What A Fine Mess

Last weekend I came to the realization that the ugly shed behind my house was not going to magically fall down and disappear. Last weekend I also realized that I had some frustration left over from the work week that needed to be dealt with. Combine those two with a sledge hammer. And I got this:

The shed was not big and it was standing on its last legs, after being attacked by various wood eating insects throughout the years and the blizzards of this past winter. And I had so much fun knocking the crap out of it and bringing it down. After I took out the front wall and one side wall (and removing a window pane without breaking the glass!), there was a strip of metal attached to the very top of the roof that was flopping around in the breeze, so I grabbed a hold of it.

Pulled the metal to the rear and flipped the roof right off the walls and it rumbled to the ground with a great crash, with me laughing madly as it did so.

Then my dogs got to play on the mini rubble pile, mimicking a very small portion of what Finn dealt with in New Orleans. Finn was not impressed.

Even Dexter got into the spirit of things, pretending he wants to be an Urban SAR cat.

After I got finished with it

the sad reality was now that it was down, the next step was loading it on to my truck to take to the landfill. I stopped laughing.

Fearless yet Stupid

About 6 months ago I took in an adorable multi-toed orange kitten I named Dexter. And immediately fell in love with him because of his huge, cute mitten like feet and his complete lack of fear. He was only 3 months old and tipped the scales at only 3 lbs when I got him.

I was concerned that the older cats would beat the tar out of him when I tried to introduce him to the pride. An unfounded worry I quickly found out. He walked through my door, sauntered over to my alpha cat, Trouble, while she was eating and slapped her on the head so he could eat her food. WTH! Trouble’s expression was priceless.

From the very beginning, he would walk with me down to the barn, in and amongst the galloping pack of very large Labs that I have.

If any one of them would happen to step on him, he would immediately slap them across the face to remind them to watch were they put their paws. I guess he got tired of the dogs stepping on him so he runs as fast as he can in front us and zooms up a tree, to look at us as the pack passes underneath him.

The first week after he arrived, when he realized that he could follow me to the barn, it became a nightly ritual. One night, Ben, my newest Thoroughbred, finished with his grain and moved off to get to the hay I’d put out for them. I wasn’t really paying attention as I was very tired and it was after dark, when I noticed something on Ben’s back. Yep, Dexter had climbed the fence, got up on Ben’s back and was going for a ride! He didn’t seem that concerned and was almost curled up, asleep on him. He’s developed a small modicum of personal safety and hasn’t tried that stunt since then.

In the big snows of this past winter my other cats stuck close to the house. Fearless Boy was not discouraged nor defeated by the drifts of snow. He waded through the thigh high drifts down to the barn and back. Although, after struggling through the snow the first couple of trips he made sure to follow in my footsteps.

However, now that Snowmagedon is but a distant memory, he insists on going on walks with me and the dogs.

I kind of like having him follow us along, over hill and dale, marking our progress with high pitched screams at random points during the hike. The best time to hear him is when we cross a creek. His histronics are particularly piercing then.

He has an interesting way of walking because of all the extra toes he’s got that probably get in the way of a normal stride.

Actually, he doesn’t really ever walk, but seems to saunter from place to place. The vocal talent of this boy is impressive. What he lacks in range, he more than makes up for in volume. When he’s not paying attention to where we are going and he wanders off a little to do his own thing, he uses his voice kind of like sonar. He’ll scream and what for an answering call from me, and then tries to triangulate my position. Problem is, I’ve quit calling out to him when he gets lost. So a couple of times during our hikes, he wouldn’t cross the stream and would stand there trying find a dry way across, yelling at me not to leave him stranded. If he wants to get off the porch and run with the big dogs, I am not helping him. It only takes him overnight to get back home. But his screams can become deafening, even out in the woods. I am surprised that he hasn’t been eaten yet by a fox or coyote. The noise he makes is a distress sound, which should call all the prey animals in to see if they can pick up an easy tasty snack. But, he’s always made it home.

My stupid yet fearless Dexter

I find dead people...

Actually, I don’t, but I have couple of dogs that do the finding for me. I’ve been doing search and rescue(SAR) for close to 15 years now and my dogs and I have yet to find a live person. When I started in search and rescue with my local team, Blue and Gray SAR Dogs, I had no idea that we could use dogs to find dead people. Ben, my first SAR dog, made his one and only find up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. A suicide. Then my next dog, Finn, who is certified as a live find SAR dog, kept finding dead people. So when the Virginia Search and Rescue Council designed their Human Remains Detection Dog Standards, Finn was the first one to pass.

Finn’s ability has taken me places I never imagined I would go. We were in New Orleans after Rita and Katrina.

In the 9th Ward after Katrina and Rita

And in the summer of 2009, we were sent to the jungles of Guyana, South America to look for the flight crew of a plane that was missing.

Trying to get an injured Finn back to the forward base camp on the last day

And too many other local searches to keep track of. Our latest searches have been for a missing college student in Richmond, Virginia and victims of a serial killer in North Carolina.

Friends and family always thought I was a little off. But the fact that I now have 2 cadaver dogs and am in the process of training a third one, has merely confirmed that suspicion. I am a little off. I ask pregnant friends if I can have their placentas to train with. I actually had one friend offer it to me before she told me she was pregnant. She told me this story when she went in to the hospital to have her first child. While she was being wheeled into the delivery room, she told the nurses that she had a request that they may think is a little weird. The nurses assured her that nothing could surprise them, that they’ve heard it all. Well, she requested that they save her placenta so she could give it to me to train my cadaver dogs. The nurses paused a moment, and replied that, yep, that was one that they never heard before. My friend’s only request to me, was that the placenta not still be at her house when she got home with her new baby. It wasn’t.

