Sheila Goffe, VP of Government Relations of the American Kennel Club, joins Cheddar Reveals to discuss the efficacy of police, military, and other working dogs, and how they're trained.

Cheddar Reveals

The World of Working Dogs

Alright, so working dogs are more than impressive. They are necessary and helpful for several professions joining us. Now is Sheila Goff VP of government relations of the american kennel club, Sheila, outside of service dogs, helping people who need it. What are, what are their types of kind of working dogs are there? We have just an incredible variety of working dogs. We see everything from your traditional types of working dogs which are hunting and hurting guarding. Sledding. You talked about the Iditarod earlier. Um, but now what we're able to do is utilize a lot of those features of characteristics, particularly in purpose bred dogs to detect certain odors, explosives detection dogs are incredibly effective at um, finding explosives that cannot even be found by any kind of technology that man has developed. So truly there's no better way to send explosives. Um, and that's a matter of national security than using a dog. I think sometimes we lump we lump in um, you know, government trained dogs or government utilized dogs into one category, but there's a difference here, right. What's the difference between like a police and, and military trained dogs? Right. Right. Um, so actually the actual training of the dogs at a young age is very, very similar. And then what they go on to do later can be different. So as we train puppies, Casey's Patriotic puppy program is actually involved in teaching readers and puppy raisers how to raise a dog up through About one Year of age to create all those foundation skills and then you divide into various different um, specialties kind of think of, hey, there's junior college or primary school and then you specialize later. So the military working dogs may be going on for very advanced explosives detection work at the same time, you may have a, a dog, a puppy even in that same litter, um, that will be trained to be a service dog or be trained to be, um, a search and rescue, um, lost person type of search dogs. I'm curious, you know, you think about like a human because you, you kind of paralleled it to like going to college and, and specializing, are there dogs that show signs of being better at one thing versus another? Like let's say I show signs of being better at broadcast versus, you know, being better at being a doctor or something like that. Is that a similar kind of thing that happens? We Yes, exactly. We see that from a young age, we really look at the dog's personality, those, those important characteristics. What's their environmental stability look like? A big difference is that drive, You see sporting dogs like labs and golden retrievers, they want to work all day, that this incredible drive and that makes them wonderful dogs for explosives detection, police work. Um, the same breed of dog, you don't want quite so much drive to say if you're working with service dog, you want them to be a little more low key and how effective we were talking about military and police trained dogs, How effective are they at their jobs incredibly. Um, you know, as I mentioned before, there is absolutely no mechanism that is more effective, especially with explosives detection, scent detection than the canine nose. You know, we think we've come so far with our technology, but the reality is we've just begun to really learn what what our canine noses I can do for us. And in terms of getting a dog to that point where it is extremely effective. What is, what does the training look like for for detection dogs? Well, the, I have to go back to the foundation. The fundamentals are incredibly important because that's, you know, that's the basis upon which everything happens. And then from there you go on to advanced training and typically after a year of age, these dogs do specialize. So you're going to have a military say training where you might have a dog that's going to be trained to actually go into a potential minefield and, and sent for explosives. They're, they're going to be trained to work off lead, um, in a, in a, in a highly volatile situation. Um, they're gonna be trained to send a detection. Um, some of these are explosives that, you know, they're improvised, these change constantly. So, so there's a high level of, of odor discrimination going on there as well as the need for environmental stability and even things are as important as how does that dog indicate if you have a dog going to say a minefield, you want it to be said. It just said to indicate you don't want to digging. You're looking at an explorer, a narcotics dog. They very often a paw if when they indicate on narcotics you definitely do not want a dog going into a minefield and pawing at an explosive. I would hope so. I mean, that's a good kind of thing to point out there. I'm curious about medical detection dogs. What's the training like for them say, you know, to help save lives? So their training is based on for the detection, it's based on chemistry, body chemistry changes in humans. So it's really, again, it's a different type of, of scent discrimination. Looking for changes in body chemistry, cortisol slide blood different um, chemical profiles that they'll be specifically trained on. So, for example, if you have like a diabetes alert dog, somebody who might have issues with hypoglycemia, we're going to be looking at a dog that's trained to detect the chemical changes that occur, say before that person knows when they're starting to go into a low blood sugar. And so, and then they're trying to paw or poke or nudge and say, hey, you gotta pay attention to this. It's so fascinating to think that dogs can do this and that the power of their noses that significant. She'd like to talk to you for hours on this. But we only have, um, you know, half hour show. Really appreciate your insight. Sheila Goff, VP of government relations of the american kennel club. Thank you.