and then
come back and talk about what we've talked about. At
this point, it's just like basic training. Now we've got
to get into specialty training. Okay, yeah, we'll be right back. Okay,
(32:39):
So Chuck, your dog has been through Star training or
basic basic training for Star, but they haven't actually been
taught the star part yet. It's just they've just shown like, Okay,
I got it, I got what it takes. Let's you know,
put me in there, show me what to do. And
the way that you you train a dog to um
(32:59):
sir and and rescue by by alerting is just basically
taking their natural inclinations and again like focusing them and
amplifying them. And you do that through reward. And the
way that you train a dog through reward I'm having
trouble saying that for some reason, is that you identify
what that dog wants more in the world than anything else,
(33:21):
whether it's a tennis ball, whether it's a nossages, whatever
it is. You figure out what that dog wants, the
thing that they will do anything to get, uh, and
that's what you use as their reward, and then you
can start the star search and rescue training. Yeah, and
the reward is important to to be consistent with that,
(33:42):
with that reward because you can't even uh and they
pointed out even in horrible situations like nine eleven or
if they find like your family member, you know, their
body out on the woods, you need to discreetly take
this dog off to the side and give them the reward.
And even if that means, you know, toss a frisbee, like,
(34:06):
if that's what it is, then that's what you gotta do.
Would should be a really just odd thing to see
somebody playing frisbee with their dog, with the crying family
and a dead body in the woods with bloody hammers
sticking out of their forehead. Discreetly is the key word there.
I don't think you're like leaping over the body or
anything like. You just find a nearby area and then
(34:29):
go kind of discreetly carry out your reward, let's just hope.
So uh yeah. So it takes um about six hundred
and this is generalization, of course, but about six hundred
hours of training, which is a lot of hours for
a dog to be field ready. That's for the dog, yeah, Yeah,
the humans have to go through what like a thousand hours,
(34:50):
that's what That's what this article says. Yeah, so that's
six hours of training between humans and dogs, which is
hilarious because it means that humans require more training than
the dogs to to do the job. And then and like,
I don't know, are humans rewarded? Are they like, here's
your martini, Chuck, You're like I would crawl through an
avalanche to get to a martini. That's my reward. So, um,
(35:15):
you the the whole way you start this again, you're
using their favorite thing in the world as a reward,
and you teach them that they can go find their
rewards somewhere. They normally want to find things, so if
you show them, okay, come find me is a good
way to start. And usually this takes two people. And
(35:36):
this article uses avalanche training as an example, but it
kind of generally applies to anything. Whatever your whatever specialty
you're training you're star dog to engage in. That's what
that's kind of what you would teach them. So if
you're if you're training them under avalanche um guidelines, you
would go dig a hole in some snow and in
(35:56):
perfect perfect line of sight with the dog, you would
go no, no, no, no, and like go run and
jump into the hole in the snow, and you would
have your assistant holding the dog back. And then after
just a second after you make it into the hole,
they let the dog go. The dog runs after you,
and when the dog comes to get you, you just
praise it and love on it and give it its
(36:16):
ball or its snausages or whatever it is. And the
dogs like, okay, if I go find human, I will
get played with, I will get a reward whatever it
is that's really important to me. And now the the kernel,
the seed of search and rescue training has just been
planted in the dog. And dogs are smart, so it
(36:38):
doesn't take much more to kind of fluff it up
into bona fide full search and rescue professionalism. Yeah, it's
kind of funny because dogs are super smart but also
very dumb in that, like it's just a simple reward
situation like find person, get treat. Yeah, and that doesn't
(37:00):
mean dumb, but it's simplistic. I guess okay, good, I'm
glad you said say. It sounds more like dogs have
it figured out rather than being dumb. I've had some
dumb dogs. Well, sure, there's things dumb dogs the best.
There's dumb people too, so dumb shrews, dumb camels, dumb plants,
(37:20):
interesting point, dumb everything. Uh So, in the case of
the avalanche, you jump in the hole and that's great.
First first part accomplished. But then they'll do it again.
But the person handling the dog holds onto them for
say five or ten seconds, then makes them go. Then
they just increase that time up until the point where
it's like five or ten minutes and the person has
(37:43):
buried themselves in the snow. And then the dog like
that's the true test, Like it's been ten minutes. I
saw the person go and disappear, and now and imagine
this isn't very fun for the person to bury themselves
in snow completely, but it's got to be done. And
then the dog finds a person and they get that
snausage or that frisbee play yep. And so each time
(38:05):
they're associating this new thing um, the increasingly complex game
of find the human um with their reward. So they're
learning this this new stuff. Holding the dog back increases
the amount of attention span and memory that's required to
to remember this game, and so over time the dog
learns if I go dig under snow, I can find
(38:28):
a person that I smell there and they'll probably play
with me. Um. Again, depends on how soon the dog
was led off on the scent of the person covered
by the avalanche. But that's what that's the game that
they learned. Yeah, and and they talk a lot about
focus and concentration. But these dogs, I mean, it is
amazing because in a in a lot of these searches,
(38:50):
unless you like you're the first one on the scene,
there are people everywhere. There are sirens, there are bullhorns,
there's equipment making loud noises, there are any distraction you
could think of that would freak a dog out is
on the scene all at once. And they say that
star dogs can get so good that they can not
only ignore all this, but they could they could walk
(39:12):
by a cheeseburger on a trail and just keep following
that scent. Yeah, which is where my dogs would fail.
You want to identify the star dog at a disaster area,
find the dog that's just casually filing its nails. That's
the star dog every time. Yeah, there's no way my
dogs would ignore that. The food thing that would I'm
(39:35):
always got this thing where her eyes get real big
and kind of bug out of her head and she
like uses a paw to kind of like gently like
tap you, like, hey, I'm right here. You want to
share some of that. So, UM, there's a couple other
things we should mention about this. This training, the avalanche
training we just mentioned, you can you can do that
(39:55):
with anything you can do with underwater training. Apparently it
involves the handler in the bow with the dog, but
also a scuba diver hiding underwater. That's the best way
to train dogs on water. Um, you can do it
with um simulated disaster like collapse buildings, that kind of stuff.
So you can take this this idea that you're training
(40:16):
the dog that if they go look for a person,
the person might give them their snausage or their ball,
and that's what they're doing. So even when they're out
there searching for dead bodies in the woods, to the dog,
they're just playing a game. There's a bunch of people around,
there's a lot of sirens and like crying humans, and um,
we're like shovels and back house and all that stuff.
(40:37):
But the dogs just in the midst of all this,
the dog is playing a game of go find it,
which is why that reward is so key even in
the face of tragedy. Yeah. So, um, that that's the
dog training. We have to talk about training you because
in in Soviet Russia, sorry, training trains you. Uh yeah,
(41:00):
I mean you know most of these star handlers. Uh well,
we'll seek out this dog probably from the get go
um at a shelter and kind of start from from
day one as like this is my next star dog. Um.
