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Tia is owned, trained and
loved by Maree McCabe, Victoria Australia
~
LIZETTE ~
Certified Visiting Therapy Dog
Pretty In Pink at a Hounds In
Hats Fundraiser
in New Orleans Louisiana
Sire : Canadian Ch &
UKC Hunting Retriever Ch Bibelots Silver Power Play U.D., M.H., W.C.X.
& Canadian C.D. ~
STERLING ~
American Kennel
Club CD CDX UD TDX SAR CT RAE
Certified Cadaver Dog
Dam : Aust Dual Ch Neiger Circus Rose U.D., J.D., E.T., A.D. and
American U.D., N.A., N.A.J.
Sterling,
Lynne Benson-Colbert's Standard Poodle, on 10 April 2002, became the
first Standard Poodle to be certified a Human Remains Detection
Dog by the California Office of Emergency Services.
Benson-Colbert is a volunteer dog handler with a non-profit search
group, California Specialized Search Team, which is a resource of the
Santa Clara County Medical Examiner's Office. On 3 June 2002, Lynne wrote: "I
became interested in search dogs four or five years ago. At the time I
only had my female Poodle, Luna. We were doing some tracking and I
became fascinated with watching that special magic of a dog using her
nose to follow invisible trails. She was so good at it, and it really
built up her confidence to be doing something where she was calling the
shots and I was following behind. "I
didn't meet up with a team until I got Sterling a year later. I didn't
pick Sterling as a search dog. I was looking for a dog who could be a
top Obedience competition partner, and maybe do some tracking on the
side. One thing led to another and I ended up using Sterling as my
working dog. "I
used to wonder what the breed-ring folks meant when they described a
show dog as having an attitude that 'demanded the blue ribbon.' Most of
the dogs looked the same to me. Well, Sterling demanded to be the
working dog. He had a confident attitude and desire to please and to
just do more than the next dog. He made this clear to me the day he
charged into a room where I was working another search dog candidate
and in a matter of seconds had found the scent items I'd hidden in the
room which the other dog hadn't found in over 10 minutes of searching.
We joined a team called Canine Specialized Search Team and began our
long road to certification as a cadaver dog specialist. "We
train with a group of about 15 other handlers, five days a week. Dogs
are first taught what the clicker means (click = treat). We imprint the
dogs on the cadaver by placing a variety of scent sources in containers
out in the open in an enclosed room with no distractions. We allow the
dog to simply wander the room. When they investigate a container they
get a click and a treat. It takes only a few repetitions before the dog
understands that good things happen when s/he finds the source of those
odors. We gradually make the problems more difficult by hiding the
scent items, placing them up high, burying them, and varying the size
and age of the scent items. We also introduce negative items; that is,
items which we don't want the dog to bother showing us. That would be
things like animal remains, clean clothing, and clean containers
similar to the ones we use to store our scent samples. The
dogs learn how to methodically search rooms and vehicles. They also do
a great deal of wilderness work as well as learning how to search in
the event of a mass casuality incident such as a plane crash, where
there are mulitple tiny fragments. Sterling is able to find a single
tooth in a garage, strands of hair in a garden or dried blood smears
and droplets, even if the surface they are on has been painted over or
washed with bleach. We also take great care to teach the dogs not to
mouth or dig up items. It is not in a dog's nature to leave remains,
any remains, untouched. They naturally want to taste and uncover
remains. Our dogs are taught to not disturb what could very well be a
crime scene. "When
Sterling finds something, he returns to me and swats me on the knee
with his paw. That is called his alert. When I ask him to show me what
he's found he returns to the item and points at it with his nose or
touches it gently with his paw. Other team dogs perform a down or sit
at the item as their alert. One dog has an unmistakable alert: she
flies through the air like superdog and cannonballs into her owner's
thighs or stomach! Since Standard Poodles are retrievers, their ability
to remember where items are is phenomenal. We have several Border
Collies on the team and they aren't very good at marking, or memorizing
where an item is located once they can no longer see it. They are
better suited for a sit at the item alert. "Sterling
had to learn many other things besides searching. He also had to become
proficient at agility. We call it 'junkyard agility' because that is
where we get the items we train on. It isn't competition-style agility,
with a lot of jumping and speed. The dogs are taught how to safely
negotiate obstacles you might find while searching a trailer destroyed
in a tornado, for instance. They have to learn how to walk on slippery
surfaces, wobbly items and how to crawl through tunnels and up and down
ladders. "Obedience
is mandatory. The dogs normally search off leash and you must have a
good recall and a good 'leave it!' Sometimes we are called to search
the homes of people suspected of criminal activity and if they know we
are coming it is not unheard of for them to plant rat-poison-laced
meatballs in closets and places where the dogs could get to them. We
teach the dogs to leave food where they find it. The dogs must also be
able to work around a lot of other dogs, strangers and loud machinery.
A good search dog must be able to handle other dogs and people 'in
their space' while they are working. "Certification
tests vary depending on the state you are in and the agency you are
affiliated with. Here in California, the Office of Emergency Services
has a standard Cadaver Dog test. The test takes place in one acre of
land, with one to two scent sources placed somewhere in that acre. One
is buried at a depth of 15 inches and the other is somewhere above
ground, no higher than 3 feet off the ground. You have an hour to
search and the handler does not know where the items are. I realized
when we took our test that an acre of land looks tiny when you are
thinking of buying it as property, and it is huge when you have to
cover it in an hour to pass a test! In spite of my fears we did pass
and now we are an official team. "However,
nothing has really changed. We still train five days a week. We are
still learning a ton. We are now starting our water cadaver search
training. By the way, Sterling is also an obedience competition dog. He
has his CDX and we will be hitting the trials in Utility A sometime in
the fall of 2002." "Sterling
was bred by Linda Johnson of Australia. His registered name is G'Day
Walkabout In Silver, CDX, CGC, TT, Certified Cadaver Dog. His dam is
Australian Dual Champion Neiger Circus Rose ('Rosie'), Aust. UD ET, Am.
UD NA NAJ His sire is UKC HR Ch. & Can. Ch. Bibelot's Silver Power
Play ('Pie') UD Can. CD WCX MH. Sterling is four years old now. His
favorite things are females of all species, sleeping on the bed, pizza
and stealing the foam off the top of my cafe mochas." -- Lynne
Benson-Colbert, June 2002
"On
April 10, 2002, my dog Sterling made a bit of Poodle history by
becoming the first Standard Poodle to become certified as a Human
Remains Detection Dog. We started our training 11 months ago and it all
culminated in a test that took less than an hour to complete.