A View From the Glen

Waiting in the Wings

2011-12-30T14:32:00.003-05:00

I know mothers are supposed to love their children equally, but I also know in their heart of hearts they have their favorite. I have four Labradors that I love dearly, but it is not hidden by any stretch of the imagination that Finn is my heart dog. Sometimes I feel like he takes up one half of my heart.

There is little room for the others that want to show me in their uncomplaining way that they can love me as much as Finn does. That they will work just as hard, just as long, and just as completely as he does.

When I got Cora as a little 9 week old pup from her breeder, she was second to Finn because he was still in the prime of his working career. We still had our adventures in New Orleans after Rita and Katrina and the doomed trek through the jungles of Guyana in front of us.

Cora at 10 and 14 weeks

She and I worked steadily through her training. Taking Finn out when the calls came, and leaving her at home. We trained through her little idiosyncrasies that, only with consistent training, will I come to understand and become a partner to her.

She easily breezed through her certification process, with only one hiccup: at her first time for her above ground test, she ate one of the gauze pads a source was on. I was mortified, since she never gave me a clue she’d do something like that. The evaluator, on the other hand, was about to toss her cookies thinking that Cora was going need surgery from a blockage from the gauze. However, that too, shall pass! I was able to reassure the evaluator several days later that she didn’t need to worry any more.

Everything else was perfect, so we went home to work on that little problem (I believer it is genetic, because her son had the same problem with his first test!) She and I got some real life training before she finished her certification when, as an exercise, several cadaver dog handlers were called to help find the rest of a decomposed body in southside Virginia. The police already had all they needed and we were offered the chance to get some real work. Three weeks pregnant with her first litter she made her first find, a clavicle and part of a shoulder blade!

We finished up her certification when she was about to turnthree.

But, I still took Finn first when we got called. Cora wasalways back up. Around 2008, Finn wasstill recovering from several nasty shoulder injuries and wasn’t quite back upto speed. So with Finn 8 years old, Ifinally had reality give me a hard slap. My yellow dog wasn’tindestructible. Time to give thosewaiting patiently in the wings a chance to shine.

And shine she did. The first search I made the very difficult decision to run Cora first, was a publicity rodeo. We were briefedthat this was a search under the radar; that we should be able to get into andout of this small construction site quickly. It was just me and another dog handler. She was going to run her dog in the half constructed buildings and Coraand I were given the task of the mud pit outside of the half built frames. It was a half acre site surrounded by chainlink fencing, enormous earth moving equipment parked helter skelter, piles ofconstruction debris (lordy, do I hate rebar…), mounds of other scary stuff andpools of water that could very easily cover deep pits.

Me and the other handler park at the site, and I get outCora to give her a potty break. I get nomore than three steps away from the truck and I’ve got a police officer stuckto my side like glue. He informs me that“this isn’t a very nice neighborhood” and I really shouldn’t wander off withoutsome assistance. Hm, this is turning outa little more interesting than I thought.

The two of us were standing on a large mound of dirt next tothe construction entrance, when we both look up at the sound of “whoop, whoop,whoop”. What should we see, not one butTWO news helicopters and then all the news vans start pulling up next to thechain link fence surrounding the site. Not sure how that can be considered under theradar anymore:

Charlotte search

Quite the scenario for her first solo search!

The other handler and I look at each other, and weshrug. She gets her dog out first andheads for the dwellings. And I get Coraout, put her search collar on, shake the bell a little and “Go Find!”

Thirty seconds later, she plops her ass on the ground, WTH? and I throw her the ball to fill her mouth soshe can’t bark.

I don’t want any of the cameras pointed towards me until wefigured out what just happened. Me and my walker turn to each other openmouthed. This was supposed to be a burial situation and she never made a moveto dig. Our minder is completely unfazed. Cora’s a cadaver dog and she’s supposedto find dead people, so what’s the big deal?