Like we said earlier, they spent about a thousand hours
of training as a human. Um, this is training the dog.
This is also like you've got to be good in
(41:22):
the woods. You've got to know weather patterns. You've got
to know how to communicate on these radio comms and
know how to work a compass. And most of these
people are a lot of more e m S certified.
But the very least you're brushed up very well in
your CPR. Because if you're a couple of miles away
and you're the person that comes upon the scene, you've
got to administer some some aid right there. One might
(41:43):
call it first aid. Yeah, you would. You gotta look
good in cargo pants, yeah, for sure. Uh, you gotta
have a nice pair of hiking boots. You gotta be
able to wear a boot. This article UM quotes a
search and rescue handler UM who who says, the chief
thing that you have to be able to do is
(42:05):
to know where you are at any given point during
the search. UM. You have to precisely identify your coordinates,
which means you have to know that GPS, the compass,
the map, all that stuff you said, But you also
have to know it while you're following your dog with
a flashlight at night, because apparently at night is the
best time for a dog to search. So you have
to be really, really good at at identifying your coordinates.
(42:28):
And the reason why is because dogs will often UM
give a sign, they'll alert that they found something even
though there doesn't seem to be anything there. But if
your dog does that, you want to note down the
coordinates and you keep searching. And if some other star
dogs come along and they note the same area and
everybody compares notes afterwards, there you're going to go back
(42:49):
to that same area. But that that you need to
know exactly where the area is so you know that
there's something there and how to get back to it.
So you really need to know what you're doing with
with um self coordination is what I'll call it. Yeah,
I would fail even if Nika was great. My my
legendary sense of that poor sense of direction would disqualify me. Yes,
(43:13):
so that's why I don't do this. Didn't you get
trapped in a cave one? Uh? No, I didn't get trapped.
You just didn't feel like leaving. What are you talking about.
I went caving, and I went in and I went out. Okay,
there was no problems. I thought there was a problem. No,
I mean the problems were. It was kind of scary, right,
(43:35):
but I was I was with experienced speed lunkers who
got me all through it. Sure, but yeah, that was
that one pancake part that you've freaked out when I
even told you about it. Yeah, I don't want to
talk about it. So. Uh, if you are a star
team or you have a star dog, um, you are,
like you said, on call at all times, even if
(43:56):
you're on vacation. That's why you travel with your dogs
a lot. Um You're always ready and I imagine it
could ruin a vacation. But if you're sitting around, you know,
pushing papers in an office, you you probably look forward
to that call to get out in the in the
woods and do what you were trained to do with
your with your best pal. Yeah, exactly. So you get
the call out, Uh, you load up all your gear,
(44:19):
you you head out there. Um. It depends on what's
going on. You might be hopping on a helicopter or
a boat again, depending what's going on there. Um. And
this is where the obedience and all those distractions come
into play, and you're you're you know, it's up to
you as the handler to be the alpha. Even though
your dog needs to be good awfu leash and on
loose leash, it's still you're still in charge. And that's
(44:42):
that's a big part of it. So I think we
said that search and um urban search and rescue is
the hardest um kind of search and rescue for a
dog to do, not just because um it's it's difficult,
but because it can be it can really get a
dog down to find nothing but dead bodies. It's also
(45:03):
extremely hazardous. You know that dogs poking around a collapsed building,
that's a precarious place to be looking for survivors. UM.
So if you're an urban search and rescue dog from
what I saw. You don't want a dog that's over
three years old entering this or that's just too old,
So you want a younger dog. You want to start
(45:23):
training them early on. But if you're an urban search
and rescue dog urban disaster search and rescue, UM, you're
probably not going to have an extremely long career in that.
It's just too exhausting and it's too demanding. So you
may as your as you kind of move towards retirement, UM,
get moved to different types of search and rescue that
(45:44):
are a little less demanding. And apparently the last step
before retirement is wilderness search and rescue because to a dog,
it's just a great day out in the woods. That's
it's as good as it comes. Yeah. So after after
four or five years on the scene of collapsed buildings,
you get to run around the national forest and uh
(46:05):
and look for folks yep. And then after you finally
are retired, you get to lay around all day and
chase those squirrels you've been wanting to chase that whole time. Yes,
and unsurprisingly, UM, I would say most all of the
time you were probably sticking with the the trainer as
their good boy or girl. But if that is not
(46:26):
possible for some reason, there are plenty of people that
will line up to adopt this sur dog. Oh yes,
because they are just as as um well trained as
they come. That's right. Uh, you got anything else now? Man?
I love these dog cats. So dogs. Yeah, I'd love
to do something about just breeds and the original dogs
(46:47):
and how they evolved and all that good stuff. Okay,
have we not done how dogs works? I'm sure we have, yeah,
but I don't know if we got into all the Uh.
You know, there's that movie out about the original dog,
the original domesticated dog. Um it's called Alpha, and I
think it's not true, but I think it may be
(47:08):
based on what people believe might have happened, like one
human bonded with one wolf and that kind of started
the whole thing. Are you talking about dances with wolves? Yeah?
That's it. Oh no, no, no, that it was water World.
That's funny you bring that up. I was thinking about
that movie the other day and just how perfect the
(47:30):
casting of Dennis Hopper was, because whoever casted him was like,
this movie's off the rails before we even started shooting. Yeah,
let's get Dennis Opper and Gary Busey in here? What's
Gary Busey in it too? And I don't want to
make fun of Gary Busey. He said you shouldn't real troubles. Well,
way to end this on a downer, will just stop
right here. If you want to know more about star Dogs,
(47:51):
just start looking it up. There's all sorts of training
resources and everything you could hope to find on the internet. Um.
And since I said at it's time for a listener mail, Uh,
this is about Pando. Yes, um, And I have to
say that since we did that episode, I've often listened
(48:12):
to brown noise here at work while I'm trying to
concentrate on my my earbuds. But I have since switched
to Aspen Forest, Oh and and wind. There's a great
like hour and a half recording of In the Field
of a It maybe Pando for all I know, but
it's really really lovely, highly recommended. Cool. So all right
(48:33):
here we go. Hey guys, Uh and Jerry, I hope
you're having a wonderful day. You really enjoyed hearing episode
on Pando. My family has been taking an annual camping
trip to Fish Lake, Utah since the early to mid nineties,
which is only a mile or two down the road
from Pando. It's like, how do you go a mile
from Pando that's that big and just not going to Pando?
All right? You know, maybe they don't know about Pando.
(48:54):
Oh he knows, he said. I've been hearing stories about
it since I was little and have always been astounded
by the magnitude and resilience of an organism like that.
The ungulate fences start right on the side of the road,
and it's like night and day. You're driving along in
a fairly sparse aspen grove and then bam, there's a
wall of tall, dense aspens on one side, surrounded by
(49:15):
a fence. The other side of the road is offence
as well, but there's often cattle roaming, and the tree
population is considerably thinner. I'm an oil painter by trade
and recently did a commission of a nice little spot
in Pando and included a little picture here in the
email of the finished piece. It is wonderfully gorgeous place.
