00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: Listening past, you can't predict. 00:00:19 Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's f I R S T L I t E dot com. Join today by Doug Roller, who was the chief trainer for l A p D Los Angeles Police Departments K nine Unit. 00:00:53 Speaker 2: Doug's been his career working with. 00:00:57 Speaker 1: This is a big important point, apprehension dogs meaning dogs that catch people. So in the dog world you got detection dogs, guns, drugs whatever. You got tracking dogs which could be used as like rescue dogs to track people lost out in the woods. But his career is in using dogs to appre hend folks. He was a handler for seven years, then spent seventeen years as the head trainer working with apprehension dogs. I met Doug a couple months ago. YEP I was at I was with a friend of mine, Shane Yeats has been on the show before. I was hanging out in a setting very similar to this on a couple of couches in a living room, and Doug was kind of blowing my mind with this whole world of dog use in dog training that I was unfamiliar with. So we're gonna kind of recreate that conversation about just an intricate, very detailed, in depth use of dogs. It kind of that kind of blows your mind before we get into the police work, which is fascinating, man, in the and the dot and the training and all that. 00:02:07 Speaker 2: I want to talk about your background a little bit. 00:02:10 Speaker 1: I didn't we didn't talk about this when I met you, right, but but Krinn was telling me that that you got one of your initial introductions dog to work in with. Sorry that one of your introductions not even to dogs. What am I saying? You were in the falconry. 00:02:28 Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. 00:02:29 Speaker 2: Train, I guess in training or whatever. Yeah. 00:02:31 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's come up before when I've talked to people, like, you know, they'll say, like, you know what drew you? I don't know. You know, you're raised and uh, I was raised in a family that was very loved animals and the outdoors and all that. There's a lot of camping, and I don't even know how it happened, but I I guess I had parents also that you know, did the right thing and allowed me to go directions that they saw, but that maybe was not instinctual, but I gravitated toward that. And I remember getting my first falcon. It was a little tiny falconet that I bought at the pet shop. They bought for me. It's a little from India's smallest falcon in the world, and I had it. It was like a pet, and it ended up dying on me because I didn't take care of it properly. But then I started reading. I got into all the books, and I was very young at the time. And then I got into birds of prey and trapping them and catching them and got my falcon's license in California. Oh, and I was a very young age. I was probably about thirteen. I couldn't even drive yet. But because I got so much into it, I was on the verge of getting my master falcon's license at a really young age. And then the fishing game got a hold of me. I don't know how that occurred. I think he just came over to approve my meuse and my equipment, and he said, hey, we need to rehab rehab birds once in a while that were injured or mistreated whatever, birds of prey. Would you be interested And of course I'm my kid, Oh yeah, that'd be great. So they started bringing me birds to rehab, you know, like Cooper redtails, you know, sometimes a prairie falcon in that area, so that that actually fuel that. But then I got very much intoto. I joined the Falconer's Club and I got really into falconry. And then some of my buddies in high school we all got into it. And I got guys right now that I kind of lost touch with, but they're really into it. I mean, I left it because I my life went to another direction, you know, I got to police work, got under the dog thing. 00:04:26 Speaker 1: But you were you were tuned up on trained up and kind of like mentally trained up on working with animal and I. 00:04:31 Speaker 3: And not only that, it was like being able to utilize an animal in the in the natural environment and hunt prey. There's something really neat about that, Like there's certain there are certain birds you you go hunting with. You hunt from the fist, you know, you you like a gossawk, you're gonna you're gonna look for jack rabbits or bunnies or whatever, and you got to have the dog approperly trained. They came out of the bird approperly trained for that. But then you also have the fat falcons, which are taught to hunt from the stoop, so you actually teach them to wait on you. There's involved like bird dogs. Bird dogs will flush the game. Your prayer grene or your prairie falcon will come up and stoop down and take them out. Got it. And then these guys put transmitters on their birds and everything else. Because some of these stoops can last go for miles. You want to lose your bird, so you got to track them down there he is with the duck or the grouse or whatever, you know, a mile away. So it's pretty neat stuff though when you really get into it, At least for me, it. 00:05:34 Speaker 2: Was what made you. What was your decision process and becoming a cop. 00:05:39 Speaker 3: That's kind of that's interesting too, because I had no I had no thought about being a police officer. I was selling real estate. I was nineteen. I was making a ton of money. I was doing buying and selling foreclosure houses, fixing them up, probably on my way to making a lot of money. You know, I had like mental properties and all this other stuff. When I was nineteen twenty years old, I had some investors I was working with. So one day this buddy of mine says, hey, once't come in a ride along with lapd And I even lost track of this guy. But it was somebody I knew at the time. So he worked southeast, which is a you know, the Watts area, very busy, very violent, and of course I rode with a sergeant and I got hooked. I go, this is neat, this is like I mean, for me, it just was really you know, it was an adrenaline rush, dangerous. I'm seeing a world that I never was exposed to. I mean, I'm upper middle class, you know, white boy growing up in southern California. Here I am in a really bad area. But I liked it so for the heck of it. And you bring up so many memories. God, I was married with my first wife and she just didn't like that, but I went ahead through it. She did not think she was gonna be married to a cop, but I went in. 00:07:01 Speaker 2: I put in like this caught her by surprise. 00:07:03 Speaker 3: Yeah, she just wasn't like we are not going there type thing. Anyway, that's another story. But I put in for the application in September and shockingly I was accepted and I was already getting ready to go into a class in December, which is pretty fast. And yeah, the rest is history. 00:07:21 Speaker 2: So and you got right into dog work. 00:07:24 Speaker 3: No, I didn't. LAPD is a big department at the time, was about sixty five hundred cops. Now it's about ten thousand. But now they're you're losing guys left and right for all the nonsense going on. So they get into a canine unit with LA. Canine wasn't There's a division in LA called Metro. Metro has SWAT mounted unit, a bing C platoon and then canine. But when I got on, young Canine was off doing their own thing. They weren't in a specialized unit. So back in the old canine there was when it started, like in the late seventies by two guys, Sergeant Mooringen and a guy named darniell Nell. It blew up. I mean a lot of departments in the in the country had canines, but LA didn't. And these guys were like the fathers of our canine unit, and they went out and research, did a lot of work, got the unit going, and they were housed out of West La Division and they wanted to be part of air support. They did not want to go to Metro. There was a lot of ego stuff going on. But as the unit grew with to like four or five handlers, these guys are getting into shootings like a lot more than SIS, more than some of the other specialized units. Because they're hunting down armed suspects all the time, and there was a lot of violence back then. 00:08:48 Speaker 1: The canine handlers are finding themselves in more shooting incidents. 00:08:52 Speaker 3: Probably they were getting more shootings back then than any unit in the in the department, got it the department chief cases, you know, what's going on here? You know, we we need to put this this unit into Metro. And you know, there was always the perception like what are they doing here? Where? Why are all these shootings occurring? Even back then, you know, are these guys a bunch of cowboys whatever? But I don't think it was that. I think it was more like, you know, back in the late eighties, it was a really violent time. It was like you know, the stats people talk about crime and where it is now. But back then, I mean, just as an example, there was about one of some of the years there was a twenty two to twenty three hundred homicides in La lapd alone, and now for the whole city, and now you're lucky to break one hundred hundred and thirty. So look at the exponentially. 00:09:49 Speaker 1: That's the thing about like crime statistics get manipulated so long. Yeah, like people have this perception that this perception that nowadays crime is so bad, but when you look at like crime trends, it's really not. 00:10:06 Speaker 3: It's not. They have even cops that I've worked with that are new, they can't even believe the numbers. I'll throw out the amount of searches that I did for example. You know in canine, it just you don't hear about those numbers. That's why our dogs were so for a training word, seasoned. They were so good at what they did because they had so much action in those days. But back to that, so when I put in for the unit for Canine, I put in for Metro too, because at the time they were in that crossroads, like they're going to bring you to Metro first and then you get selected to canine. Well, back then, I was the last group of guys that came in straight from patrol. I was working Rampart, very busy division, and then I went straight to canine. And then things evolved after that where you had to go to Metro, do about a year in Metro and then be able to put in for canine or SWAT. And now they're called high risk positions. 00:11:03 Speaker 2: Where you actually get Canine is a high risk position. 00:11:05 Speaker 3: Just like SWAT, you get more money, you get hazard pay, you get a take home car because you know it's deserved, I guess. But that's that history of that, so you know I did. It was a process. I got in and I got in pretty young. I got in less than five years on the job, which is pretty young for that kind of a U. L A. Yeah. I mean guys in other departments they might get in after a year or two, but in LA it's it's a lot more competitive, the expectations are a lot higher. All that stuff good, bad are indifferent. 00:11:37 Speaker 1: Let's jump to some definitions here. Explain to folks what an apprehension dog is in that like juxtaposed to a detection dog, a tracking dog like. Explain that specific term. 00:12:01 Speaker 3: Well in where I you know, my shot are claim to fame in LAPD canine. Now, within lap D, there are several canine units that are separate from metro canine. So you've have metro canine, which is the apprehension dog. The dogs that actually are are taught to search, find suspects and if needed, they'll bite them. LAPD still has a policy of finding bark, which not a big fan of and you know, I hate to say that, but I'm just not a big fan of it. As things have evolved and we can get into that later. 00:12:35 Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, we got to come back to bite and bark. Yeah, that's a big deal because people an't going to know what that means. 00:12:41 Speaker 3: They won't. They won't and then it needs to be explained. But that being said, that's metro and we have done some tracking in the past. We put a lot of time and effort into it. I did a lot of experiment with the tracking dogs. It's very time consuming and it works. But the problem is we just don't have the environment for that. You know, most of our searches, the vast majority, are going to be containments like a perimeter search. You know, we lock down a block, two blocks, three blocks, or a building or a warehouse, and then we systematically clear it numerous dogs sometimes oh really yeah. And then then you have the detection dogs, and for most apartments, that's for most apartments because of money and economics, they'll have what's called dual purpose dogs. That means these dogs also are apprehension dogs, but they'll also find narcotics or firearms or bombs. And you know, you can't do more more than one odor with one dog. And we can talk about that a little bit, like I can't have a dog that's trained to find narcotics, find bombs. Really no, it can't be done, shouldn't be done, because it's just not there's legalities of it. You know, what's my dog really hitting on? That's why. 00:13:53 Speaker 1: So when you see it, if you're in the airport and it just happens to me, there's a dog day, there's a guy in the airport. That dog isn't looking for everything. That dog's looking for a thing. 00:14:05 Speaker 3: Yes, And there's that's another whole discussion. They have what's called vapor wake dogs now where the dogs are taught to just scan by people as they're walking and they'll alert on them for maybe narcotics or maybe bombs, depending what he's trained for. But you're never going to know. And you know, it's it's funny because back in the nineties early nineties, before vapor wake was ever termed, we were already experimenting with that with what with dogs that were taught to go ahead and detect odor by following somebody like an action instead of just pinpointing odor at a specific location. They were taught to find and follow. So a guy would be in the crowd walk and I'll say, dog would alert show a body a change of behavior and start following that person, and then you could have time to go ahead and do what you're going to do. 00:14:56 Speaker 1: Man, Okay, we got a lot of balls in your because I knowing I want to talk about yeah, because when we talk before, you talking about the difference between a dog whose noses on the ground and a dog whose noses in the air but APPREHENDI so back to it's all stuff I want to talk about. 