Training a dog for this kind of work is not easy. It takes imagination and experience to design training scenarios that mimic searches I’ve been on. The tough thing is, every search is different and just when I think I’ve seen it all and trained for it, something brand new pops up. Finn and I have had to deal with many different scenes that I couldn’t train for. A most interesting one was a house fire. My training director at the time told me that unless the house was a log cabin with a tin roof we should be able to find fragments of bones, especially long bones such as the femur, and teeth. A log cabin with tin roof acts as a crematorium, and temperatures can get high enough to completely burn bone and teeth. Usually nothing is left, but a regular house burns unevenly and rarely does the temperature of the fire get high enough to burn bone.

We drove over an hour and half to get to the site of this fire. Then we had to take a tiny two track down into a ravine and then up the ridge to the other side. We rounded the curve in the two track and what should greet us, but a completely burnt out house that started out as a log cabin with a tin roof. Nothing was left but a huge pile of ash. Finn ran over the scene checking everything as if were another training day. Snorting often to clean out his nose and me washing his mouth out with the water bottle. He was eventually able to tell us where the elderly lady was when she passed and also where her ashes had been dragged out while the fire fighters dug through the remains of the house looking for her body. But there was nothing left of her.

I was on another search with my other dog, Cora:

in another state.We were looking for a college student that was missing and might have been buried at a construction site. This site was in the middle of a sketchy neighborhood, sketchy to the point that I had to have a police escort when I was walking the dogs prior to getting to work at the site. We were surrounded by news trucks and there were actually two news helicopters hovering over us as well. Cora was ecstatic to be the first one to work; she was as high as kite with excitement when I let her out of the truck and put her collar with the bell on her. Within the first 100 yards she does her indication, and quick as I can, I throw the ball at her before she can add a bark, because I don’t want the cameras on us! Come to find out, a man had been stabbed about 5 weeks earlier and bled out on that spot. We didn’t find the college student that site.

When my dog makes a find, I am thrilled. They’ve done what they’ve been trained for and have successfully completed their task. Then it is up to the police to finish the job. I get to go home and my dogs get a hamburger from Wendy’s. I get tired of people telling me that the dogs get depressed when they keep finding dead people. That depression comes straight down the leash and the dog reacts to the handler. Dogs don’t care if who they are looking for is alive or dead. All they want is the reward after making the find.

People ask me all the time, “how can you do this kind of work? Doesn’t it make you sad?” My reply to them is there is nothing I could do to change what has happened but I can certainly help the grieving family find some kind of resolution, even if it means a funeral. Then they don’t have to wonder about it for the rest of their lives.

I’ve been absent for the past several weeks trying to get ready for these guys:

The end of January Cora came into heat and I bred her to a beautiful yellow Lab out of Maryland, Ch Gateway’s Nothin’ But Trouble. He’s won many dog shows and he’s got a great personality. So step by step we got closer to her due date, which was supposed to be April 2^nd. I could tell, almost immediately, that she was pregnant. She thickened up quickly, got some rosey nipples and then started moving very carefully. But, I wouldn’t know for sure until about day 28 to day 35 whether she was truly pregnant. On day 35, I got to see this when we ultrasounded her!

I didn’t look for how many pups she had, because ultrasound puppy counts are notoriously inaccurate. All I wanted to see was one fetus that said she was pregnant. And I did. I continued to train her and take her on searches. But, about five weeks into her pregnancy, she turned to give me “the look”. It was the same one she gave me the last time she was pregnant. It said, I am done, my body is too big to this anymore and I just want to go home to the couch. So that’s what she did. Just about the same time, though, my search team started getting call after call after call for searches. I went on 4 cadaver searches with Finn in 4 weeks. And one of my other team mates made her first live find, of a little girl that went missing overnight down in Bedford, VA.

One week prior to her scheduled due date this what she looked like:

And the waiting continued. On March 26^th, I took a radiograph her to do a puppy count. I counted 7 pups, but others counted as many as 10 puppies.

The weekend of March 27^th, I had a friend help me move the behemoth of a whelping box into my laundry room, having been turned into the puppy room for the duration. I moved everything out of the laundry room and scrubbed everything down. Cleaned the stall mats that I put down to cushion the box away from the floor, dragged them in and then the box was placed on top.Nearly put my back out doing all that. I wanted to cut a piece of linoleum to put on the bottom of the box, and I thought I had a couple of days to complete that task. Oops, though, that was not to be.

I went on my morning rounds, seeing several sick animals. All the while just wanting to get home to check on her. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but she was so close and she had acted a little off first thing in the morning. Her main oddity was the fact that she ate breakfast a little more slowly than what was normal for her. She wasn’t nesting, because nesting for her means ripping things to shreds. None of that happened. So I left feeling pretty secure that it wasn’t going to happen today.

When I got home, I was greeted at the door by a very worried Finn and a couch that was doubling as a whelping box! Two pups already born, a mess on the couch and a very distressed and upset Cora. I picked up both pups, one still attached to the placenta and the other not breathing. I wasn’t able to save the pup that wasn’t breathing, so I concentrated on the one that was still with us. Over the next 3 hours I helped her have another five pups, one of which didn’t make it either. He got his head stuck in the way of another pup that was trying to get out and had his oxygen cut off. The rest of the whelping was uneventful and Cora and I ended up with five beautiful pups, all yellow.

Six days later everyone is doing well and all have more than doubled their birth weight. Even my runt.