Saddens me to hear how much danger it's in. Thanks
for getting the word out there, guys. Hopefully something could
(49:37):
be done. Hope all is well. That is from Lawson
Barney in Colorado and asked him if people could view
his art, and he said, just go to Lawson Barney
on Instagram. L A W S O N all one
word capital b A r n E y on Instagram
to see some of this stuff. Yes. Uh, Instagram is
a great place to find artists these days. That's what
(49:58):
I hear. Are you're not on I don't know you
know me? You gotta check it out. While you're there.
Check out an artist I love called the Christian Rex
fan minute amazing. And I'm gonna check out laws and
Barney too at the very least because he's got a
pretty awesome name. Uh. If you want to talk about
artists that you love on Instagram, turn us onto some.
(50:20):
You can go to our website Stuff you Should Know
dot com find all of our social links. I also
have a website called the Josh Clark Way dot com
and you can send us an email. Send it off
to stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that
(50:42):
how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and first time ever
guest producer Andrews. It's very exciting. Yeah, I thought you
(00:23):
were saying he was a ghost or something. We'll know.
He's right beside you, right, But I mean he could
be an illusion or one of those uh like the
ghosts that I saw that didn't look like a ghost,
that was just a solid form. Sure, hey k a ghost.
Yeah we could use more ghost producers, we could, you know, Yeah,
(00:46):
I don't have to time benefits. No, you do not
have to do anything. Yep. He just pretty great. Press
a button and die? Oh so um, Chuck. Yes, I
don't know if you remember. Several months ago we released
an episode and it was a good one if you
ask me. It was about search and rescue. Okay, do
(01:08):
you remember the episode right? And there was like you
saw urban search and rescue, wilderness search and rescue, and
in that episode I was like, man, we have to
do an episode on search and rescue dogs. Well, by god,
today is the day We're doing it. The only time
we've ever followed up on a promise in our career.
The prophecy has been fulfilled. It's right. So we're talking
(01:32):
today about search and rescue dogs and this, first of all,
this article is just genuine bona fide how stuff works,
quality from the olden days. Just checks all those boxes,
done in't it? Every box that's that's that's Mark one
in the favor of this episode that it's based on
that article. Mark two is that it's about dogs and
(01:56):
how much how great dogs are. And I just had
a really good time researching this one. Yeah, it's funny,
like during reading this whole thing and all this research
in my head, I just kept thinking, good boy, good girl.
I just kept saying that over and over. Yeah, just
petting them behind the ears in your mind. So, um,
(02:17):
when we're talking about star dogs, we're talking about search
and rescue dogs. Dogs that are trained to go find people.
Right there, they do two things. There's two components to
a search and rescue dogs job. It is to find
people and then to let their handler know that they
found the person. Right sure, because of a dog that
just find someone doesn't let anyone know. They'll just be
(02:40):
sitting around licking faces all day. Right, you're like, yes,
you you found me, know, go get help, and the
dogs like, I don't know, although I did like seeing
what was that one dog called that's trained to uh
to like stay there instead of going to to alert
everyone else victim loyalty? Is that behavior? Yeah? And I
think that's the case if there's if like someone is injured,
(03:02):
they may need that dog to just stay there and
start barking instead of saying, hey, I'm gonna run and
find someone and let and let them know that you're
not okay. Right. So, however they alert, as long as
they alert, that's good. That's the second part of the job.
As long as they don't wander off and like find
a craps game to engage in without telling anybody that
they found the person who's stranded in the wilderness, right,
(03:24):
which would not happen with the star dog because they
can focus like nobody's business right, right. So star dogs
are professional working dogs, right, just as much as like
a herding dog on a farm who actually does that
work um or a canine unit dog or one of
the Beagle Brigade we've talked about them before. It's a
(03:46):
it's a working dog. But the the article that Julia
Layton wrote points out and I think really just kind
of changed my perspective on things and opened up my
eyes that what the dog is really doing is playing. Yeah, right,
so I mean the dog is not taking work seriously
even though it appears to be. It's taking place seriously.
(04:08):
And I just love that. Yeah, And and it really
hit home to me too, like when it pointed out that, um,
if you've ever had a dog that will like run
till their paws are bloody to get that tennis ball
or that coong, right, I guess I just name checked
a brand they should throw some dough for that. It's
(04:28):
a good brand. Uh loves the little those tiny ones
are so cute. Um that that that would make a
good star dog. And I have had two dogs in
my life that would be great uh search and rescue dogs.
My dog Buckley, who was no longer with us, and
my current one of my two current dogs, Nico, And
(04:48):
they both had a lot of Staffordshire Terrier on them,
and they both from day one, if you threw something,
ran and got it, brought it back, dropped it at
your feet and looked at you as if if you
don't throw that thing again, I might keel over and
die right now. Staffords your terriers and that Spuds Mackenzie
And now I can't remember what kind of terrier that is,
(05:11):
but it was some kind of terrier, and I thought
it was an English countryside village name terrier. Huh. I
mean staffies are I think a lot of people throw
a lot of dogs into the pit bull category that
aren't pit bulls. That's kind of a a bone of
contention with pit bull owners is like, you know, a
dog attacks that has any a terrier in it and
they say it was a pit bull. Um, So staffies
(05:33):
are lumped in there. But I remember when we did
one of my great memories of being in Edinburrow on
our tour. I took a walk around Lovely, uh, the
lovely town, and I ran into a lady who was
walking one of hers And you know, when you're out
of town and you're not with your dog, you just
sort of like attack every dog you see. And so
I got down. I was with this dog and I
(05:54):
was like, I love this dog. Your you know, your
dogs are sweet or something, and she went, just a
wee staffy that's so Scottish. A wee staffy that was
a uh that like that town is magnificent. It's magic,
it really is. I can't wait to go back one day. Yeah,
we need to do that. We need to get on
another UK tour. I could not agree more. Dude. Heck, yeah, okay,
(06:18):
it's done. We're doing it in like two years or
three years if it's anything like our Australia tour. So
with the Star Dogs though, Um, we cannot emphasize anymore
how much time is of the essence because whether it is,
and we'll get into the various types of rescues, but
they're all pretty time sensitive. Whether it's a missing child,
(06:38):
god forbid, or a collapse building, God forbid, or an avalanche,
God forbid. None of these situations are awesome and the
clock is ticking, especially you know in in those cases
where you know there's maybe short of oxygen or they're
buried in snow, Like minutes count. Yeah, for sure. I
saw on a site for an organization that offers stur
(07:02):
dog training, um for your dog, Like if you think
your dog's got it, they say, come, we'll find out
if your dog's got it. They were saying, like, um,
you have to be out there, like you have to
treat this like you're an ambulance. Basically, when you get
the call, you gotta be out the door. And it's interesting.