00:15:10 Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I said, you got to keep guiding me here, so because there's so much that No. 00:15:14 Speaker 1: This is it's it's I want to talk about this stuff. Like I first want to just clarify. 00:15:17 Speaker 2: Like what you mean by apprehension, how it's different than a track. 00:15:20 Speaker 3: And right in my world now a tracking dog is an apprehension dog too. But basically, these dogs are trained to find and locate, whether it's tracking or air sending, to go ahead and find somebody and bite them if necessary or not bite them, depending on the circumstances. And we can talk about that. You know, a lot everybody's got different methods. I train a certain methods that's a little bit unique, not as unique as it used to be, because a lot of the a lot of I think teams are catching onto the when we search an l A p D. And a lot of units that I work with now with my business, I teach what's called off lead searching and we utilize this tool, this electric caller here and some of your audience, I'm sure it's familiar with it. 00:16:11 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, all my bodies to have the trained dogs and. 00:16:13 Speaker 3: The gob fifty or whatever they use, and that's what we use primarily, that's what I like. But our dogs are taught to primarily air scent and find the suspect, you know, pinpoint the odor, change of behavior, bark at the odor, let us know, the guys inside that cupboard or that shit or whatever. That's primarily what we do because of our environment. There's some guys like out here in Montana, they do a lot of tracking. They do both, and they'll actually hit a track and you know, they might be in the track for a half mile or a mile and find a guy in some bushes in a creekside, or maybe attracts to a building and then they turn into the But they do apprehend too, so at the end of the track they have a chance to maybe take the guy into custody with no force. Maybe he takes so runs they send him on them, they take them down, yep, just give them. 00:17:03 Speaker 1: So there's like a there's like a fundamental difference between I'm gonna give you two scenarios. One is a scenario you're in an agricultural rural, agricultural area, right, and you know that a guy has gotten out of the car, like yesterday, got out of a car and ran off through the woods. 00:17:19 Speaker 2: Right that scenario one, no one knows where he is now. 00:17:23 Speaker 1: Scenario two is he comes into this building right Like these are different yep, these are different dogs. 00:17:32 Speaker 3: Well, they'll do both, Okay, it's not a big deal. A dog can be taught the track with different commands, even like one command might be you have them on leash, you find out where the guy was last seen some guys, some guys might even do discrimination where they show up a part, you know, a jacket or something the guy might have left. That's another thing we can get into. But generally speaking, they'll pick up a track and nose on the ground and they'll go footstep the footstep, but they'll assill do what it's called trail because they're air scenting at the same time. But they're taught to be get their nose on the ground. And these dogs are specifically trained, like, for example, if you're going to have a tracking dog, his nose needs to be trained on the ground immediately. In other words, if you take that dog and start teaching him how to aircent it's going to be very difficult to get his nose on the ground. So that's got to be trained first because the dog is going to go well, you know, if I want to go to eight eight to a f I want to skip everything which is aircenting. But with tracking, it's more diligent, and the dog's got to learn to put his nose on the ground and follow footsteps, crush vegetation, skin rafter are falling, you know, like in a curb or you know. It's amazing how a dog will pick up on this stuff. But he's got to be exposed to all these different environments to be a good tracking dog, and it's got to be followed up on. But like I said, if you try to take one of our apprehension dogs that are trained to aircent, they've been doing it for three or four years, it's gonna be very hard to get them to track, got it, because they're not gonna want to do it. Very difficult. So that's that's a little bit of training thing on that. 00:19:10 Speaker 2: There's a thing you explained to me. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: With with with the dogs you work with, the apprehension dogs is what was the term you used where it's kind of almost seems like something from from maybe more popular in movies and TV shows and reality is like you show them like a hat, like the guy's hat, right, and the dogs like, got it, I'll go find them, right. But you were explaining to me that that the apprehension dogs you guys train with, they're smelling something very different. 00:19:41 Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked about that. I remember, Yeah, Yeah, there's a thing. It's and it's it's true. It's a fact. It's been studied. There's a thing that when you're in fight or flight, you put off a certain odor. It's enhanced sent Some people call it fear scent. A dog that has had a police thought, that has had numerous apprehensions will be seasoned on that odor. And it's not race specific. It's something that the body goes through, you know, nor adrenaline, epinephrine. All these changes happened in the body when you're a fighter flight, you know. I think I was reminds me. I was watching the show once on boar hunting, and these board hunters are out there and they were talking about what they go through during a boar. In fact, I knew a guy, one of the guys in the unit, Joe Vita, used to go boar hunting in Catalina and nunt these things down on the caves. And you know, back in the day, Kally and I and he would carry nothing more into three thirty seven with a little scope on it and go in the caves and hunt them out. And I guess you can imagine the adrenaline and the fear at the same time that not only is going on in your own body, but also is going on in the body of the boar because when he's corners, he's in fighter flight too. So that's kind of what a suspect does when he's in fire or flight running from the police. He puts out that odor, and trust me, he does. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: Yah. 00:21:07 Speaker 1: You mentioned to me that this you're like, you're dealing with people who this maybe is the most excited and scared they've ever been in there or not. 00:21:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean we talked about it. I mean I found guys after and some of them weren't even bit. They were just scared, excuse the language, shitless and they they end up defecating on themselves because they're so scared, especially if they're bit by the dog. And some guys aren't. Some guys are very aggressive. They're yoked up there. They're they're seasoned criminals, they're prisoners, you know, prisoners and all that, and they take it. They take anything like a chap. But this is what you want to do with the seasoned dog over a period of time. When you're training a new dog, you obviously can't they've tried to. They can't bottle fearcent. There's companies that have tried to, and I've tested them and experimented with them, and I'm not seeing it. So the best you can do this is old school stuff. Just kind of funny. But I remember when I was a brand new handler and I'm in the unit and there was a guy named John Hall had his little dog named Liberty rod Wiler. We don't use rots anymore, but it was his own dog you've bred, and the dog was still in training and they're messing with me, and you know, I'm a new guy, and they said, Okay, we want you to hide over here, and I want you to put this face mask on because he's going to go for your face. He's not going to go for my face, but he wanted to put that fear in me so that when I'm hiding and we're doing a training scenario, the dog will supposedly maybe hit on me at being a little scared. Ye, And it did get to me. I'm thinking, shit, I'm a brand new handler. I knew a little bit about dog, did some dog stuff before I got in the unit. I'm like this dogs a face bier, really, and you're hiding. So just that kind of thing, it wasn't going to happen, but he was trying to recreate that. But you can't, You really can't. You you can only do it by funding real bad guys. 00:23:03 Speaker 1: Really, so if one of one of these apprehension dogs it's experienced, if I took like so, it sounds it's an outlandish scenario. But let's say you had someone that just was in a high speed chase, crashes a car, gets out of the car, runs, But all of a sudden, you could nab that person and put them in a lineup of one hundred people, and the dog walks past one hundred people. The dog is gonna go this dude, he might has the odor. I'm interested he might. 00:23:33 Speaker 3: But you know, lineups are very strange. When you're doing that. You know, you've got to have so much corroborating evidence usually you know, it's like, uh, yeah, we have. You have to be careful on that. Relying on a dog for core purposes, just to discriminate on somebody gets you in a bad place, got it. Not Not not to get too much into the ways, but there was a program the sheriffs were using for a while and I'll keep the guy nameless. But he was running a bloodhound and he was claiming to do all this stuff. Dog can you know, pick up on the drop of blood a week old, he can hit that track, he can find that guy three miles away going through the streets of LA and all this other stuff. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute, that's you're you know, you're you're making up stories. I didn't believe it, and I did some training, not with him, but some observations that the department wanted. The department wanted me to look into it. Robert Homicide wanted to look into it. And I mean, I'll just say it had proved out that I couldn't do it. But what what sealed it was he put a guy in jail based on what he said. The dog had found this guy with some kind of rape shooting suspect, a male. The Hispanic guy did was already in jail. DNA comes out proves that he's innocent. I did like five years, got a big lawsuit out of it, and that hurt that program big time because they based. 00:24:59 Speaker 1: Everything I was like using the dogs, just the dog sense receptions. 00:25:04 Speaker 3: Without any cooperating evidence. The dog nailed them and it caused them a lot of problem. 00:25:08 Speaker 1: God, Well, let me ask the same Let me ask the question in a different way. Picture that you have that same scenario. The guy is in a high speed car chase bam, crashes his car, gets off his car, runs all around, enters the house. The house is full of other people. Okay, there's a whole apartment building. Okay, whatever, it's full of other people. You guys are all there, the cops are there. 00:25:34 Speaker 2: What does the dog? 00:25:36 Speaker 1: Why doesn't the dog just run up to the first person in the house and be like, here he is, I got them. 00:25:41 Speaker 3: Well, what would we do on that? Because we've had that many of those where we call and he runs into a friendly yep, or sometimes he just runs into a pilgrim's house like a non suspect, totally innocent citizen YEP. I can talk all day about some of the crazy stuff we've had. You know, we've had guys run into a house, we know he's in there, we banging the door like sometimes gone by and we says, hey, is everything okay here? And then it's like a movie. Right, the lady looks at you and goes, everything's fine, Everything's fine, and I'm like, oh. 00:26:12 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, people listening, you're not. She's doing like. 00:26:16 Speaker 3: Right behind the corn with a gun on her, and she was trying to say we're good because he's going to kill her. He was the guys, this guy's wanted for murder, so he's got nothing to lose. And we ended up catching him, but we basically picked up on her eye movements like Okay, she's scared shitless right now the guy's right there, and we ended up we ended up trying to nail the house down, and this guy bails out of a window, crawls up into a crawl space, he hides, and we have to gas him out, and huh yeah, we have to actually we have to actually have to have to use hot gas because what he did was he was ready for the gas. He put a bunch of clothing on his face. He was taking it like a champ. And hot gas is really hard to defeat. It's like nasty. You gotta be careful because you'll could burn down a house. What the squat guys finally did was they kept punching it in different parts of the ceiling, and he had corralled himself into an area where he wasn't getting hit, and then finally they put the hot gas right where he was hiding and then he screamed out, I'm coming out. So that's just another story. But yeah, you got to be careful about discriminating like that and usually want to be safe and have coroberating evidence and all that to you're gonna put someone in jail, take his freedomway, you got to be right, no. 00:27:32 Speaker 1: But I mean what I'm trying to get at is how does the dog know that he's found the one he's supposed to find. 00:27:37 Speaker 3: Well, that's a good point. I mean, after you have when you put a dog in training, obviously he's just finding decoys. And that's a really good question that leads into a lot of good training. Right when you're exposing a new dog. First you get your police dog that has all the right trades, You test them, you purchase them, you put them through the basic obedience, and then these dogs have the aptitude to do what we're going to do. And we could talk all day on that. But once that dog, before he hits the straight, he needs to work in what's called the search team environment. So you might with us, we have a point guard who's married up to the handler, and we have a rear guard two or three people behind us, and those folks play a really important part in the search. That's your backup. The point guard usually carries you know, either a tube or a banelle or an ar and he's married up right to the shoulder of the handler. So the dog has to get used to all this. He's got to get used to the team. And some dogs aren't. You get them new. Some of these dogs are. They're edgy. They're ready to just you know, bite anything and everything, and you've got to socialize them and make them right. Not all, but you've got to train them appropriately so they're safe to search with. So you have to teach him how to work within that search team sell environment, and you do that outside the search. You might just do a lot of ball work and playing in obedience with the team around you. I understand the dog understands in low drive when he's calm and cool, these are the guys I'm working with. You don't want to introduce that environment when the dog's at this level. It's like trying to teach a human how to do things when he's in a gunfight. The gunfight teaching starts way before the gunfight, right, you have to teach him how to shooting platform, how to operate the gun, calm and cool and collected, slow fire, single fire, all that stuff. Same thing with the dog. Most of the learning is going to be done in a low drive environment, so the dog can learn, and then you start escalating and you bring in a myriad of other things so the dog can chain all those different environments and situations and be able to perform at a high at a high drive level. 