Come to find out that a man had been murdered on that spot,knifed and bled out, 3 weeks prior. Wenever found what we were looking for though. And the guy is still missing.

Falling down buildings, dark crawl spaces covered incobwebs, junk, debris, back firing cars, heavy equipment, crowds now that isher element. The more noisy anddistracting the environment, the happier she is.

I trust Cora implicitly now. And it started with that search in North Carolina. She has slowly, steadily and consistentlyshown me that she is just as much a partner in this world of search and rescue asFinn. I still miss having the yellow dogalong with me, but I don’t feel like I am “missing” anything when Cora gets outof the truck.

Daring Darcy

2011-11-28T21:42:00.001-05:00

Darcy finally got completely certified in August.

She’d finished all the big tests in May, butwe still had to jump through the rest of the hoops of obedience, agility andtemperament testing. I was dragging myfeet because once Darcy was certified, Finn would really be retired and Iwasn’t sure I could actually handle that. Anyway, as Hurricane Irene was moving up the coast in August my team,Blue and Gray SAR Dogs, were put on stand-by for possible deployment. I couldn’t go unless Darcy was certified;that was all the incentive I needed. Atlunch, the Friday before Irene was scheduled to hit Virginia Beach, Darcy and Iwere getting the last little check mark we needed to finish our obedience. The five minute stay. In the parking lot of Steven Toyota, inHarrisonburg.

Darcy is not a patient dog. Particularly not with cars buzzing here and there. People walking to and fro. And especially not with the bushes rustlingnext to her. Thank God we didn’t have todo the AKC sit stay. Because, she laiddown, sat up, laid down again. And satup again. But didn’t move from herspot. The third time was the charm forher (this was the third time we were trying to get that five minute stay checkmark), and she and I passed.

Then we waited and waited and waited for the word to get onthe road to the shore. Thankfully, Irenewas being the typical fickle woman, and only side swiped the Beach rather thanhitting it head on, so we weren’t needed. So we waited more for that first call out.

On October 2^nd, Deacon and his mom Cora wherewith me at Hone Quarry doing some water training.

While we were training that Sunday, an unlucky private planewas flying close by on a course from southern Virginia over the AlleghenyMountains to its final stop in Pennsylvania. It was raining that day and the trees in the higher elevations of themountains that ringed the quarry lake were rimmed in ice. Quite pretty to look. Deadly for the plane. It disappeared from the radar around the timewe were finishing up and loading the boat on to its trailer.

We got the call Tuesday evening to meet with the rest of theteam and other dogs and handlers from several other Virginia SAR teams at 7AMWednesday morning in the northwest corner of Rockingham County. There was only a skeleton crew available forplanning, and none of them were dog savy. Then the head guy got a bright idea and snagged a few dog handlers fromeach team, told us what we were going to be searching, then left it up to us toplan the dog tasks.

Our search area was the entire Gobblebark Mountain. We split the mountain we were to search intosmaller areas, 8 task areas in all. Theeasy task I’d devised first, was snatched up quickly by another dog team and Iwas left with the task at the very other end of Gobblebark Mountain. According to the map we had, there shouldhave been a two track we could drive on that would get us close to the start ofour task. This little piece of shortlived joy just reinforced the lesson we were taught as young orienteer’s- maps lie. Especially about man-made stuff. There wasn’t a road, let alone a two track inthe area; there was just a path. Aboulder strewn, tree blocked path that not even an ATV could get through.

Do you see a trail through here?

We had to hike to the end of this “path” to even start thetask. Darcy was overjoyed that she gotto run free for the whole time. Shefound the teams that started before us several times. She ran up the side of the mountain to find ateam that was already in their sector. And she kept stealing one of my team mates gloves out of his back pocketwhen he wasn’t paying attention.