You know, the dog doesn't have any job other than
search and rescue, so the dogs ready to go any time,
(07:24):
but you're their handler and they live with you, and
you have to be out there with them. So you
have to be able to leave your regular job at
the drop of a hat. And and Star dog handlers
are on call twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year,
so much that um the dogs go on vacation with
the handlers in case there's a call and you both
(07:46):
have to go show up somewhere together. So you have
to be very, very responsive. And it is like you're saying,
because time is of the essence. Because this article gives
the example of avalanche victims, Like if you're an avalanche
victor them, if you're covered in an avalanche, you probably
will not want to be thinking about these stats. But
most avalanche victims who are found within I think, is
(08:10):
it ten minutes or fifteen minutes? I think of the
victims are alive at fifteen minutes. Okay, great, what about
thirty five minutes. Uh So between fifteen and thirty five minutes,
sixty percent of the of those folks will be gone. Right.
And so you might say, well, okay, wait, wait, you
(08:32):
guys are talking about an avalanche. How's the dog going
to find you in an avalanche? Dogs can find you
covered in snow, Dogs can find you underwater. Dogs can
pick up your scent sometimes when you're five away, right.
It's amazing. I was surprised to hear that because you
always see in like those old timey chain gang movies, um,
(08:53):
you know that are my favorite genre. Obviously, when when
they're trying to elude the tracking dogs they cross a
river something like that, it's off the scent. And that
probably works for for tracking dogs, and we'll talk about
the difference between these dogs. But for for a scent dog, um,
they can they can be trained to find your scent underwater,
(09:14):
especially if you just happen to be decomposing. Yeah, and
especially if that dog is a bloodhound. Um. And in
those old timey movies that you love, it seems like
it's always a bloodhound or you know, a pack of
bloodhounds and the and the dude you know who just
escaped from prison. Is runs through the river, and usually
in the movie they're they're like, you know, drat it all.
(09:37):
They just threw us off the scent, right, somebody throws
their hat to the ground. It's because of those kind
of because of that whole thing, that whole um, that
genre whatever, that in prison escape thing. I unfairly associate
bloodhounds with scary backwoods like redneck police officials. Yeah, yeah,
you know what I'm saying, because they're always with them.
(09:58):
But that that doesn't mean that the bloodhounds are scary.
They're great, sure, good old hound dogs. Yeah, Elvis wrote
a song about him. Yeah, but it wasn't favorable. Uh,
that's true, you know, lying all the time. I wonder,
but Elvis wasn't talking about dogs, no, but he was
(10:19):
comparing somebody who he didn't have in a high opinion
or high esteem to a hound dog. I wonder who
that was about. And he probably had no idea that
he was giving them quite a compliment, right he was.
He was trying to do the opposite. It was like
that Simpsons where somebody calls somebody else a chicken and
it chicken, and the top head appears and goes, he's
insulting the both of us. They Elvis should have said,
(10:41):
you ain't nothing but a hound dog, which is actually
the most talented scent dog of all time. That would
have fit too. You ain't nothing but a hound dog.
I hold you in deep admiration. And there goes the
career of Elvis Presley. Uh So, smell wise, dogs have
a sense of smell about forty times stronger than a human.
(11:03):
And this is all dogs. It doesn't mean all dogs
make good star dogs. But just because a little Momo
is uh, you know, like a little curly, cute lap dog,
doesn't mean that Momo may not be a good star
dog for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean Momo can't
smell a dead body in the ocean. No, and she does.
(11:24):
She just she goes and finds a game of craps
instead of telling anybody. That's because that's how you've trained her. Sure, now,
Momo would not be a very good star dog. She
would be a little sketched out on the scene of
a search and rescue mission. But she could she and
she does. I'm sure pick up on the rafts are
a T I'm sorry r A F T S which is, uh,
(11:46):
it's gross. But these are the dead skin cells that
are constantly flying off of our body that smell only
like us, Yeah, like every individual. Apparently this is not proven,
but they think they know that humans shed skin cells rafts,
and that they do have a sense human specifically human scent,
(12:08):
and that is specific to each person too, which is
all totally believable. Yeah, which is why they You know,
like in the movies, they give somebody an old sweatshirt
that that person wore the day before, and that's how
they know how to go look for that person. Right,
They'll they'll do that, they'll mash it in the dog's
face and then go find it and they find the whatever,
the person that smells like that. So they think that's
(12:28):
how dogs are able to find specific human sense or
any human scent, is that the rafts, the skin cells
that were shedding are being picked up. We leave them
behind on the ground. They follow the ground. Um. If
we run up against a bush or something, a bunch
of them get scraped off, or they're just kind of
floating in the air, and depending on the type of
dog um, they're going to pick up those skin cell
(12:50):
rafts and and it's probably about here that we should
say that there are two types too general umbrella categories
of UM search and rescue dogs. There's the tracking dog
and there's the air sent dog. And they do the
same thing, they find humans, but they do it in
two very different ways, one super targeted and one super general.
(13:13):
And depending on the situation that you're faced with, you're
going to call it one dog or the other, or
maybe both. If you're just a county that's just flushed
with extra taxpay or cash that you don't know what
to do with, sure dog, county. Uh Yeah, so a
tracking dog. They also call those following dogs. Those are
like when you think of a bloodhound with their nose
down on a trail. Uh. They're the ones who who
(13:36):
know and this is what these dogs need. They know
the last scene point of this person. So like you know,
if you went hiking in the woods and you parked
your car at a trailhead, Uh, they know that that
is your last if that is in fact your lasting point.
That is the last sing point. Here is a sweater
that they wore yesterday, and uh, go at it right,
(13:58):
And we talked about the nuts and bolts of that
kind of stuff on the Search and Rescue episode. So
go listen to that because we talked about the last
same point, and we talked about how searchers like fan
out from there. Sure there's like a quick response team.
The dogs are the ones that are brought out first
because a scent, if it's a tracking dog and they're
(14:19):
following the scent that was specifically laid down by that person,
that tracking dog needs to be there very quickly, and
they need to um, they need to be there before
everybody else because once a bunch of searchers get into
the area and start searching for the person, they don't
know where the person's scent trail is, so they might
be crossing all over it and ultimately ruin it for
(14:40):
the dog who can't pick it up anymore. So that
tracking dog is going to be among the first searchers
on the scene. That's right. Uh. The air scent dogs,
like you said that, these are a little more like
when you don't know, like somebody's just lost in the
forest or somebody is buried in the snow. They don't
have that last scene starting point, uh, and they basically
(15:01):
just say go out there and stick your nose in
the air instead of on the ground and see if
you can inhale some of those So some of those
airborne rafts like fine seventies cocaine, right, the finest Quervo
gold and the fine Columbian uh and those you know,
(15:21):
that's basically basically their deal. Um. You know, if it's
a little more general, um, you're you're probably some sort
of a well, they're all kinds of dogs, but you're
not small. You're medium sized or larger. You may be
a German shepherd or like a lab believe believe it
or not, it's probably not a Saint Bernard um, just
(15:41):
because they're they're just a little too big these days. Yeah,
cumbersome as how this article put it. Border collies are good. Uh,
And of course the bloodhound because they're those big old
ears and all those cute folds in their faces actually
concentrate scent particles right into those uh, stinky, stinky, drippy nostrils. Yeah.