00:29:50 Speaker 2: Still listen, and these dogs are tied to a person. 00:29:54 Speaker 3: Yes, for us, And for the most part, I did a lot of military training, not as much as I used to. I had a big contract with the Marines for a while doing all their putting all their dogs on the e coller. And you know, God bless them the way that not the specialize units, not the SF guys or the Delta guys, because those guys are married to a dog for maybe the life of the dog seven eight years maybe. But you're basic military guy. He might just be working that dog for one or two years and then dog's going to go to somebody else and the dog is kenneled at home in their kennel. I mean in the the the camp kennel, so they go home every night, they come to the kennel and pick up their dog. Which really isn't that that good of a thing because the bonding you lack in the bonding you know, with a police dog and agencies. They take that dog home and that dog is their dog. The dog learns that that's the guy that's his master. The dog stays with him all the time, stays at home and his kennel, all that stuff, so that the bonni is a little bit better that way, and I think that the handler gets to know that dog intimately. You know, sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing because what we always battled we talked about earlier, even with a police officerho's trained and canine, is they end up treating that dog like a pet, and you can't do that, and we have more problems with that, you know, And I'm speaking of the choir. People are probably gonna listen to this podcast go yeah, yeah, that's true. You know, you can tell a guy over and over again, he's a police dog, he's a tool. You can love him, you can cry if he gets killed, but you've got to treat him like a dog, and that's not a bad thing. It's just they're not a human. You know, dogs live for the they live for primarily food, sex, love, and you know, satisfying drive, and you have to look at him in that respect. And if you don't, you got to establish that hierarchy. I guess we talked about early. And if you don't do that, you have a problem. Especially with these dogs. You know, they're they're up there. You know, you want to get a dog that's got that high drive and has all those traits for police work. But if they're not handled appropriately, you can turn that dog into a nasty dog, you know. And it's not the dog's fault, it's way he's been handled. I mean, coming up on the leash, body in the handler, body, search team members. These are all the things that happen in dog training and it's usually a human problem, you know. Usually it is some dogs, you know, come out of a letter. They're just two alpha They grow up very dominant, and they're not the kind of dog you want. You know, like when you're selecting a dog, especially as a pup, you're looking for the dog. If you're looking at a litter, you don't want that alpha dog. You maybe want the number two or three dog in the hierarchy because he's going to be a bit easier to manage. Yeah, you know, you don't want the you know, number eight dog that's got no drive whatsoever and you know, hides the corner and all that. But you do that dog has got that that drive and that alpha mentality. But you know, you'll get some dogs in the litter that they're kicking all the other dog's asses all the time. They're like they're just relentless. They don't get along with any Mama is always correcting that dog to leave the other dogs alone. Probably if you're looking at a Malanwa or a shepherd, probably not the great the best dog for police work really well, because you're going to see that same thing happen. Are going to try to dominate you, got it. And some of these things, like I said there, they happen over time, Like you talked about your pit bull thing. Some police, some kanine officers don't handle the dog appropriately, and next thing you know, I've seen guy dogs come out of training and he was a great dog, great team. A year later, I get a call from somebody, Hey, so and so this dog just ate him up. I go what happened? I don't know, But then I get out and watch them. I'm like, okay, I can see what's going on here. You know you're not You didn't maintain the alpha. You didn't and in a fair way. You know, it doesn't mean about kicking a dog, but it means that the dog has to understand that everything comes through you, like I live through you. I get water from you. You feed me, you keep me alive. And you also make him earn everything, especially the dominant dogs. You know, like little things like and at home, you know the way he dogs have to be consistent. You can't treat him one way at home and then go to work and treat him another way, because they're not gonna It's got to be very consistent and structured. The dog will respond accordingly. So it's little things like you know, you go to put him in a police car, put him on a sit open a door car, so you're telling him what to do. He comes out of the car, you open the door and make him wait, come to your heal because he's not going to want to wait. If you've done car deployments where the guy the dog is sent out of the car to go and deploy and catch somebody. We do a lot of that. That can cause reactions that you don't want. He might just pop out one time and go by the wrong person because there's no structure there anymore. Yeah, makes makes sense. Yeah, yeah, So you really have to in everything you're doing, you got to really treat him like a dog. 00:35:19 Speaker 1: Walk me through if you can think of a memorable apprehension, walk me through an apprehension process. 00:35:26 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, God, something from in the field, you know. 00:35:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I've got some really good capers. But we talked about the fear scent. There was a time I was I was a handler and I wasn't a trainer. I was new in the unit, and we had these cops I think in seventy seven. They were ambushed. They were deep in seventy seven their residential neighborhood, probably taking a report call or whatever, and while they're getting in their car, guy pulls up Craig's off a bunch of around blows out the back windows. The cops are okay, but out help call. So they set up a two block perimeter, and of course this is when we were transitioning over to utilizing SWAT as our backup. So the policy was, if we have that kind of a high threat, we have to use SWAT as our search team members. Which is fine, you know, because they're trained at that high degree and they've got the weapons and all that stuff. But they're also working with us now, so they have to do canine tactics and not spot tactics, which is another conversation. 00:36:23 Speaker 1: Because this dude shot at these cops. Yeah, he runs up and you know, within two blocks where he is. 00:36:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, they had the containment up, they had the airship overhead, and we have a lot of resources, which is great. It spoils us because the airship. Our airships are the best in the country. I mean, the way they can operate and communicate and use their flour system, you know, all that stuff. They're just they're golden. And even back then this you're talking a long time ago, this twenty years ago. But anyways, the guy bails out, he's in the containment and I started doing it. We're starting a systematic search. And what I mean by that is we have like a one block, let's say it's a long block. It's in deep seventy seventh and we have a team on each side. We have a team here and a team here. I'm searching over here. We've got spot personnel with us. And what we want to do is we want to hopscotch. So one team searches the yard and then pushes. Next team does the same thing and then pushes. But we don't want to be back to back because of crossfire. Oh so we want to make sure that we're safe. But at the same time, we don't want one team to get too far ahead because you want to keep pushing the guy one way. And these suspects are very savvy. I mean they'll you'll We used to interview all of our suspects after we would catch them really yeah. Yeah. We we brush them off and treat them really nice because we want to get info. We'd find out all kinds of stuff like where did you run, what made you put down? Why did you move? All these things? And really we put it in our head as far as you know, tactically, how do these guys liked you? 00:37:53 Speaker 2: Like an exit interview? 00:37:54 Speaker 3: Yeah? Almost? And you know, I used to be mad at some of the handlers. They were new and they're treating a suspect like a you know which is fine. I mean it's you know, maybe he's a wanted suspect or whatever. But let's think about it. Let's think ahead here, Okay, ask him, you know, and they'll tell you. And what they try to do is if one team gets too far ahead and they're glancing over the fence and they're watching the airship at the same time, and they know that if that airship orbits at a certain point, he's going to be out of view. And he'll say that during an interview and he says, that's when I moved and I hit again. Because they're trying to escape. Some guys will just put down the old suspects. When I came on, a unit used to just run and put down. But they got very savvy because they knew Canon was going to search at LA. So then they started trying to break the perimeter and tried to find holes in the perimeter. Like a unit wasn't paying attention on the perimeter. He's looking at he's doing a peakc he says, Okay, I got time, I'm going to jog over to the next block. You know, these things would happen we developed, you know, so. 00:38:59 Speaker 2: These dudes get sad to how to avoid a. 00:39:01 Speaker 3: Dog unbelievable, and how to escape and all that. So we're pushing this guy. We're pushing, we're pushing. So I'm starting over here with I think the backup guy was a rayde Oil good guy, swat guy, big guy. And we're pushing this guy. Get about the third yard and my dog comes out and I'll mind you. And I know it sounds cliche, but I had a great dog. He was like I mean, even the guys in the unit they said there was times when I got in one shooting. And that's another story where they have their actually says, hey, look my dog's not getting anywhere. He says, bring out your keep, bring o qino. Your dog will do his magic. So anyways, back to this story, we're pushing, we're pushing, and also my dog's exits the yard and his nose goes up. Now, tactically, you don't really want to do this. I don't teach this. You want to even if your dog gets older. You don't want to miss anything. So you keep pushing because you don't want to take a chance of bypassing a yard. Got it, you might he might okid oak you or fool you. Or whatever. It's just not good. But my dog was just telling me he's got oder. I mean, he's like a fishing line. I mean, he's got so much change of behavior that I'm using the caller to call him back, and I'm applying pressure on the caller, the e caller right here, because he's got so much drive to just want to blow past these yards. So I look at Doyle. I go, look, he's got something down the street. I'm going to go with it. Airship follow me. So we pass about five or six seven yards and he's just sucked in, goes into the yard, dives into a bush, and he's on this guy just taking care of business and guns out laying over there, and Doyle's on top of the guy, all excited about taking him into custody. And I'm yelling at and I says, hey, I go come on back. I got to call my dog off because I do what's called verbal outs. I'm a very big proponent of that. We can get into that later. It's safe for its tactically more safer. A lot of guys will do what's called choke off or heart outs. But and you're you know, I don't like that, so but I can't call him off until Doyle gets off him. So I literally grab him and then I call Keno back to my side take him into custody. But Doyle goes afterwards says, that was awesome. Your dog got that guy eight yards away, that the fear sent that I'm talking about. At that time, Keno probably already had one hundred apprehensions. You know, at that point, he was well seasoned. 00:41:25 Speaker 2: He just knew that smell. 