We had no radio communication, even with Civil Air Patrol inthe sky to relay for us. We did our radiocheck at our trucks, had one short communication a short distance in and thennothing until we got back to the trucks seven hours later. However, we could hear what was going on overthe radio at certain points. Actually,we mostly heard what was going on in West Virginia and their search operationsnear Peru (pronounced PEE-rou J). We even could hear the Hardy Countysheriffs office. But nothing from our own base. Twice during trek to just get tothe start of the task, a Medi-vac helicopter was needed to extract twosearchers on the West Virginia search teams. One was heart problems and I think the other was a broken leg. Thank goodness we didn’t have any injuries onany of our teams.

Two and half hours later we finally got to the GPS way pointthat showed us the drainage we needed to start up. And up and up and up wewent. All the way to the top. Then all the way down to the bottom intoHardy County, in West by God Virginia.

The trip to the top was breath taking. Literally. I had to stop about 5 times to catch my breath. Darcy on the other hand, probably ran up anddown the mountain 3 or 4 times in the time it took me and my team to reach thetop. I had two skinny country guys fromour local ground pounding team and one VA State Police officer with me. The skinny guys ran circles around me and thepolice officer. The police officerdidn’t have to stop as much as I did, but he wasn’t running up the side of themountain either.

Darcy having fun "finding" my walkers

This guy could run circles around me, while climbing the mountain

Even out in the middle of nowhere, there was always evidenceof a human presence. There was a brokendown cart with bicycle wheels, the ubiquitous glass liquor bottles

and even this little trail marker up on top of the mountain:

We ended up sliding down Gobblebark into Hardy County,WV.

It is not easy walking a contourline in that kind of elevation. As muchas I wanted to skirt around the back of the mountain to the other side, myaching ankles and knees told me it was going to be easier leaf skiing down intothe hollow and find the right drainage to go back over the mountain. Darcy was still bouncing between me and myteam mates, just out of her skin excited she got to be the only dog out withthree humans to watch her strut her stuff.

This search ended up being about 7 hours long. We travelled about 6-7 miles, had over 1000foot changes in elevation, and only were active in our task area for about 2hours.

The plane was eventually found near Peru, West Virginia. Ironically, the end of our sector was closer to the crashsite than it was to our trucks.

I was dead, but Darcy… she was ready for another 7 hours offun on the mountain. Not bad for her veryfirst search.

Hitting the Wall

2011-11-18T13:42:00.001-05:00

I’ve been stepping up the pressure on Deacon as we getcloser to his certification tests.

Deacon has got many flashes of incredible brilliance,interspersed with times of a southern California surfer dude attitude. That’s the attitude where “I’ve worked longenough, it’s time to go home”. Not whatyou want when you are in the middle of the woods, two hours into a five hourtask.

Just about every one of my dogs hits this stage in theirtraining. This is when training changesfrom fun and games into a job that has to be done. I call it hitting the wall. The tasks move from being able to fall into ascent pool to tricky scenting conditions like swirling breezes, overlappingscent pools, buried sources and trying to extend the time between placement of source and theactual running of the task. I do this to start making Deacon think. To make him start developing some problemsolving ability. I also move from justone or two sources to many multiples because, contrary to popular thinking,dogs know how to count. And Deacongot to the point that after locating two sources, his brain went into neutral.

There is such a thing as mental endurance, or as I readsomewhere, nose time. It is the time adog is effectively using its nose to detect the target scent. This also plays into the “hitting the wall”scenario.

To me, developing physical endurance is the easy part. It's the mental endurance that is difficult. Deacon has good physicalendurance, he can run beside a bike for two miles, can hike three to fourshours or go on a fast trail ride with me on the horse for a couple ofhours. However, when I first startedpushing him, he was only effectively using his nose for about 30 minutes at atime. The 30 minute timer went off and, boom, it was like a switchgot flipped off. To the uninitiated, hecontinued to run around acting like he was actively searching. To my eye, though, he really wasn’tworking anymore. His whole demeanor changed. He would work a bit manically, his nose was on the ground, snort like apig pretending he was working, but he just wasn’t getting anywhere. Just running around frantically, pushing his nose under this log or that clump of grass.