(16:03):
It just kind of slaps the skin cells of humans
right into the dog's nostrils. Amazing. So let's take a
break and then we're gonna come back and talk about
different specialties that a search and rescue dog can have. Okay, Wolf, Sorry, Okay, Chuck,
(16:42):
so we're back. We're talking now, if you'll follow me
in this line of thinking, Okay, about the different specialties
search and rescue dogs can have. Yeah, this one is
sort of the saddest specialty. But the cadaver dog UM
very very important though, because, uh, you know, people need
(17:04):
closure in their lives. And if you've lost a loved one,
uh literally lost a loved one and you don't know
where they are and they end up not surviving that ordeal,
then you would still like to give them, um a
burial of your choice or you know, however you want
to do things in your family. But that that was
a lot well I was saying a proper burial, but
(17:24):
that means a lot of things to a lot of people.
Sure it could be a sky burial, Sure it could
be remember those Oh yeah, that was a great one.
I don't remember what that was on, but that was
a good one. Buzzards right, just picking at your body yep.
Up in the Himalayas. Uh So they are they are
specifically trained to search for human remains and those uh
(17:45):
decomposition gases uh and those skin rafts. Still. But that
that is pretty amazing because these dogs can find. It, says,
a single human tooth or a single drop of blood
they can detect, right right, because you know, first of all,
they're they're truly um able to detect that kind of stuff.
But then the training they receive really kind of narrows
(18:07):
and and focuses that that natural ability they have. But
when when I was looking up cadaver dogs, as of
course they did, I was like, how would you train
a cadaver dog? What are you? Where are you getting
the dead bodies? Weren't. Apparently if you are training cadaver dogs,
you can't apply to get like decomposing human tissue. You
(18:28):
have to you have to like get a license for it,
I believe, or a license to have it um. But
apparently it's hard to come by. So trainers will like
use their own blood to train dogs to fine blood.
There's also a company UM that makes a scent of
an artificial training scent called Sigma Pseudo Corpse Scent, and
(18:51):
it comes in three flavors recently deceased, decomposing, and drowned.
And you can train a dog on the UM on
this sent It's close enough approximation that they will learn
to follow the set and find decomposing human remains. So
two people by those creeps creeps and uh star trainers,
(19:14):
right and like, but just two people by the bottles.
They're like a million dollars each Yeah, and they go
out on a tender date and they're like just a
little dab of drowned body behind each year. I'm all set, Yeah, alright.
Water dogs are the next, and those uh search for
drowning victims. Obviously, Uh, they are generally in a boat
at some point, and we'll talk about their training, but
(19:35):
one of the one of the big parts of training
is to make sure that these are dogs can ride
in helicopters and ride in boats, and ride on a
snowmobile or whatever you know. And a t V one
are those things called, yeah, a t V four wheelers?
Remember they had three wheelers when we were kids. Man,
those are so dangerous. Everyone's like, man, they sing, surety
(19:57):
tip over a lot, right, Maybe we should add a
fourth wheel. Yeah, there you go, and then now it's
stable and it's a man. Those were so dangerous that
I remember when they came out and it was like
twelve year olds dying all over the place with those things.
I never read one of those. I didn't either. My
mom would would not have let me near one of those.
I was a go carter. Oh lucky I had. I
(20:19):
didn't have one. You know, we never had any of
that stuff because my parents are teachers, so they were like,
draw a picture of one. Um. But my my really
good friend growing up lived out in the in the
woods in the country, and he had two sort of
homemade go carts. Um, not sort of homemade. They were
totally homemade. Uh. They weren't like the you know, the
super sweet things you could buy. But they had the
(20:40):
land where their dad built like a dirt track and
it was the most fun thing I ever did as
a child. That's awesome. It was awesome. Yeah. It was
always the friend out in the country that had the
go carts. Sure, yeah, not a city folk, right. So
I mean, if you have a really specialized um sar dog,
maybe it is used to hiding in a go cart too,
(21:01):
but it's gonna definitely be trained to ride in on
just about anything that it will be called in for.
And in addition, Chuck, this is amazing to me. They
are totally fine with being lowered down the face of
a cliff in a harness on a rope stuff like that.
Like they're trained to um as. We'll see their training
to basically keep it together in some very weird situations
(21:24):
for dogs. Yeah, and again with my dog, Nico the
staffy uh have you know, two dogs, and they've both
been on boats. And Charlie the uh the shelty mix
kind of just hides under seats, whereas Nico is we
call her the hood ornament. She just sits as tall
as possible front and center, and her nose is just
(21:47):
I mean, I can't imagine the amount of sense that
she's inhaling right, it's really impressive. Yeah, we took Momo
and a kayak to see what she would do, and
she loved it. She did not hide at all. She
was alert, bark at fish, and I think she could find.
She was like, yes, this is pretty great. That's pretty
fun stuff. So there was also, like we said, there's
(22:08):
avalanche um search and rescue dogs, there's also urban disaster
searching and rescue dogs, and we'll talk about them more
in depth than a little while, but suffice to say
that that is the UM, the pinnacle of search and
rescue dogs. That's the toughest one. There are something like
from what I saw. There's maybe a hundred search and
(22:28):
rescue dogs in the United States that are officially qualified
to search in a disaster scenario in an urban area. Yeah,
and I know we're going to talk about it in
a minute, but there was one part of that section
that just got me, like, these dogs operate on reward
for doing what they're doing, and uh in urban disasters,
(22:51):
like apparently a dog can get down if on themselves
if they just keep finding dead people. And so at
Own zero, they were firefighters and rescuers that would pretend
to be uh, people trapped just so that these dogs
that have been working long days could feel like they
had done something to help. Right. Can you believe that, dude?
(23:15):
I totally can. That's just such like a firefighter thing
to do. Oh my god, I love that too. All Right,
So there's wilderness dogs self explanatory, and then something called
evidence article dogs. Yeah, they can find like pieces of
clothing or or evidence in a crime. Yeah, got you,
So go find the bloody hammer, right right exactly? Wow,
(23:39):
that that turned dark all exec. So let's say that
you want to start training your dog. Um, there there's
it's actually training of search and rescue dog follows pretty
established training principles and first of all, it's all positive reinforcement.
We eventually need to do an episode on UM negative
(24:01):
reinforcement or dog obedience because it's just so fully discredited,
but most people think that most people don't realize it.
But you do not need to punish your dog for
not doing something right. You just praise and reward your
dog for doing something for when they do do something right.