00:41:26 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I mean he was just you could tell. I mean, and a lot of Canon guys will tell you that they just know your search on the yard, and all of a sudden, you get about four or five yards in it, and the adrenaline kicks into you, and the whole hunt thing's happening, and you can see your dog alerting we're we're on the track. Or sometimes we'll say hey, We'll get hold of the other unit on the backside of the search and I'll say, hey, my DOS's picking him a, picking up a lot of odor. I think he's on your side, so you're getting close, yea. Then we start got things like that. 00:42:00 Speaker 2: Prevents the guy from shooting the dog. 00:42:05 Speaker 3: Well that's a good point. I mean, you know, that's another whole story. You know, what prevents a guy from shooting you know, I think you have like two or three different kinds of suspects. Okay, one of them, you have a suspect doesn't give a shit, he doesn't care if he dies suicide by cop. It's hard to work that kind of guy because you know, you can do best tactics in the world and he's just going to take you out. We've had cops get killed because of that. Then you have the other guy that wants to survive, you know, but he'll hurt you if he can. Yeah, So if you drop your tactics and he gives you an opportunity, he's going to hurt you. But if you overwhelm them with good tactics. You know, I used to teach this and I got it from a sergeant many many years ago. It's a great sergeant, Jack Orr passed away a little a couple of years ago. It's a great sergeant. And he had a thing he called the tactical clock. And when you have everything at even at twelve, the suspect is always ahead because he has to be. He can be he can be proactive, he can shoot you without any cause or whatever. Cop can't do that. He's behind the clock because he has to be reactive. He's got to wait and see what happens. He just can't go out killing people. It's not like a military operation where they're not the story. But you know what I mean, you have to do. There's laws and rules and policy and you have to adhere to that. So it puts you behind the power curve. So the only thing you can do is to have tactics that are overwhelming. So the suspect's going to say, hey, I might take that guy out, but his backup's going to kill me. You know, the rear guards are going to get me whatever. Because the way that we work and we do everything off lead, which is great because when a dog works off lead and he's not restricted with the long line like a lot of departments do, and they're great dogs, don't get me wrong, and I've worked with them all the time. But I've been asks to actually do married classes with guys that do long line tactics and I go, well, you know, I don't do that. I don't teach that everything you do is off lead. When a dog works off lead, that dog offers you reaction time because he's way out ahead of you. You know, he's within range to see. But reaction time is everything. You know, with a long line, you're restricted twenty thirty feet and the dog is always on the line, and the land's getting tangled up on stuff and it's getting what wiped out, and plus the dog can't work right either. When a dog is working offline, especially when he gets good at it, the magic really starts happening because they're using, totally using the dog's natural instinct to hunt with no restrictions. And he also knows through time that Dad's going to direct me into odor. It's up to me to expose my dog to odor. It's up to the dog to listen and trust me that if you follow my direction, I'm going to leave it to lead you to the Promised Land God. And when you get that connection, the dog performs really well. I mean, any guy will tell you a seasoned dog is like gold. I mean, because it takes so long to get to that point. It's just a lot of training in particulous. 00:45:12 Speaker 2: The more experience valuable. 00:45:14 Speaker 3: I mean, it's like you're like you're you're like one. You know, you can read your dog you know exactly what he's telling you and and you can trust him. So like let's say you know, there's a bunch of bushes over there, and my dog will come in a train dog will usually hit the corners all by himself because sin has a tendency to bleed off into the the perimeter of the yard. So you want to you want to hit that perimeter first and then detail the rest of it. So it's a it's a it's a science and it's an art. You want to allow that dog to hunt and self discover as much as you can, but you also want to do it systematically so he doesn't miss anything because sometimes you know, you a dog may not get deep enough this handlers will make a stake mistakes and they'll miss somebody because you didn't get your dog on odor. You can't blame him on him because let's say you're doing a warehouse and you're not getting him deep enough into the rooms in scent plays of you know, scent is not scent could be very finite sometimes depending on the environment and not I might have to get his nose right on the edge of that door and then boom, you know, he alerts change of behavior starts barking to the door. Okay, guys behind that. So you. 00:46:27 Speaker 2: Direct the dog's pace. 00:46:28 Speaker 3: Yes, you don't want to overdirect him, but you also want him to hunt, but he has to listen, and that's a whole training thing. You know, there's you know, this e caller helps a lot. This E caller is magic because I can reach out and communicate with my dog twenty thirty forty feet thirty forty yards away. 00:46:47 Speaker 1: How are you communicating to the dog with commands and stuff? Like if you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog? 00:46:54 Speaker 2: I want you to go in that room. 00:46:56 Speaker 3: More A good point, But like let's say tactically, Let's say if I'm entering a warehouse that maybe has an L shape to it, big warehouse, and you want to let you do your announcement, which is likely. It could be a lot of things, but with us it might be like, you know, this is LP a canine. We're doing a canine search. We know you're in there. If you don't want to get hurt and bit come out, surrender yourself. You've got one minute to surrender. Come out with your hands up, follow the light, follow my voice, whatever, and. 00:47:27 Speaker 2: You mentioned the dog and you mentioned getting bit. 00:47:29 Speaker 3: Yes, you tell them all that. In fact, now it's really aintal I mean back in the day. You know, now we have to record it. The units on the perimeter, like in an outside perimeter, they have a pre recording in Spanish and in English. Then it's got to be time stamped and all those rules have to be follows that, you know, you make sure like the guy, I never heard an announcement of that kind of thing. You need to do your due diligence and that all takes time. So but we battle that because now that we have to do all that, when somebody requests a canine airships overhead while we're on the route, they get all that done. 00:48:03 Speaker 2: It's already done. 00:48:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, so when we show up, boom, boots on the ground. So because at first we're getting there, it's like, okay, we're twenty minutes into this thing. We haven't even kicked off yet. And time is of the essence in a search. It's not like a barricade where a guy's in a building, you know, when you may have a containment in a block, but that suspect has freedom of movement and that will get you every time he has freedom to move, fortify his position, relax, you know, maybe get into a friendly house or even a or even a non friendly house which they try to get into. So you want to start putting pressure on him as soon as you can. Got it, So I lost track? What was I talking about? 00:48:40 Speaker 1: Well about when you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog, like no, no, no, go check that room more right, don't worry about that room, And we'll do that. 00:48:50 Speaker 3: Sometimes we have to do that because there's scent problems. We might recognize something through experience that odor is going to play funny, like we might want to turn all the air conditioning off because it's going to suck up odor and do weird things, you know, sent does. We'd like a lot of guys will be hiding in a false ceiling like this, Yeah, sometimes in buildings, and what will happen is the scent picture down here could be totally different than up there. So my dog may hit at the corner over there, barking up a storm, crawling up the wall. Okay, guys up there somewhere, but guess what he's over here on the other side, because scent is coming down there. For some reason, I got you. So all you can do is use the dog as a tool. Okay, I know I got odor, and then it turns into okay, I'm gonna put my dog up. We got to hand search it now because the dog done as much as he can makes sense. So we get a lot of capers like that. But a good dog will pinpoint isolate odor, and you have to give him time. You'll see him. You know. A new dog might take longer because he's working out that self discovery thing we talked about. But a good seasoned dog, he'll he'll bounce back and for and boom, he's right in the corner of that door or that dipsy dumpster. Or we found a lot of guys in trash cans. We've got in some major shootings in trash cans. 00:50:09 Speaker 2: Guys like the hide and trash cans love. 00:50:10 Speaker 3: Trash at least in la or crawl spaces. Yeah, they love crawl spaces, you know the race foundation. And it's hard because it's a hard sent picture. But when your dog finds his first crawl space space, fine, he'll never leave a crawl space like that again. Oh really, Oh yeah, he'll be he'll be checking every cross space forever. It's like something happens with that scent picture, because that's what dogs learn by. They learned by pictures and chaining events, right, So the more pictures you show them in a positive way, it's like a snapshot, and that's how he learns. 00:50:45 Speaker 1: So they learn like some architecture, I mean they learn like building structure. 00:50:49 Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, they learn. They learn like for an example, and other dogs did it. My dog once he got real season. If you can picture a drone over a perimeter and you see these big, wide open yards, you know, five, six, seven of them in a block, my dog would go in automatically at the corners, bisect all of himself. I'd go in, double check, come out and do the next yard. But my dog would do this. He would do the same yard. And let's say the dog, here's a fence and there's a shed on the other yard, and the guy's hiding in the shed. So we'd come over here and he'd alert, even though the shed's twenty feet away in the next yard, but he can't get to it because the fence. He'd be frustrated, and without me saying a word, he'd run out and be waiting at the gate really because he knows I can get to him from the gate. That's how smart they get, because you'll allow them to learn to be a predator. You know, their natural state, which is what they you know, they were like a wolf or so. 00:51:55 Speaker 2: They learned structure. 00:51:56 Speaker 3: They learn structure, they learn association, and they change those things together and they just become a better animal. 00:52:02 Speaker 2: Are they on hand signals? 00:52:03 Speaker 3: Yes, there's a good point. I do. There's some units that don't. I teach them to follow the hand signals. That's a big that's a good, really good question. I teach them to follow hand signals. And the light, so the light, the light in the dark environment, like you teach. 00:52:18 Speaker 2: Them to like, they'll go where you shine a light. 00:52:20 Speaker 3: Yes, and I like the light. There's guys that have experiment with and I have too, with the laser. But the problem with the laser is dogs don't see very well at night. They don't see very like you and I. They need lateral movement, okay, like most predatory animals do. They need the back and forth. I mean, if a guy's hiding in a dark spot in a bush and I've seen this happen, and uh, really dark. The dog will go in and I can see him. I can see the shadow dog go in and start doing this. We can't see him trying to fight. He's almost like bumping into him until he bumps them. Then he goes, oh shit, there there he is. 00:52:59 Speaker 2: Oh really, so he smells him, but he doesn't. 00:53:01 Speaker 3: Smells him, and the odor is right there and he's excited, but he's working it out. Yeah, and it's funny to watch it. We've done stuff in muzzle, like you know where we actually hit decoys, and we do a lot of muzzle searching for a lot of reasons. Getting a dog ready for the street and all that. And that's another whole topic we could talk, which is probably something important to talk about. But yeah, we direct them with the light. We give them what it's called a search command. And remember we've changed all these events. We've done the announcement that becomes a marker. It's time to search, especially for a new dog, so that consistency thing. Okay, it's time to search. Put him on a down through the announcement, back off from the entry level because the door is always a kill zone. You don't want to just blast them from there. We've got guys that are shot there, you know, got to be worry of that because the suspects are waiting. So if you have that big warehouse with that l shape, let's say you send a dog in and we let him have his head. We just let him kind of get some odor. But at the same time, before we let him go deep, we want to get our backside done first. We want to clear an area that is safe. So we structurally we tell them sometimes with the caller, but most dogs will do it if they're trained properly. You call them back here revere hand singal to the right hand, singer of the left detail the backside. Okay, we got somewhere to go to now, and that's a safe area if something happens right, and then we start allowing the dog to search, and then we try to we try to as much possible keep the dog in view, you know, because sometimes a guy can hide in a spot where the scent is very minute. You won't get that heard alert. You'll get a little bit of a change of behavior, and then that's what you've got to recognize, Like that head might go up, but if you don't stick with it and you move beyond it, you might miss the bad guy got it because and the dog could be a really good dog, but sometimes that scent is very subtle, and you've got to be able to see that as a hand, you know, when I'm doing certifications or new dogs, that's part of the problem, getting that handler to be able to read his dog. Like I'll have another trainer with me and we're doing a search and we're looking, and the dog is alerting, he's showing a solid change of behavior, and then the handler just calls a dog and leaves it. 00:55:19 Speaker 2: Got it? 00:55:19 Speaker 3: And then halfway through the search, I'll go, okay, stop put your dog in it down. 00:55:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, And hunting and hunting birds is the thing, like, yeah, everybody's like he's the dog's getting birdie, right, and the guy that knows the first guy that knows the dogs getting birdies? 