And that is what hitting the wall looks like. It is messy and ugly and sometimes you just want to throw your hands up, march your dog back to the truck and head home. The job was no longer fun or easy, it was WORK. Almost every dog gets to this point in theircareer. And almost every dog comesthrough the other side with a renewed devotion to the task, to the point thatfinding that source is the be all, end all, of their life. It may not be “fun” anymore, but it becomesan avocation, a passion that they would rather do with their human partnerunder any kind of circumstance.

This change in attitude does not come quickly nor does it come easily. Ittakes a dedication on the part of the human partner to remember the spark thatmade them pick this particular canine partner. To remember what their tired confused canine partner was like, to coachthem, and condition them. So the dog can come out the other side. During this time is when the true partnership develops. You see how your dog learns, and you develop training strategies that compliment his style. Your dog trusts you.

Ultimately, it is remembering how exciting this journey isgoing to be with your canine partner at your side. That is what keeps you plugging away. Through the ups and especially through thedowns. It is tedious and it is boring, this training to set a work ethic. But, it will come. That excitement, that joy, that devotion tothe job. We will get a partner thatworks WITH us, not FOR us.

By sticking with it, when it is work and not fun, showing to our dogs that we will stand with them no matter what, we get adog that will perform in the rain, the snow, disasters, the heat, brush sothick a human couldn’t walk through it upright, all night, then all day the nextday. They want to do this with their humanpartner because it is the reason they live, to find the source and show it to their partner.

And it is all the better because we are ateam.

Mother Nature and Her Temper

2011-10-30T21:18:00.000-04:00

I love fall. I lovethe crispness that comes with the cooling temperatures. Such a relief from summer’s oppressive heatand humidity. This year though, fall isacting like a recalcitrant two year old that doesn’t want to go to bed. September 21^st was the first dayof fall with equal amounts of daylight and night time. Once those nights get longer, though, MotherNature is by turns grumpy and glorious.

What I don’t like, especially for my horses, are the wildswings we’ve had so many of this season. From 80 degree days to 25 degree nights. This time of fall they aren’t ready for that. Fall starts for the horses around the end ofAugust. Their coats lose the slick shine of their summer do and edges towards asoft velvet plush that hints at the thick hairiness of their winter coat. Horses don’t grow their coats in response to temperature;rather their coats thicken in reaction to the amount of daylight.

So in October, they don’t have their full coats and if itstarts raining or snowing when the temps dip below 30 degrees it can be brutalfor them.

Even more so because they won’t use the run in shed to staydry. That I will never understand. They’ve lived on pasture for the past 5 yearsand haven’t seen the inside of a stall that entire time. You’d think they would have figured out bynow that: roof=dry and dry=notfreezing. But, nope, they’d rathershiver standing under a pine tree.

I guess that’s what happens when a 1500 lbs body is pairedwith a brain the size of a grapefruit.

This past weekend though, was just a little over thetop. Thursday it was in the mid toupper 60’s, sunny and a sparkling fall day. On Friday, Mom Nature got a little grumpy and on Friday night she had afull blown temper tantrum. In the 30’s,6 inches of snow and to top it off, no electricity. And by Sunday, back into the 60’s and snowalmost completely melted.

Saturday during Mom Nature's temper tantrum

Sunday, after she smiled again:

I really, really, REALLY hope this is not a harbinger of things to come. It would almost make me want to move back into town.

Almost.

Head and Heart

2011-10-16T22:52:00.001-04:00

There comes a point in your working partners career when it is time to hang up the collar, put away the bell and let the youngin’s take the lead. Sounds easy. But it is a soul wrenching decision for me.

Finn came into my life, as a bouncing, rambunctious and annoying 9 week old puppy, after my old boy, Ben, destroyed his suspensory ligament in a back leg. I didn’t want Finn, didn’t need Finn and certainly didn’t think Finn could take Ben’s place. Finn didn’t take Ben’s place, because nobody could, he just squeezed himself into another part of my heart.