That's how you train a dog and that's the basis
(24:21):
of search and rescue training is it's all positive reinforcement
and reward UM. And the whole thing starts out with
just basic obedience. And it's at this point that Momo
would wash out of search and rescue trail, just right
out of the gate. Momo is her own person, and
we treat her as such, like she's our child, so
we don't treat her like a dog. So she has
(24:43):
come to not see herself as a dog. UM. She's
very good dog, very sweet and loyal and takes good
care of us. But she Um, she would just get
distracted and again a little freaked out and sketched out
when the when the distractions came around. Yeah, Nicos stairs
at UM you know, we're living in a in a
rental house right now because we're doing work on our house.
(25:07):
So it's a very weird time for our whole family
to all of a sudden be uprooted in living in
a strange house out in the woods. But Nico just
sits and stairs in the window which overlooks a big
wooded lot, just movement, squirrels, birds or whatever. And the
second you open that door, she's so fast. She's like
(25:27):
a greyhound bolting for anything. And luckily she hasn't caught
anything yet. But um, I'm telling you, man, she'd be
a great star dog. Youlling reason I would not do
this because I want her around, not on location, helping people.
So I guess yeah, if I'm selfish, if it were
squirrel search and rescue, I think Mama would be excellent,
(25:48):
excellent at it. I agree, s S A R. Yeah,
maybe there is a call for that. We just don't
realize it because we don't speak squirrel. So yes, basic
obedience is level one, uh, just regular commands. Temperament is
super important. They have to be good with um strangers,
um other dogs. Obviously a lot of times there are
(26:09):
a bunch of dogs on the scene and they can't
be like I'm gonna go fight that dog or play
with that dog. Uh. They have to be good on walks,
on loose leashes, but be good with crowds, all of
that stuff, I imagine really roots out and training a
bunch of dogs right off the bat. Yes, for sure.
Um so that's just basic obedience and you have to
(26:32):
you have to just knock that off the list out
of the gate. Sure, right, then you move on to
the you you move from you know, good well behaved
obedient dog too. Now we're starting to get into the
training a little bit, and you want to teach your dog,
um something really important that apparently comes up in search
and rescue that you are not the end all be
(26:55):
all in the world to this dog. This dog has
to be able to um to to take instruction from
people other than you, and to also show a tremendous
amount of concentration, self possession, non distraction. And the way
that they test this usually when they're training search and
(27:15):
rescue dogs is they will um take a dog over
to a crowd of other dogs, and there will be
other people milling about and all that, and um, you,
the handler will will ask the dog to to lay
down or stay or sit and the dog and then
you leave, You go away at least out of sight.
I think this article says thirty feet away, and so
(27:36):
the dog can't see you anymore. And then over the
course of ten twenty minutes, other handlers come in and
take over responsibility of tending to this herd of dogs
that are all sitting around. And if your dog will
listen to your command that you gave one time to
stay here or sit or lay down whatever, the whole
time you're gone until you come back and tell them
(27:57):
that they can get up or whatever, then it's apparently
the test for canine professionalism pretty amazing, and I'm sure
there's probably a lot of different tests. There's no standardization
for search and rescue dog training except for the Female
Certification for Urban Search and Rescue Dogs. Um so I'm
sure there's different tests all over the place. But that's
(28:18):
a pretty good glimpse of what you need to expect
from your dog to to surpass the the second level,
the second echelot, and move on to the third one.
The second the second one is tough. I think the
third one is genuinely tough, not not necessarily for you
training the dog. I think the third one is the
tough one on the dog. Yeah, this is just raw
(28:40):
physical and mental ability and agility. So I mean they're
going through like an obstacle course. Basically, you can go
through tunnels. You can climb uh and incline of more
than uh I think a minimum of forty five degrees
on each side, like up and down. You can get
into a a cherry picker like we talked about and
go up really high without jumping out, or be in
(29:04):
that boat or be in that snowmobile or a helicopter
and not get freaked out like you have to. You know,
they don't crank up the helicopter usually, like once you
get in that thing and we've all seen mash you
gotta run up to a helicopter whose blades are spinning,
a lot of people don't want to do that. No, no, so,
but your dog needs to be able to like, come on,
(29:25):
let's go, I'll all the man, all man the machine gun. Yeah,
or hey, get in this harness. I'm gonna attach you
to my chest and we're gonna repel down this mountain
and you just got to be a good boy. They do.
I mean once they reach a certain level of training
they do and then the final is is tracking. Obviously, um, well,
I mean this is this is after they passed those
(29:47):
three levels. But um tracking is urban tracking is level one,
like you talked about that is that's the hardest thing
to do in this test is just off the charts.
To me. What they have a person do is they
will be the target, like the you know, the whatever
they're looking for. So they will do a half mile
(30:07):
to one mile track from one point to another in
high traffic area of a city, Like they'll go to
like downtown New York and walk a half mile to
a mile. This dog is sitting there the whole time,
you know, with someone else. Uh, they have to cross
at least two intersections, make at least three right angle turns,
(30:28):
go down two blocks of alleyways, leaving you know, a
scent article along the way, like they're at least leaving
little nuggets shutting off skin cells, I guess, or maybe
dropping the comb in your back pocket. Uh. Then once
you have laid down that track, another person crosses that
track in at least one place, so they're adding scent
(30:49):
basically trying to throw this dog off. And then thirty
minutes later, after all of this, and after the target
is at the very end, they finally say, all right,
dog go and the dog has to find this target
and no more time than it took for the person
to lay down that track. Right and like you said,
waiting thirty minutes before they start after the person is finished,
(31:11):
that's impressive. That is super impressive. And there's distractions the
whole way to righte Like from from what I gathered,
this is actually done in like an actual city, Like
they don't have like a fake city built somewhere in
Colorado or something like that. Like this is a like
you your real town, this is happening in. So the
more distractions the better, yea. And they hire people who
(31:34):
are wearing like um, drecar no wir and just to
wander around everywhere to confuse the scent and everything. It's
it's a it's a crazy jam for the dog's gross.
So let's um, actually, man, when's the last time you
smelled dre car no are? Oh? I don't know. I
have smelled it within the last year, and I gotta
(31:54):
tell you it holds up, maybe even more than it
I realized before. You know, how I feel about cologne. Um,
So I say we take our second break and then
come back and talk about what we've talked about. At
this point, it's just like basic training. Now we've got
to get into specialty training. Okay, yeah, we'll be right back. Okay,
(32:39):
So Chuck, your dog has been through Star training or
basic basic training for Star, but they haven't actually been
taught the star part yet. It's just they've just shown like, Okay,
I got it, I got what it takes. Let's you know,
put me in there, show me what to do. And
the way that you you train a dog to um
(32:59):
sir and and rescue by by alerting is just basically
taking their natural inclinations and again like focusing them and
amplifying them. And you do that through reward. And the
way that you train a dog through reward I'm having
trouble saying that for some reason, is that you identify
what that dog wants more in the world than anything else,
(33:21):
whether it's a tennis ball, whether it's a nossages, whatever
it is. You figure out what that dog wants, the
thing that they will do anything to get, uh, and
that's what you use as their reward, and then you
can start the star search and rescue training. Yeah, and
the reward is important to to be consistent with that,
(33:42):
with that reward because you can't even uh and they
pointed out even in horrible situations like nine eleven or
if they find like your family member, you know, their
body out on the woods, you need to discreetly take
this dog off to the side and give them the reward.