00:55:31 Speaker 2: Who owns the guy that owns the dog? 00:55:33 Speaker 3: You can see it, but you know a new guy will miss it though, yeah right, yeah, and then and I'll let him. And I don't want to go on and on with the search and knowing that he just bypass that guy twenty months ago, because then it becomes detrimental to the dog. And I go, look, I go just to make sure I've got my other trainer here, and we both saw the alert. Okay. Sometimes when I'm hiding somebody, I'll tell me to go hide and not even tell me where he's at. It keeps me honest, God, so that when I'm evaluating somebody, I can say I had no idea where's at, but I saw your dog alert and you missed it. You boned up, So you can't do that, So get your dog back over there. And then he goes, oh, yeah, how did I miss that? Well, you missed it, and you don't want to miss a guy in the street. That's a big deal for a unit, especially with LA. You know, you miss a guy and it's one thing to miss him when you can't get your dog there. Like a fortified structure, you can't get in it's all locked up, and you'll tell the command post, Hey, we searched everything except for that. You want us to bust in or not? He says, Now, we can't bust in. Okay, well it's not clear. Two hours later, the guy's found in there because we didn't get him in there. So can I miss him? No? Can I didn't miss him? You didn't allow us to search. But it's another thing when you have search an area and you call it clear and then suspect comes out. And I've got some stories on that. 00:56:58 Speaker 1: Do you There's got to be things that you can train a dog do and things a dog just has to come out of the box ready to do. You talk about biting, is can you train a dog to bite or does it got to be that that dog wants to bite. 00:57:14 Speaker 2: That's a great question, like wants to bite from birth. 00:57:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. Because some dogs do they have a propensity to come out and their first apprehension they have no problem biting a real bad guy. That's not normal. And sometimes when you have a dog that is that quick, maybe edgy, it brings about other problems because he's almost too much going that way. God, your normal dog is going to be you know, need training when they come out. When you test these dogs, they are usually from Europe and their competitive dogs in KVP ring sport, shits and work, and it's really a big deal over there. They make a lot of money doing it. Not as popular as it used to be, but it's still a big deal. You can look it up on the website and look at some of the trials and all that that they do. You'll see the dog hidting the guy in the bite suit, the call offs, the recalls, the escorts, the obedience, the agility, all that stuff. And they compete with these dogs and they get different scores. And some of these guys, some of the vendors, are even some of the big trainers out there. After they get a couple of high scoring dogs, they'll sell their dogs to Americans. And sometimes they're titled and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're green. I mean by that is they're brought to a certain level. They know how to bite, they're prey oriented, you know, they love the prey toy like this right here, whether it's a jude or something to play with. They've done maybe a little bit of search work, who knows, you don't know. And they're young though, they're very young, so they need to be brought along. And that's another story. And after nine to eleven, things really changed because the dog were all exploded. I mean it exploded with the APPREHENDI the bomb dog detection. I mean the military. You know, they were getting hundreds and hundreds of dogs and the whole thing just went crazy. So the need for dogs was pretty high, and that's when some of the younger dogs started coming out, and they're good dogs. I mean, you could take a younger dog. In fact, that's pretty much. The younger dog sometimes has a lot of benefits because he's not locked into the equipment. And what I mean by equipment is the bite suit, the sleeve, the undergarment sleeve and all that stuff that is used in training and competition. 00:59:36 Speaker 2: But how do you get it too right? 00:59:39 Speaker 3: So that's the whole thing. When you're working a dog and you get some of the basic training dog, you're teaching a dog out of hunt, but at the same time, you want to start introducing things. You know, when I'm teaching a dog, everything I'm doing is for the end result, which is tactics and catching a bad guy. So you take some of those disciplines that are learned in ringsport and KVP and shits and you use them. You use some of those disciplines that make sense for you, but you trash some of the other ones that don't make sense. And one of them would be to get him off equipment. So you do a lot of you get that dog interested in or you get him to accept the muzzle very quickly, and there's different kinds of muzzles, but you want that dog to be able to be neutral in the muzzle. Some of the problems just to talk about training, all put muzzles on some dogs that have had aggression training in muzzle, which is fine, but they're not neutral in muzzle. So when that muzzle goes on, he gets aggressive, and that's not what you want. You want him to be gunfire neutral. You want him to be muzzle neutral. You don't want rounds going off and the dogs looking for some of the nab or bite. Now he's not safe. You want him to be able to just accept the gunfire and move on to his work. Same thing with the muzzle. So the muzzle allows you to when you're playing cat and mouse, when you're playing you know, hide and seek with the dog, and you're setting up training scenarios when that dog learns how to hunt in the muzzle, not only just hit in the muzzle, because when a dog is really good in the muzzle, you'll send him on a straight here and they'll hurt you. I mean, I've had guys without protection broken ribs and. 01:01:22 Speaker 2: From the dog hitting even though he can't bite you can't bite. 01:01:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, you just like rockets and they're trained right, and I train them really good in muzzle. I have a certain technique and my dog's you know, they'll they'll they'll put some hurd on you. So sometimes we'll wear a vest sometimes over a big jacket, will wear it's like a ski vest or something. Yeah, a skiing vest because they'll hurt you. Plus it depends on the skill of the decoy too, obviously, But yeah, that's one thing you want to do. Another thing would be to do what's called a lot of civil fines. And when I say civil, it means no equipment. So when I'm hiding people right away, I had to take all the equipment off him. He's hiding in that cabinet. We got him stuck in there, and you know, he's sweating up a storm he's in his tight But you want to mimic the real environments, like for example, you might start just leads into something else. You might start a dog on a really simple odor, like a really small closet with a door, because you know the sense is going to be true and the dog knows how to apprehend, he knows how to catch, you know, take bites and all that. But you want to introduce him into odor. So we'll put a guy in a suit behind that door and we'll let him cook up. That means he's a lot of scent is developing inside that small room, and we crack the door and make it super easy. So we may do the announcement twenty yards away or at the beginning of the room, and then depending on the dog and what I think he might need or you know, lapd com ale your hands up and then the decoy will do a picky boo. He'll open up and he'll paint a picture. He'll start screaming at the dog, and the dog's barking. He's all excited. Then he shuts the door and leaves it cracked. We send a dog in, so now we want to teach him to be able to bark at the scent. So he'll go in frustrated, going, okay, where do you go? Yeah, and he's thinking some dogs will pick up on really quick. They'll go and they'll start working it, and all of a sudden you'll see his nose go up and he goes to that corner and then he starts scratching and he gets frustrated, and it's important for the handler to shut up because you want that alert to be between him and the odor. It's called making the dog be obedient to odor. And you'll see the mistake. Sometimes a handler will be back there, going what you got, buddy? Dog looks around, he goes, okay, you just marked it. So in other words, instead of the dog's self discovering, you've told the dog to alert, and then what happens is the dog will end up falsing. He'll go to a door, check it out, look back at you. You'll think the guy's in there, and you'll go, what you got. Dog starts barking, open it door. Nobody's there because you marked it. And it's not about you. It's about what happens right there with that odor makes sense. Ye, Little things like that will happen. And you know, when I go do a lot of problem solving, I'll see it right away. The dog will be, you know, at the set, and he's looking back. I go, you've been talking to your dog a lot, haven't you go? You got to shut up. I go, in fact, get out of the room, go hide and let your dog do his thing. I don't want to even see you, and then we fix it so that because you don't want that dog fALS thing. 01:04:30 Speaker 1: I'm going to get back to a question I'm trying to so the bite, Yeah, like yeah, I mean, so dog might go up and find something, But how do you ever get to how do you ever get to where you know the dogs going to come up and bite but also not bite the guy in the face. 01:04:45 Speaker 3: Sure, well, you know almost all the bites are going to be on the extremities. 01:04:49 Speaker 2: That's just because that's just what a dog is going to do. 01:04:52 Speaker 3: Well, that's what he's going to be offered to when during decoy work. You know, one of the one of my favorite bites is the inside run bite. I like that one. There's all will thing called bite marking. Way way back in the day, we used to do a lot of what's called pulling on the bite, and I called it more of like a prey bite. And it's not a it's not a good bite. It's not a bite that's going to take down a suspect. You want a dog that's going to be digging in and you mark the you mark that with a good decoy work. That means the dog bites and he pushes. That's just that's just a detail. I like it because the decoy can really work the dog. He can feel it. A good decoy will tell you what he needs. A good decoy and I my training groups actually hire a decoy and it's it's kind of a the handlers are kind of spoiled because back in the day we did our own decoying. Now I hire people to do it, and it's hard work, but they're good and it makes that dog. You know, I can fix problems a lot with a good skilled decoy. Guys that you know do bringsport, KVP and all that pay him some money. They come in, they help. But when he's when that dog's biting, Let's say, for example, that dog has a propensity to pull. So when you take that inside arm bite and the dog comes in and he's pulling, you ignore the behavior. You don't give him a mark on it, and then you wait the dog out and then pretty soon he's not getting any kind of reward. He's just kind of pulling. All of a sudden he does this bites. 01:06:14 Speaker 2: Oh, you do. 01:06:16 Speaker 3: A mark, and then the dog does again, and pretty soon that. 01:06:19 Speaker 2: Remain You do a reaction. 01:06:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll do it, you'll turn away, go to a submission, and he likes that because you're showing that you're kicking his ass, you know, the dog. The dog picks up on it. Oh, I get a reaction here because what he was trained to do was some we call him bite dummies. You're not doing anything for the dot. You're just a bite dummy. The dog will bite. He's pulling, and he's pulling, and the handler's going or the decoy's going, ah, he's marking all bad behavior. So the dog learns to pull the problem with the pull bite. If you have a real apprehension the dog might pull and rip off clothes and start shaking on it a piece of prey. That goes into another little story. So you want that bite to be firm and pushing. 01:07:02 Speaker 1: So you can, like you encourage the dog to bite how you want it. By the decoy overreacting when it's doing the right. 01:07:09 Speaker 3: It's very subtle too. You don't need to scream, and it's just little things like you're looking at that dog. You're feeling the confidence. The decoy will tell you, Okay, don't call him yet, don't call him, let me watch him. He rebites him pretty soon he's pushing. Oh yeah, And pretty soon he's pushing and digging in and the bite's really strong. And then you obviously keep your control. And all my outs are verbal outs, which is another thing. You know a lot of guys do choke offs. 01:07:36 Speaker 1: Do you ever get a dog that's got too much like he's too good at biting and it winds up being not safe to use the dog. 01:07:42 Speaker 3: Well, he's only not safe he's biting the wrong thing. Oh you mean, because he's so powerful. Yeah, that's a good point. I'll leave it nameless. There was an apartment I worked with uh I still work with him. I have a contract with him. And one of their old handlers had a dog and he was the son of his other dog from a really good breeding line. And it was a shepherd. And not a lot of shepherds out there anymore. There are, there's some great shepherds, but everybody's using their mouths in the Duchi's you know, I ran a great shepherd whatever. But this dog was a powerful dog, and he had a couple of apprehensions where he bit him, wasn't long in a bite and brought the guy's arm and that can be a problem. 01:08:21 Speaker 2: If the dog's bite broke. 01:08:22 Speaker 3: The dude, it wasn't like he was on them long. This this dog, I mean, you would take a bite on him through the bite suit and it would hurt. I mean, you have to wear neoprene undergarments and the bite suite otherwise you're feeling some good pain, you know. I remember working dogs back in the day. We had some pretty lousy bite suits. The department wasn't keeping up on our equipment, and I'd go home sometimes I didn't even know it, take my T shirt off, getting ready to go to bed, and I can't get my shirt off, and I got blood dried up blood on my uniform T shirt stuck. He didn't go through this suit, but the pressure made me bleed. Yeah, my arms all black and blue. It hurts, you know, because they bite hard even with a bite suit. 01:09:08 Speaker 1: You when we talked before, you explain something to me that like you tell people about. 01:09:13 Speaker 2: When you go to buy dogs. 01:09:17 Speaker 1: And you're in the police work and you're and you're shopping for dogs from the same sources that the military is shopping for dogs. Right, You're saying, the military wants dogs that don't bark, but you guys want dogs that do. 01:09:32 Speaker 2: The police want dogs that do bark. 01:09:34 Speaker 1: Right, and that's more of a thing that that's just like the dog's tendency and not necessarily a thing that you train into a dog like the dog don't hunt silent. 