Special Forces
blue team's dog sits to indicate it has located explosives during a training
drill at Vohne Liche Kennels. (View larger version)
Photograph by
Schweet Entertainment / Tim Kasiewicz
By Jodi Kendall
Published Feb. 12, 2013
Dogs are trained
for specific in-the-field jobs including sniffing out bombs, recovering
cadavers, protecting police and military, enforcing anti-terrorism initiatives,
locating missing persons, detecting forensic evidence and discovering hidden
narcotics.anti
While these alpha
dogs are often a Working Group breed, not every German Shepherd is a solid
candidate. They must demonstrate the right drive, disposition, social skills,
and nerve strength to handle the challenges that may come their way. Working
dogs rise to the task, despite noise and fatigue. These brave animals are known
to ignore personal injury – like cuts, scrapes and open wounds – in the line of
duty. They not only persist through extreme temperatures but, with restricted
scent, can successfully identify the odor of a cadaver.
According to Ann
Christensen, National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR) Canine
Committee Chair, working dogs will persist despite rain, wind, lava rock, hot
pavement, crowded cities and unstable buildings in order to complete the task
at hand.
Canine Training
NASAR uses a lot
of the same training methods that law enforcement might employ when teaching a
dog to detect narcotics or explosives. "First, the dog is taught to
recognize the target odor," Christensen says. "Then it is taught a
final response or indication so the dog can tell the handler when it's been
located. Training works on teaching the dog to search in various environments
and around multiple distractions without losing focus." While many civilians
train dogs with food rewards, Christensen prefers to reward with a toy, game of
tug, or retrieve when they find what they are trained to locate. "Civilian
handlers normally plan on about 500 hours of trained to get a dog trained,
certified and ready for deployment," she explains. "But experienced
trainers can do it in less time." Search and rescue dog teams are
dispatched across the globe, with multiple teams throughout the United States
and Canada.
Vohne Liche
Kennels, a full service K-9 training facility founded by United States Air
Force Senior Master Sergeant Kenneth Licklider two decades ago, has trained
police and military service dogs for more than 5,000 law enforcement and
government agencies. They train their dogs on a 600-plus acre property in Indiana,
complete with an obstacle course and workout gym. Off-site training sessions
include field trips to hotels, schools, impound lots and jails.
"Obedience is
on and off lead to heal, sit, stay, come and down," says Licklider, of VLK
training methods. Handlers maintain full control of the dog at all times, and
use positive motivation techniques (like a toy) as an associate reward. They
designed agility training to increase the animal's confidence in a myriad of
environments, and apprehension is based on five phases of control.
"Tracking [training] is based on following a combination of human skin
cells and disturbed vegetation," Licklider explains. "We begin by
tracking footsteps, but gradually encourage the dog to trail the suspect lifting
their head, utilizing both ground and airborne scent. All substance detection
is imprinted the same way with the dogs learning to locate a particular scent
then respond passively. Building and Area searches teach the dogs to locate a
suspect using airborne scent in a confined area whether it be inside a building
or within a cordoned off perimeter."
Dogs in the Field
Kathy Holbert of
West Virginia took her personal dog, Strega, as a civilian contractor to Iraq
and Afghanistan from 2009-2010. Strega was one of the few human remains
detection dogs, tasked with trying to recover missing United States military
and civilians. Led by the promise of 'no one left behind,' Holbert and Strega
entered into difficult and dangerous situations.
"The most
memorable mission was a water search in the Morghab River, near the
Turkmenistan border in Afghanistan, where two paratroopers had drowned trying
to recover a miss[ed] drop of supplies," Holbert shared. "The
recovery efforts were in a highly volatile area, where several other deaths had
occurred trying to make recovery. One victim was recovered by a well-trained
team of British divers before Strega arrived, quite a bit away from the entry
point. The army command wanted to expand the search area based on that
recovery, which would have exposed our troops to more danger." But Strega
alerted on a hydraulic boil, and her consistent and confident alerts ultimately
changed the search direction, and the diving team recovered the victims within
days. Had they extended the search area as originally planned, the searchers
would have been exposed to greater dangers – Strega's training and mission
experience were a life-saving asset to the search and rescue team. "It is
rare that a dog trained to find the dead ends up saving the living, but I feel
that is exactly what we did there," says Holbert.
One Vohne
Liche-trained canine located a missing three-year-old child in a cornfield
during the freezing winter after all the other searchers had given up, and
ultimately saved the child's life, while another one alerted military to the
presence of explosives just prior to an assault team going through a door,
saving the entire squad.
In a new series on
the Nat Geo WILD, Alpha Dogs, camera crews follow Ken Licklider and his
handlers as they work tirelessly to train dogs for police and military
personnel across the globe.