And even if that means, you know, toss a frisbee, like,
(34:06):
if that's what it is, then that's what you gotta do.
Would should be a really just odd thing to see
somebody playing frisbee with their dog, with the crying family
and a dead body in the woods with bloody hammers
sticking out of their forehead. Discreetly is the key word there.
I don't think you're like leaping over the body or
anything like. You just find a nearby area and then
(34:29):
go kind of discreetly carry out your reward, let's just hope.
So uh yeah. So it takes um about six hundred
and this is generalization, of course, but about six hundred
hours of training, which is a lot of hours for
a dog to be field ready. That's for the dog, yeah, Yeah,
the humans have to go through what like a thousand hours,
(34:50):
that's what That's what this article says. Yeah, so that's
six hours of training between humans and dogs, which is
hilarious because it means that humans require more training than
the dogs to to do the job. And then and like,
I don't know, are humans rewarded? Are they like, here's
your martini, Chuck, You're like I would crawl through an
avalanche to get to a martini. That's my reward. So, um,
(35:15):
you the the whole way you start this again, you're
using their favorite thing in the world as a reward,
and you teach them that they can go find their
rewards somewhere. They normally want to find things, so if
you show them, okay, come find me is a good
way to start. And usually this takes two people. And
(35:36):
this article uses avalanche training as an example, but it
kind of generally applies to anything. Whatever your whatever specialty
you're training you're star dog to engage in. That's what
that's kind of what you would teach them. So if
you're if you're training them under avalanche um guidelines, you
would go dig a hole in some snow and in
(35:56):
perfect perfect line of sight with the dog, you would
go no, no, no, no, and like go run and
jump into the hole in the snow, and you would
have your assistant holding the dog back. And then after
just a second after you make it into the hole,
they let the dog go. The dog runs after you,
and when the dog comes to get you, you just
praise it and love on it and give it its
(36:16):
ball or its snausages or whatever it is. And the
dogs like, okay, if I go find human, I will
get played with, I will get a reward whatever it
is that's really important to me. And now the the kernel,
the seed of search and rescue training has just been
planted in the dog. And dogs are smart, so it
(36:38):
doesn't take much more to kind of fluff it up
into bona fide full search and rescue professionalism. Yeah, it's
kind of funny because dogs are super smart but also
very dumb in that, like it's just a simple reward
situation like find person, get treat. Yeah, and that doesn't
(37:00):
mean dumb, but it's simplistic. I guess okay, good, I'm
glad you said say. It sounds more like dogs have
it figured out rather than being dumb. I've had some
dumb dogs. Well, sure, there's things dumb dogs the best.
There's dumb people too, so dumb shrews, dumb camels, dumb plants,
(37:20):
interesting point, dumb everything. Uh So, in the case of
the avalanche, you jump in the hole and that's great.
First first part accomplished. But then they'll do it again.
But the person handling the dog holds onto them for
say five or ten seconds, then makes them go. Then
they just increase that time up until the point where
it's like five or ten minutes and the person has
(37:43):
buried themselves in the snow. And then the dog like
that's the true test, Like it's been ten minutes. I
saw the person go and disappear, and now and imagine
this isn't very fun for the person to bury themselves
in snow completely, but it's got to be done. And
then the dog finds a person and they get that
snausage or that frisbee play yep. And so each time
(38:05):
they're associating this new thing um, the increasingly complex game
of find the human um with their reward. So they're
learning this this new stuff. Holding the dog back increases
the amount of attention span and memory that's required to
to remember this game, and so over time the dog
learns if I go dig under snow, I can find
(38:28):
a person that I smell there and they'll probably play
with me. Um. Again, depends on how soon the dog
was led off on the scent of the person covered
by the avalanche. But that's what that's the game that
they learned. Yeah, and and they talk a lot about
focus and concentration. But these dogs, I mean, it is
amazing because in a in a lot of these searches,
(38:50):
unless you like you're the first one on the scene,
there are people everywhere. There are sirens, there are bullhorns,
there's equipment making loud noises, there are any distraction you
could think of that would freak a dog out is
on the scene all at once. And they say that
star dogs can get so good that they can not
only ignore all this, but they could they could walk
(39:12):
by a cheeseburger on a trail and just keep following
that scent. Yeah, which is where my dogs would fail.
You want to identify the star dog at a disaster area,
find the dog that's just casually filing its nails. That's
the star dog every time. Yeah, there's no way my
dogs would ignore that. The food thing that would I'm
(39:35):
always got this thing where her eyes get real big
and kind of bug out of her head and she
like uses a paw to kind of like gently like
tap you, like, hey, I'm right here. You want to
share some of that. So, UM, there's a couple other
things we should mention about this. This training, the avalanche
training we just mentioned, you can you can do that
(39:55):
with anything you can do with underwater training. Apparently it
involves the handler in the bow with the dog, but
also a scuba diver hiding underwater. That's the best way
to train dogs on water. Um, you can do it
with um simulated disaster like collapse buildings, that kind of stuff.
So you can take this this idea that you're training
(40:16):
the dog that if they go look for a person,
the person might give them their snausage or their ball,
and that's what they're doing. So even when they're out
there searching for dead bodies in the woods, to the dog,
they're just playing a game. There's a bunch of people around,
there's a lot of sirens and like crying humans, and um,
we're like shovels and back house and all that stuff.
(40:37):
But the dogs just in the midst of all this,
the dog is playing a game of go find it,
which is why that reward is so key even in
the face of tragedy. Yeah. So, um, that that's the
dog training. We have to talk about training you because
in in Soviet Russia, sorry, training trains you. Uh yeah,
(41:00):
I mean you know most of these star handlers. Uh well,
we'll seek out this dog probably from the get go
um at a shelter and kind of start from from
day one as like this is my next star dog. Um.
Like we said earlier, they spent about a thousand hours
of training as a human. Um, this is training the dog.
This is also like you've got to be good in
(41:22):
the woods. You've got to know weather patterns. You've got
to know how to communicate on these radio comms and
know how to work a compass. And most of these
people are a lot of more e m S certified.
But the very least you're brushed up very well in
your CPR. Because if you're a couple of miles away
and you're the person that comes upon the scene, you've
got to administer some some aid right there. One might
(41:43):
call it first aid. Yeah, you would. You gotta look
good in cargo pants, yeah, for sure. Uh, you gotta
have a nice pair of hiking boots. You gotta be
able to wear a boot. This article UM quotes a
search and rescue handler UM who who says, the chief
thing that you have to be able to do is
(42:05):
to know where you are at any given point during
the search. UM. You have to precisely identify your coordinates,
which means you have to know that GPS, the compass,
the map, all that stuff you said, But you also
have to know it while you're following your dog with
a flashlight at night, because apparently at night is the
best time for a dog to search. So you have
to be really, really good at at identifying your coordinates.