01:09:43 Speaker 3: You know, it's easy to make the dog silent. 01:09:45 Speaker 2: It's easy to make it. 01:09:46 Speaker 3: Most dogs will come in silent. You know. You got to teach them to bark like an odor and all that. 01:09:51 Speaker 2: Oh you do, okay, yeah you do. 01:09:53 Speaker 3: I mean sometimes we'll pick it up pretty naturally. But some dogs are really quiet. We had a dog that came out of training from another vendor and he's a good friend of mine, and they had a tendency of not getting that dog those dogs that bark on odor. And we have some discussions by going, hey, look, because once that dog is allowed to find somebody in that closet or that cupboard and showing some indication but no bark, and then he gets paid with a bite. You've taught him to be quiet, ye, and he've done that over and over again. It's hard to fix. 01:10:24 Speaker 1: And that's problematic for you guys because of legal issues. The dog's got to bark. 01:10:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just it's something positive that you can say and helps you as a handler. Like I mean, for example, too, he he may not even be able to get to source to this to where the guy actually is. Like let's say the guy's up in that ceiling. The dog is trained to get as close to sores as possible and bark, So you'll have a dog that can't get close, but he's as close as he can. You'll crawl up that wall and start barking. Yep, that's pretty good. That's a pretty good indication to have. And he also it steadies the dog. What I mean by that is that the dog is given a behavior to do, and when you first teach them to barget odor, you go with one or two barks bie, okay, next one one, two, three four bite, And then you want to vary it. You know, the variable to intermittent. And what that means is you're going to lock in the behavior. Sometimes I want you barking twenty times at that door. Sometimes I want you barking twice, because if you don't do that, if you don't you know, you use pattern to train a dog, but you have to know when to deviate from the pattern to make the behavior solid. Ye. What I mean, but that is it might be bark, bark, bark, Oh no, bite, I'm going to leave because I always get bite on the third bark. So you want to build up the tolerance, you know, the time and the length and all that, so the dog stays at that odor because it might come up in a real search where you know, you want to make sure the guy's there, like you're calling out swat. You got all these resources. You really want to make sure that guy's going to be there. 01:11:56 Speaker 1: So there's not a reason, there's not like a legal reason. I thought that dog would need to bark no and like as a way to like announce itself to the suspect so that the suspect couldn't like come at you legally. 01:12:08 Speaker 3: Sure. Sure, and sometimes you can bring them back and have the dog bark up, you know, but if your dog barks at a door, we're going to de escalate. We're going to call him back in a real search, and we're going to order the guy out, got it, And we're gonna do it several times. In fact, with LA I'm not sure about some of the other departments, but even the departments I work with, if a guy is in a shed and a dog is solid and he's barking and he just shot Let's say he just shot a cop or murdered somebody. Times on your side, you know, you don't need to make an entrance into there, call your dog back, surround it treated like a barricade. Then you have all these other tools you can bring in. You can forty millimeters gasset whatever. But there's no there's no rush to go in. And that would be my training because you're going to get hit on that. It's like, you know, there's been a lot of lawsuits out there where guys, you know, they cowboy their way in and then they actually kind of make a shooting happen, you know, because and that goes into like, well, I use a canine, you know, I can just get into this a little bit. Back in the day when canines on LA were still kind of new and there was a we were having an issue with our use of forest division, and they were teaching a lot of how to chase a suspect, how to chase, how to pie a corner, how to wait, be safe, all that stuff. And I watched it and the sergeant was doing it was a great guy, very good instructor. But I'm coming from another world. You know, I'm coming from Canine. So I'm not teaching how to chase a guy. I want to teach how to contain. So you're not going to catch people if you're chasing them unless you can, unless you're an athlete, you can run the guy down within the first twenty thirty yards, he's gone if you're doing it safely. Because when you're chasing an armed suspect or potentially that guy cuts the corner, You're not going to cut the corner. You're gonna you're gonna buy that corner slow and make sure he's not going to ambush you or you're gonna get shot. Maybe, So if you're teach, if you're if you're chasing him properly, he's going to gain ground on you all the time because he doesn't have to worry about anything. So why not back off and contain the guy. So we would teach like, hey, if you can't run this guy down quick, and you know your average patrol cop, you're in the car, it's cold, it's you're calm, you've been just had Code seven, you just had something to eat, you've been relaxed and Now this guy, this athletic suspect Boom is running and you're coming out with forty pounds of gear on you. You get hurt, you're going to get sick, You're gonna rip your hamstring. Whatever it happens all the time. So contain this guy. So the city of La, the way the cops are trained is to contain and it's phenomenal. People across the country can't believe sometimes our find ratio. 01:15:02 Speaker 2: Contain them and let them settle in, yeah. 01:15:04 Speaker 3: And de escalate. And the way I sold the apartment, I go, hey, look, you want to get your use of force capers down. Your use of force incidences where it's an investigation. If you're going to chase somebody, run them down, that's going to be use force. You know you're going to tackle the guy, could be a fight, everybody gets hurt, suspect gets hurt, Boom. If you want to de escalate, that contain this guy. Plus it's safer right you give you give that that chance, that suspect a chance to de escalate, and you're going to catch them. So what I'm getting at. When I was on a unit, we had about a fifty find ratio on containments not too bad. And I was talking to one of the algren, one of the chief trainer on LAPD now and they supposedly have like a seventy to seventy five percent find ratio. That means every time a perimeter is set, that's the odds of catching somebody. It's not because of the canine, it's because the perimeter units are locking these guys in it. Like when you see a pursuit on TV and you've got you know, the old thing used to be and still you'll see it on TV. You got primary suspect traveling at a high rate of speed and you got seven cars behind them. Yeah, that's stupid because your seventh car is not doing anything. So you're going through this neighborhood with a big daisy chain chase chasing this guy. What our guys will do? And another department like the final chase scene A remember that a thing called the Animal Planet. There was a Attenborough whatever doing a narration and he was doing it. They had some great footage, maybe a drone, I don't know what they had, but it was they were filming those African hunting dogs. There were a certain breed out there and they work in big packs, not like wolves. They're like thirty of them. And they had them chasing a deer and it was just like I train or we train. They had about three or four of them chasing this deer and then they had the group splitting off. Got it, so they had a rolling containment. So by the time they surrounded this thing, the deer ended up going into the water, but they had him corralled because they're had nowhere to go. Now, I say, well, it would have been all right here, he's got open space left and right. 01:17:15 Speaker 2: I understand. 01:17:16 Speaker 3: But that's a natural thing that they developed, you know, without just beautiful right. 01:17:22 Speaker 2: So instead of seven cop cars chasing spread out. 01:17:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, an airship a good airship and us, well, we can tell when a guy is going like the airship will say, okay, it does be advised. He's slowing down. I think he's looking for a place to bail because he's in a friendly area. Now he's like his own territory, unless he's like doing some like let's say a South End guy in seventy seventh is capering in west Ola by Beverly Hills, gonna he's gonna bail quick because he's out of his territory. Right, He's got to get out of the car quick because he knows there's going to be a containment, so he's not going to go very long. But when you get in a pursuit in seventy seven, he's going to stay in that car because he's going to go to an area that he knows and maybe get into a friendly. So there's a big old different mindset. But with that being said, the airship will say, Okay, he's slowing down. Units be aware, let's start setting up the containment now. And they units that are left and right, so we'll have like the primary unit, secondary unit, maybe a third unit. Everybody else is out here. So when that guy bails, we've already got units here and here, so we lock him in. Yeah, he's not going anywhere. 01:18:28 Speaker 2: Yeah, and then your dog comes in and does. 01:18:30 Speaker 3: Find Ratio just goes up. Because these guys are thinking containment and not chasing. It's a whole different mindset. And I tried, and you know, like there's some of the departments I work with, like in Texas, and great guys. I got some good dogs. I got. In fact, one of the guys in Texas, Chris Morey runs a for Harris County. They run twenty dogs, and he's frustrated because he knows all these tactics and he's getting into the off leash thing like I teach him. Taught him. But they just don't have the resources like that, and they do a lot of tracking. They just they don't have that many airships because you need all that stuff. And I feel bad for some of the smaller agencies because you can really lock these guys down with a good airship. But we're using a lot of drones. Now. Drones are coming in real handy, these big drones, you know, like the size of the scouch. Yeah, you know, these guys are operating them, and it's beautiful what they can do with them. 01:19:24 Speaker 1: So where do most of the So you're saying that, like you're still involved in dogs and dog training. 01:19:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, most of these dogs are coming out of Europe? 01:19:32 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, most of them. Most of them are. 01:19:36 Speaker 2: Why is that? 01:19:37 Speaker 1: Why is the why is the center of this kind of apprehension dog coming out of here? 01:19:40 Speaker 3: It just always has. I mean, there's some breeders out here and they've done some breeding. In fact, one of the companies are working Spectrum canine. They bred a duchy that we got for San Pablo, and they bred that dog and that dog is just tearing it up. Great dog, but they know how to breathe, they know how to bring the dog up properly. And because it's a whole process. 01:20:04 Speaker 2: What countries in Europe are big into this. 01:20:08 Speaker 3: You know, you got hungry Turkey, Slovakia, France, Holland, Germany. Germany used to be bigger because a lot of the dogs out of there were coming where they were shepherds, but some of the more desired breeds, it seems to have really gone toward the mouths and the Dutch shepherds got it. 01:20:29 Speaker 1: What's one of these dogs worth coming out preliminary training? 01:20:34 Speaker 3: When I came on a job, we were picking up dogs for three thirty five. Now you're talking about thirteen thousand, maybe fifteen grand. 01:20:41 Speaker 2: And that's for dog which is basic training. 01:20:43 Speaker 3: Basic training. Yeah, and some want more if they include some kind of training with it. But yeah, they're expensive. And then you also, you know you want to like I used to work with a vendor van Lick Kennel's out of Indiana, Ken Lackletter, Rennet and get. They were getting hundreds of dogs a year, hundreds. It's facilities in Indiana. We go there, I take my guys. I'd get a hotel Stadred for like three or four days test dogs. Another one the elder is Kennels in Riverside. They get a lot of good dogs too. But you know, like my trainer told me once, he says, where do you find a good dog? You find a good dog. Where a good dog is. I mean, you have to keep your eyes on them. But the problem is you want to vendor you can trust so you don't waste your time. You also want to guarantee, because you could have three months into the dog and things start happening medically or whatever, So you want that guarantee that you know. But something that I learned kind of the hard way when I was working as a head trainer in La. You, I don't know, you look complacent, maybe a little sloppy because you have all this time. And I had a tendency sometime not always, but and a dog's not perfect, but I can make them work good. And then I paid the price for that because you know, maybe I can make him work, but he's got to go to that handler and he's got to continue to make him work. 01:22:06 Speaker 2: Got it? 01:22:07 Speaker 3: And I learned that, you know. 01:22:08 Speaker 2: Just through you learn to focus on perfect dogs exactly. 01:22:12 Speaker 3: I learned to be greedy, huh. And I learned I learned to fly out to Indiana or go to Riverside or wherever I'm going, and spend two days training and go, well, you don't have anything for me, I'm leaving. But sometimes when you do that, the guy will go, well, wait a minute, I got one dog you didn't see. I saved him for special Forces. But if you really want to see him, I'll show him. He'll bring him out, and I'll go, you wasted three of my days, wrap them up. Of course I want him. You know you were hiding him for somebody else because a vendor will sell you what you'll buy. Not anything against vendors, you know. They they'll help you to a certain point, but their job is to sell dogs. Yeah, you know, And so you don't want to wait. 01:22:54 Speaker 1: That would like if you look if you think about bird hunters, do you think that like would your recommendation to people training bird dogs or duck dogs whatever, would your recommendation be that same thing? 