(42:28):
And the reason why is because dogs will often UM
give a sign, they'll alert that they found something even
though there doesn't seem to be anything there. But if
your dog does that, you want to note down the
coordinates and you keep searching. And if some other star
dogs come along and they note the same area and
everybody compares notes afterwards, there you're going to go back
(42:49):
to that same area. But that that you need to
know exactly where the area is so you know that
there's something there and how to get back to it.
So you really need to know what you're doing with
with um self coordination is what I'll call it. Yeah,
I would fail even if Nika was great. My my
legendary sense of that poor sense of direction would disqualify me. Yes,
(43:13):
so that's why I don't do this. Didn't you get
trapped in a cave one? Uh? No, I didn't get trapped.
You just didn't feel like leaving. What are you talking about.
I went caving, and I went in and I went out. Okay,
there was no problems. I thought there was a problem. No,
I mean the problems were. It was kind of scary, right,
(43:35):
but I was I was with experienced speed lunkers who
got me all through it. Sure, but yeah, that was
that one pancake part that you've freaked out when I
even told you about it. Yeah, I don't want to
talk about it. So. Uh, if you are a star
team or you have a star dog, um, you are,
like you said, on call at all times, even if
(43:56):
you're on vacation. That's why you travel with your dogs
a lot. Um You're always ready and I imagine it
could ruin a vacation. But if you're sitting around, you know,
pushing papers in an office, you you probably look forward
to that call to get out in the in the
woods and do what you were trained to do with
your with your best pal. Yeah, exactly. So you get
the call out, Uh, you load up all your gear,
(44:19):
you you head out there. Um. It depends on what's
going on. You might be hopping on a helicopter or
a boat again, depending what's going on there. Um. And
this is where the obedience and all those distractions come
into play, and you're you're you know, it's up to
you as the handler to be the alpha. Even though
your dog needs to be good awfu leash and on
loose leash, it's still you're still in charge. And that's
(44:42):
that's a big part of it. So I think we
said that search and um urban search and rescue is
the hardest um kind of search and rescue for a
dog to do, not just because um it's it's difficult,
but because it can be it can really get a
dog down to find nothing but dead bodies. It's also
(45:03):
extremely hazardous. You know that dogs poking around a collapsed building,
that's a precarious place to be looking for survivors. UM.
So if you're an urban search and rescue dog from
what I saw. You don't want a dog that's over
three years old entering this or that's just too old,
So you want a younger dog. You want to start
(45:23):
training them early on. But if you're an urban search
and rescue dog urban disaster search and rescue, UM, you're
probably not going to have an extremely long career in that.
It's just too exhausting and it's too demanding. So you
may as your as you kind of move towards retirement, UM,
get moved to different types of search and rescue that
(45:44):
are a little less demanding. And apparently the last step
before retirement is wilderness search and rescue because to a dog,
it's just a great day out in the woods. That's
it's as good as it comes. Yeah. So after after
four or five years on the scene of collapsed buildings,
you get to run around the national forest and uh
(46:05):
and look for folks yep. And then after you finally
are retired, you get to lay around all day and
chase those squirrels you've been wanting to chase that whole time. Yes,
and unsurprisingly, UM, I would say most all of the
time you were probably sticking with the the trainer as
their good boy or girl. But if that is not
(46:26):
possible for some reason, there are plenty of people that
will line up to adopt this sur dog. Oh yes,
because they are just as as um well trained as
they come. That's right. Uh, you got anything else now? Man?
I love these dog cats. So dogs. Yeah, I'd love
to do something about just breeds and the original dogs
(46:47):
and how they evolved and all that good stuff. Okay,
have we not done how dogs works? I'm sure we have, yeah,
but I don't know if we got into all the Uh.
You know, there's that movie out about the original dog,
the original domesticated dog. Um it's called Alpha, and I
think it's not true, but I think it may be
(47:08):
based on what people believe might have happened, like one
human bonded with one wolf and that kind of started
the whole thing. Are you talking about dances with wolves? Yeah?
That's it. Oh no, no, no, that it was water World.
That's funny you bring that up. I was thinking about
that movie the other day and just how perfect the
(47:30):
casting of Dennis Hopper was, because whoever casted him was like,
this movie's off the rails before we even started shooting. Yeah,
let's get Dennis Opper and Gary Busey in here? What's
Gary Busey in it too? And I don't want to
make fun of Gary Busey. He said you shouldn't real troubles. Well,
way to end this on a downer, will just stop
right here. If you want to know more about star Dogs,
(47:51):
just start looking it up. There's all sorts of training
resources and everything you could hope to find on the internet. Um.
And since I said at it's time for a listener mail, Uh,
this is about Pando. Yes, um, And I have to
say that since we did that episode, I've often listened
(48:12):
to brown noise here at work while I'm trying to
concentrate on my my earbuds. But I have since switched
to Aspen Forest, Oh and and wind. There's a great
like hour and a half recording of In the Field
of a It maybe Pando for all I know, but
it's really really lovely, highly recommended. Cool. So all right
(48:33):
here we go. Hey guys, Uh and Jerry, I hope
you're having a wonderful day. You really enjoyed hearing episode
on Pando. My family has been taking an annual camping
trip to Fish Lake, Utah since the early to mid nineties,
which is only a mile or two down the road
from Pando. It's like, how do you go a mile
from Pando that's that big and just not going to Pando?
All right? You know, maybe they don't know about Pando.
(48:54):
Oh he knows, he said. I've been hearing stories about
it since I was little and have always been astounded
by the magnitude and resilience of an organism like that.
The ungulate fences start right on the side of the road,
and it's like night and day. You're driving along in
a fairly sparse aspen grove and then bam, there's a
wall of tall, dense aspens on one side, surrounded by
(49:15):
a fence. The other side of the road is offence
as well, but there's often cattle roaming, and the tree
population is considerably thinner. I'm an oil painter by trade
and recently did a commission of a nice little spot
in Pando and included a little picture here in the
email of the finished piece. It is wonderfully gorgeous place.
Saddens me to hear how much danger it's in. Thanks
for getting the word out there, guys. Hopefully something could
(49:37):
be done. Hope all is well. That is from Lawson
Barney in Colorado and asked him if people could view
his art, and he said, just go to Lawson Barney
on Instagram. L A W S O N all one
word capital b A r n E y on Instagram
to see some of this stuff. Yes. Uh, Instagram is
a great place to find artists these days. That's what
(49:58):
I hear. Are you're not on I don't know you
know me? You gotta check it out. While you're there.
Check out an artist I love called the Christian Rex
fan minute amazing. And I'm gonna check out laws and
Barney too at the very least because he's got a
pretty awesome name. Uh. If you want to talk about
artists that you love on Instagram, turn us onto some.
(50:20):
You can go to our website Stuff you Should Know
dot com find all of our social links. I also
have a website called the Josh Clark Way dot com
and you can send us an email. Send it off
to stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that
(50:42):
how stuff Works dot com.
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