01:23:07 Speaker 2: Like they don't waste time on m profession un percent. 01:23:10 Speaker 3: In fact, Huh, there was some you know during the after nine to eleven that got really big into the SSD dogs and some of the dogs were looking for bombs and they used that same method that the bird dogs do. You know. I did some training with the Marines on it, and they were at Camp Pendleton. I was down there training with them doing a patrol dog class. But they brought in some of their SSD dogs and yeah, they were I learned a lot on that because we weren't really into that. And they would contract these dogs out to certain organizations that made a lot of money. They were charging departments like got forty grand for a dog, you know, for the training and everything. But they were good dogs. They were taught to hand signal, go straight out, get older, turn around, face to left and right. Some of these guys in the Marines were actually using communication devices strapped to their callers so they could talk to them through that. Got it, And uh, you know they were finding bombs and all that because that would they were. They were dogs that were taught to find ground ground explosives. 01:24:17 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:24:17 Speaker 3: So that's all they did. They did a good job. 01:24:20 Speaker 2: What's your take on these services that uh, you know these people. 01:24:24 Speaker 1: Now you get these people buying these like high end like kind of like executive dogs. You know, it's supposed to be like these these like souped up dogs meant to protect you and your family. 01:24:33 Speaker 2: Do you buy that? 01:24:34 Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, here's the problem with that. You can anybody can purchase a dog that's going to take care of business, but at the same time, that dog might get you in real trouble, right, I mean, if a real dog, a dog that's really going to take somebody down, you better you better, you better go as much you better go through as much training as that dog went through to handle that dog and really know that. It's like having a weapon, right, I mean, you know, you just don't hand somebody a gun. You teach them how to shoot, and you also want to teach them about liability risk management because you get yourself in a lot of trouble. 01:25:16 Speaker 1: Amy someone walking around with some like some dog that, yeah that means business when he attacks it, or is this. 01:25:22 Speaker 3: He might look really good in the equipment and the bite suit and the muzzle, but will he really bite somebody? Because that's what we do. That's the problem of police work, you know, because besides the muzzle work and the civil finds that I talked about. We do undergarments, we do prosthetics, you know, which is like the fake arms that we teach a dog to buy different services so that we throw a myriad of things at him so that generalization occurs. That means that whatever that guy offers you, you're going to bite it. You're not going to freak out over it or release it or have some kind of problem with it. 01:25:59 Speaker 2: You know. 01:26:00 Speaker 1: Funny about that man is when you set up electronic predator callers. Right, it's so interesting to watch when a kyote comes in. 01:26:10 Speaker 2: I've seen cats come in. When they hit that thing. 01:26:16 Speaker 1: How quickly they know that that doesn't feel like what it was supposed to feel like, right, I mean. 01:26:22 Speaker 3: They they like back, they hate it, But I bet you have some dogs they bustled right through it. 01:26:29 Speaker 2: No, No, I've seen with coyotes. 01:26:32 Speaker 1: Once they make contact with it, they know it's like a little decoy, right, they know that that's not what they were at Like just the feel of it, the bite, feel, the way it feels on their paws, the way it feels on their body. 01:26:46 Speaker 2: They like, hit it there out the door. 01:26:48 Speaker 3: That's that's a that's a good example. Yeah. 01:26:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, like they're like, that ain't what I thought it was, right. 01:26:54 Speaker 3: And we've we've had that, you know, we've had that. In fact, yeah, my my and I was a brand new handler and he was in a situation where we were supposed to bite and he went in there and it was a find him. It was still find to bark, but it escalated to a situation where the guy needed to get bit. He got aggressive and he went in and he nabbed him and then he backed off. And I'm a new handler and I'm like, I'm thinking my dogs hard. He's doing all the stuff that we did right, And my trainer, Doniel Nelly come out and go, my dog's broken. What happened? And I was one of those guys. I got to be the best. That's just me. I mean I I put in tons of training and anything anything I do, I want to be really good at it. So I'm like, I want the best dog, and this is pissing me off. And lo and behold he said, don't worry about it, just like I would tell a new handler. Now we'll fix it. Not a big deal. So we did a whole lot of stuff muzzle. We didn't have under garments back then or prosthetics, but we did a lot of things to civil him up and to get him that way, and the next apprehension that was required of him, he did a great joint for it, and after that after that, because he was such a strong bitter and he had this natural reflex of biting and shaking, and so I had to have really good control over him because he was doing a lot of damage. And there's a thing called the thirteenth floor, if I should even be getting into this, but where the guy is submitted to a hospital. It's a jail ward, but it's a hospital, and a lot of his bites were turring into that, and the sergeants looking at me like, what are you doing? Are you like leaving him on a bite forever? I go, No, I'm not. I mean he's coming right off. So they actually assigned a season handler with me to keep an eye on me. I'm brand new, you know, And I'm. 01:28:52 Speaker 2: Like, because this dog's doing too much damage. 01:28:54 Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and I'm like, he's a great dog, but he's like, I'm calling him right off, like boom. A couple of seconds, and then he saw an apprehension and looks at me and he says, you got better control anybody in the unit. He says, your dog's popping right off. He just bites hard. 01:29:12 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:29:12 Speaker 3: So I had to realize that and and you know, do things accordingly. I mean, I have to maintain really good control over them. 01:29:20 Speaker 1: It was an interesting point you raised a minute ago when I was talking about these guys. I various buddies of mine talk about these dudes that like make these uh defense dogs. It's an interesting point you make that if you're selling someone a dog that's supposed to protect their family, how do you ever really know that you've only had you've only had them being training until you take them out to attack someone. You could have that thing sitting around for five years thinking it's some big, bad attack dog. 01:29:50 Speaker 2: But that dog has never attacked anybody. 01:29:52 Speaker 3: Right, And that's my whole thing. You know, that brings me in. 01:29:55 Speaker 2: It's like an interesting idea that. 01:29:57 Speaker 3: Brings me into this. Here's what's real edible to that. There was a time when the guys in the SWAT unit we weren't getting along very well with SWAT. There was a lot of egos going on. Now, when I left we're golden. We like love each other. We work together with them, but there was like a competition thing. You know, canine is getting all these bodies, they're doing all this stuff and that's a swat caper. That's not a canine caper, and this kind of silly stuff. So we had to get through that. But as they developed, for some reason, they started doing some work with Delta and some of these other high speed units, because you know, laped SWAT's great, they're like one of the best in the country, but they're doing all this advanced stuff all the time. And Delta their teams are married with a canine guy like Laso Los Angeles County Sheriffs. Their canines are part of SWAT l a p D. Swat and canine are different different entities, So we don't work together per se like that. We do train together, we do work together, but we're not married up like that. Yeah, not military or like LIS. So when they get a swat call, canine is there all the time with us, it's going to be a special event. So yeah, with that being said, after they did this training with Delta, they says, we want a swat dog. This kind of goes into what you're saying, what's a swat dog. All of our dogs are swat dogs. Our dogs are always there for you, you know, and we'll always pick a certain dog that might be better for a certain incident, right, I mean, if I need a bigger, more powerful dog at this certain location. 01:31:37 Speaker 2: Well, I'm gonna understand what you're saying. Who was saying they. 01:31:39 Speaker 1: Wanted a swat dog, our swat unit, your swat want. 01:31:42 Speaker 3: Wanted a specific swat dog, signed a swat. 01:31:45 Speaker 2: That they picked up off from the deltagether. 01:31:47 Speaker 3: Yes, And I'm thinking, and I knew it was coming, and I said, well I go the only I go. They wanted to go in training and all that. I said, Well, the reason that our dogs are swat dog is because they've been out in the street for a year and most of them had about forty fifty apprehensions already. Now for you to have a swat dog that's going to prove you right and not fail you when everything's on the line, how are you going to make that happen. You've got to be a handler for a while, so you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Our dogs are going to take care of business. We're going to train with you, we're gonna do so we mixed it, but they wanted that swat dog thing, and it kind of goes in line with he's not proven. You know, I can do all the training in the world. Here's your swat dog. It looks great out in the field, muzzle work, bite work, whatever, But is he really going to take care of business? 01:32:38 Speaker 1: This is the thing that This is the thing I find with friends of mine that have dog hunting dogs, as you got, there's like the hunting dogs that it's just all training. It's like putting pen raised birds out and little meadows and the dog knows he's going to find something in ten seconds. Right, It's like that's all that ever lived. And then you got dogs that have been hunting for real yep. And when I whenever I hear about all my field trial this and field try that, I just. 01:33:11 Speaker 2: Like, I don't I don't care, right, I don't care. 01:33:14 Speaker 1: Like the dog that's been out doing the real deal stuff in the real world. 01:33:19 Speaker 2: That's interesting, right. 01:33:20 Speaker 3: Well, you know we had the same thing. I mean, there's like a lot of canine trials all over the place, not all over, but you know, they and our guys didn't really compete very much. And them sometimes they would and they may not even do very well in them, but they're competing against dot has maybe had one bite and they're five years in the job. Uh, And now you're competing with this guy that's had like thirty forty in the year or fifty or more whatever. You know, I had one hundred and twenty one bodies one year. That's a lot of that's a lot of searching. Wow, in our heyday and back in the day, forty percent of them got bit. That was standard in the end of tree. Now that will get you fired, you know. Now the bait ratio is looked at. 01:34:04 Speaker 1: So you had a year, you caught one hundred and twenty people and forty bytes. 01:34:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what like this. 01:34:10 Speaker 1: Kind of kind of final final is question here? What is the dog getting out of this? 01:34:18 Speaker 3: Do? 01:34:18 Speaker 2: I mean? Like, what what drives that dog to want to catch a person? 01:34:25 Speaker 3: Well, it starts from this little toy here. That's a piece of prey object. Do It's just a toy, just the can with a rope and I use a lot of it. And you know this is what we train. Okay, I mean it's not only it, but it's the natural instinct, the predatory and most dogs have it, even your little Pucci dogs. They have some kind of prayer, pray in them, you know, but some of them obviously have a lot more genetically predisposed for all that. Yeah, you know, that's like the detection dog. They do everything for this. This is a reward system, which be a tennis ball or a calm, a jew toy, whatever it might be. But the dog's hooked on this, and you know, when he bites a man, it's just a bigger version of this. 01:35:09 Speaker 1: Really, you know, it's not like he's like he wants because yeah, he's got no concept of justice. 01:35:14 Speaker 3: No, not at all. I mean, although there is something to say about protection of the handler and all that. 01:35:23 Speaker 2: They oh you think, okay, that's a factor. 01:35:25 Speaker 3: I think there is some of that, and I'm not so sure how much with every police dog. But for a home dog, let's say, you're going to see some of that, like I saw it in my mouth, like we talked about, I can't. He's not totally the most trustable dog. He's got a lot of guardiness in him, and he's very guardian to the family. I see, and once I get someone to know him. He's totally cool. But I found out the hard way that I got to watch him. 01:35:47 Speaker 1: So one of your apprehension dogs could develop a professional like or develop a personal relationship where they are in some part motivated, you know, texting their handle. 01:35:58 Speaker 3: It's a really good question because the way that I preach to guys and this is you can tell them all day long. It says, you know, for the most part, this is a working dog and he's not a pet, and the worst thing you can do, really, I think, is to treat him totally like a pet. First of all, you want to contain that drive. The dog stays in the kennel when it's working, and of course you want to bring him out, socialize them and all that. But when he becomes too much of a family dog, There's been a lot of times when that's bites in the butt because the dog will perceive something, you know, maybe a neighbor will come over and do something or move or make some kind of furtive movement, and next thing you know, he gets grabbed by this police dog and the lawsuit happens, you know, and I've got stories about that. So you got to be careful about that stuff. You know. I mean, it's safer just to treat him what he is. He's a police dog. He goes in the kennel, he goes to work days off, bring him out, run him around, have fun with him, play with him, do some toy work with him. Whatever. But he's his job is to catch bad guys. Yea, and some. 01:37:03 Speaker 2: Dogs never like that dog. 01:37:05 Speaker 1: You know, the dog's not angry when it goes at somebody. 01:37:10 Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good point. So when you are training a dog to bite in the beginning as a puppy, they're biting out of fun. You start off, you know, maybe with a jew toy. You know dogs like you know, so big, you know, three months old. You got him on a little jew toy. He's having fun. You're playing with him, and he's biting. And that's how you want to bring a dog up. You don't want to do what it's called like the old sentry dogs where they treat teach a dog to bite out of aggression and sometimes even out of defense and fear. When a bite, when a dog is biting out of defense and fear, he's he's unreliable because he's not biting out of fun. The aggression will come later. You know, you want to build aggressions to where he's biting out of fight, but that's later on, if that makes sense. So you do that too soon and the dog can be can be very understand on and. 01:38:00 Speaker 1: A dog it's aggressive as a youngster and bite. 01:38:04 Speaker 2: You're not gonna tell. 01:38:04 Speaker 3: A toy he's coming at you, he's biting him. You have him an a lee, you let him run around, the toy in his mouth, you grab it again, you play tug. You work on the bite, you work on the grip, you get all those things. Then you develop into a bigger tug. And as a dog gets older and he has his adult teeth and you bring in the sleeve and then you graduate from the sleeve to the bite suit and you bring him along that way. So by the time he's nine months old, he's like on his way. You know, he saw he's got a nice bite. He's biting for the right reason. You know, he's not biting out of you know, I wanted to just kill everybody. It's a fun thing. Tug award and all that stuff. That makes sense. 01:38:40 Speaker 1: So have you did you ever lose a dog? 01:38:43 Speaker 2: Do you ever have a dog get shot in a line of duty. 01:38:46 Speaker 3: I've been around it. Yeah, that that h quick story. I was a new handler. I wasn't in the street yet. I was still in training and we had a dog. Uh the radio, I was talking about John Hall and he was a season handler. He's been in a lot of shooting. He's a lot of very violent time. Back then, we had a it was a traffic stop by two motor cops, pulled two Hispanics over and he's going to give him a ticket, but he had no idea. They just robbed a bank. Oh or a store. They robbed a store, so they're thinking shit, you know. They came out of the car, shots fired, pursue him, help call, and they bail out into a perimeter in West LA which is a really high end area of LA, and canines called. So we're all the whole units and route where. You know, back then we didn't use SWAT. It was everything was patrol. The unit was a lot newer than it, you know is now. John Hall shows up with his dog and I think it was another canine. I was on the other block side of the block searching, and while we're about halfway in, maybe an hour into it, I hear the shots fired go off, and the help call comes out and I can hear the shooting going on. And what happened was he went in there and there was a sergeant, a canine sergeant, Mark Mooring was on his search team as his backup within a couple of patrol cops. The dog entered the garage and then he was ambushed right away. The dog is on the bit, he's already shot in the neck. The dog is but he's still taking care of business. And now John's having a gunfight with the second suspect and he gets hit in the hand, transitions to his other hand and ends up taking down the suspect, and then Mark Mooring shot one of them two and then Liberty was still on the bike finally released and is led out right there. Oh god, so she died. And that dog was really sad because he raised that dog pup. It was one of the dogs he raised from a good breeder and trained all you did, all the training. We've had dogs stabbed. We had a dog, really nice dog apprehended somebody in a bunch of inside of a building and the guy pulled out a knife and stabbed him. 01:41:07 Speaker 2: Killed it, killed him. 01:41:09 Speaker 3: There was another one. We ended up actually changing policy on this one. Salabadaca had a dog or a Newton a vision and very sad too. He had a really good dog, Marco. This dog was a nice dog. A lot of apprehensions been in gunfights with him. And they had a guy under the crawl space and he was wanted for like a burglary or something like a low great felon. He wouldn't come out, and this when we changed our tactics, you know. So he sent his dog under the house. Well, the guy was ready for it, and he wrapped himself with an army jacket. He took the bite. He had a screwdriver and he shanked him behind his head several times and Sal heard the whining dog came off, the bidy came out, and then he's in his arms like, you know, laying there. It was kind of neat because the airship they would never do this today. The airship now, this is a you know, a rough area of Newton Division residential area. I think it was like gauge and it was a fiftieth in some street Broadway or something. The airship landed in the middle of the street, picked the dog up and flew him to the vet in West La. Oh really pretty badass? Do No, he died. Yeah, we all showed up at the vet and seals and tears. You know, that's a hardcore guy and he's crying. 01:42:29 Speaker 2: But they get guys get closer. 01:42:31 Speaker 3: Yeah. I cried like a baby when my dog passed away at home. He got blown and I had my two boys with me, and I'm like Jesus, losing my shit. 01:42:40 Speaker 1: So yeah, so what's your business now? 01:42:43 Speaker 3: Man? So I do I do a lot of you know, I started my business, you know, like in twenty ten, and basically we were getting Even before I started my business, we would get called to help other agencies do training. It would be on duty stuff. It was just kind of mundane tactics and stuff like that. But then I noticed as I was training, I couldn't do it. When I started my business, I wanted to offer advanced tactical training. That was kind of my thing. But I soon found out that I couldn't because I started in twenty ten, because most apartments weren't doing anything what we were doing. They weren't doing off lead work, they weren't using the caller like I use it. The caller was more used like a punishment device and not a way to communicate, which you probably heard that from other guys right in the bird world, you know, not using the caller properly causing all kinds of issues. There was a lot of that going on. So I developed the knee Caller Course, a five day course for units to get the dogs to work off lead and do it the right. 01:43:45 Speaker 2: Way, give them directions from a college. 01:43:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, and just I got to the point where I developed the class over a period of time through some trials and tribulations that I got to really solid class now that I can take ten guys and get them pretty much going as long as they're certified the street. So that's primarily what I do. But I also have contracts with a few agencies that I do their maintenance training. Okay, and but I'm slowing down, you know, I'm pushing sixty nine now and my wife wants me to not be gone so much. 01:44:15 Speaker 2: You don't deal in dogs, I have. 01:44:18 Speaker 3: I don't do that. I have done some patrol classes, but I'm pretty expensive, so it's really not you know, for my time. They can probably do a better job going to a vendor and getting their patrol done in a group of guys. 01:44:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, what's the name of your how do you work? 01:44:35 Speaker 3: Just under dog roller tactical canine tactical tactical K nine And uh, yeah, it's going good. It's been a great it's been a great, been a great, great career, great job. And I love what I'm doing. 01:44:47 Speaker 2: So and and just to be clear, you keep a couple of pet dogs around. 01:44:51 Speaker 3: And I keep a couple of pet dogs around. Yeah they're painting in the butt. But yeah, trying to do a little more traveling now and all that stuff. But and I got I brought two other guys on that are going to be doing a lot more work so I can field more stuff. Guys that I trust that are going to do the same thing I do. 01:45:08 Speaker 2: Do you ever think about raising a bird dog? 01:45:11 Speaker 3: No, but I've worked with them. It's pretty interesting. 01:45:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd be interested to see if like, I'd be interested to see if you you. 01:45:19 Speaker 2: Know, if you worked with a bird dog, what the result would be. 01:45:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a lot of the concepts are probably And I've worked with them with the Marines, I learned a lot how they worked them. In fact, I ah doing the bomb dogs doing the bomb dogs, and we talked a lot about that, Like here's a quick story when I first saw them working in Pendleton and then I did some work in Campla June. But they were doing. What they were doing is we're teaching their dog to go out and do the left and right hand. Soon those commands dog turn around, sid cast them left and right about one hundred and fifty hundred meters out. And they were using a reward system. And the reward system Tritronics used to make before it became a garment, they used to make a bird launcher or Yeah, what it would do is it would it would be you could hide it, put the bird in there in a cage, remotely press it, bird comes. 01:46:08 Speaker 2: Out, you know a bird bird. 01:46:09 Speaker 3: Yeah, bird launcher and for I guess the bird dog guys re using it. Well, they took that same concept and they would put a toy in there, all right, so the bomb odors over here. That's hidden over here, so the dog would alert a passive alert because it's a bomb. They would just sit there and wait and then boom. Pay them. Toy goes up in the air and to get paid. That's the marker and all that I'm watching them do this. I go, well, you know, do you have any other method of paying? I said, is that is that the marker called paying payment? You're paying them, Yeah, pay the pay the dog. Pay the dog, especially in detection, pay him he's on order, throw the ball on top of his head, so he gets the marker. So he goes, oh yeah, yeah, works great. I go, well, I see a problem. I said, your dogs are alerting on the bird launcher because the because the picture right. Oh no, no, I go, let's do an experiment. I go, put that bird launcher thirty yards over here or twenty yards away from the bomb the source what you want to find. And every one of those fuckers they went in and they fringed, and they they got the bomb oder, but they left it and final on the bird launcher because they know. So I said, you know, you've got to You've got to vary everything right now. One way to counter it, which they actually do now, is if you had like ten bird launchers and have the bomb oder here so that they can't just find one. The primary scent is going to be the bomb odor. And there's a lot of a lot of things that guys do where they mess things up like that. They don't realize that they use one thing to bridge something, but then it costs them in another way, you know what I mean. 01:47:56 Speaker 2: And part of your work is coming in troubleshooting. 01:47:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, you can troubleshoot that stuff exactly. Sometimes handlers don't even know. I mean, simple little things like marking behavior. I mean, you know, you'll get I'll see a dog doing a guy doing obedience with a dog, and every time he puts them on a sit, he sits and he jumps up in his face. And I said, well, you don't want him want to sol it down right, you don't want that to happen. But what he does is what he does is I watched him working them. The dog would sit and then every time he sits, he pays him with the toy to jump up. And well, that's what he's doing, So stop get rid of that ball too much ballwork too, That's another thing. So you can identify things like that they don't even know. I even told guys when I was working a dog, just to drop your ego. I says, look, I got a problem with this dog. What am I doing because this? And he says, you know, Doug you're doing X, Y and Z. Really I didn't even realize it, you know, So you just got to drop the ego and figure out that, you know, you're doing something innately that you're not even paying attention to that is causing a bad reward for the dog or a bad marker. So sometimes it's good for people to evaluate you, you know, like we're doing e caller work and we have this out here, and you know, you'll see dogs really quick. It's like in a dark environment, and they'll pick up on it and they'll get maybe not even get hit with the stimulation, but when you call them off the bike, they're going to the guy holding the caller. Really yeah, so then you got to hide it or everybody has. 01:49:26 Speaker 2: A tune in weird weird associations. 01:49:29 Speaker 3: AFT man, you paint that picture and you've got to be careful what picture you're painting. You always got to be aware of that, you know. And a new handler has a hard time because you know, I mean, I'm trained thousands and thousands of dogs and that's why they hire me because I can see those things right away. But it wasn't always that way, you know. It just took a lot of experience. It's good. 01:49:50 Speaker 2: Well, Doug Roller, thanks for coming on the show. 01:49:51 Speaker 3: Man a pleasure, Thank you having me, and thank you all the people I know out there. 01:49:56 Speaker 1: Well, I bet you're going to get some emails people want are going to ask you a bunch of dog questions. 01:50:00 Speaker 3: Man, Well, it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure meeting you, and especially a shout out to the Task Force heroes. That's how we meet. 01:50:09 Speaker 2: Well, Task Force heroes. 01:50:10 Speaker 3: Shane Shane Yate does a great job. You know, my my buddy j D. That got me to go. God bless you. So thank you for coming on. Man, all right, thank you