Matter of fact, I think he took over most of it. He and I have been through so much together, starting young. He was less than a year old when very early one morning, too early for the sun to be up, he crash landed on me while I was in bed. I was about to yell at him to get off of me, when I looked at my bedroom window and saw something my sleep befuddled mind couldn’t make sense of. The sun shouldn’t have been up and it certainly shouldn’t have been shining thorough that window… No, those were flames from the other side of my duplex that had made their way up the vinyl siding of my neighbor’s side. Good Morning!!

He got me up in time for me to get dressed, call 911 and make it out of the house with all the dogs. The house was completely destroyed, lost both of my cats and all because of a mentally deranged wanna be rent-a-cop. He poured a can of gas on my neighbors side of the duplex and lit it on fire.

Finn always worked WITH me, never FOR me and certainly never for himself. I trust him with my life, if I couldn’t quite make out a trail at night while it was raining and the fog moved in, I could follow his glowing collar and he always got me home. If I was cold he always curled up on my right side to keep me warm. If I was nervous, he leaned against me in comfort. When he is in the truck he’s got an unblinking stare that could put off the most determined of car jackers. He is bomb proof and nothing put him off his game.

He is a very serious dog. Not given to the normal rowdiness and silliness that marks the behavior of most Labs. However, he does have a game he likes to play with people that are afraid of dogs. When they aren’t looking, he’ll rush up behind them barking like a hound of hell, tail wagging and one ear cocked back at me. He wants to see how high he can make them jump. He can’t do it often, because they obviously don’t get the humor like he and I do, but when he does it is quite spectacular.

He did this to one of the porters that was carrying my gear in the jungles of Guyana, when he and I were down there looking for a lost plane. I finally had to yell some pretty explicit obscenities at him to make him stop after he made the poor man jump for the third time. It would have been completely in that porter’s rights to just dump my pack and make me carry it.

His first find was drowning that the police had been looking for more than three days. He found him in less than 10 minutes. His last task was in April, when he was just about to turn 11 years old, looking for a despondent in Goshen, VA.

But, now he slides a little too much coming down an embankment, and he is less sure of himself when working the pile. It is hard for my heart to agree with what my mind sees when he still goes on two mile bike rides, likes to go on trail rides and can still find cadaver sources quicker than my young ones.

So when the calls come, Darcy and Cora get in the truck with me

Cora

Darcy

and the old man has to stay home, breaking my heart and his.

Labrador RETRIEVER

2011-10-13T19:13:00.000-04:00

I’ve tried I don’t how many different times to write another entry for this blog after posting the one about Teagan. All have gone in the virtual circular file. It’s been 3 ½ months since she passed away and so much has happened here at Glendair, but I just haven’t had the heart to write about them.

I still miss her dearly and keep expecting her to come home from the trainers anyday, but my heart breaks just a little more each time when I remember she can’t come home again.

In August, the Deacon man got his chance to become a certified HRD (Human Remains Detection) dog for VDEM (Virginia Department of Emergency Management). He was amazing. He was spectacular. He was confident. And he was fast. He found the first source in a two acre task area in less than 3 minutes.

Then promptly brought back to me. That is an epic FAIL.

One thing we have drilled in our heads, is crime scene preservation. It does no good to find the remains and then move them around so the police officers can’t tell what happened. And it really doesn’t help if your dog does that and you then have to answer to the defense attorney. Yikes! I’d hate to see that dog handler.

Deacon is almost ready. Actually, after all the work I’ve put into him for the past 6 weeks I think he is ready. He hasn’t picked up a source in over a month. But, if I really think he is over that little problem and I feel over confident that he will NEVER do that again, Murphy will hit me smack in the face and undoubtedly, it will be another epic fail.

There is a reason Deacon is a Labrador RETRIEVER… and if he can he will.

Moving on

2011-07-23T23:17:00.000-04:00

On June 27th, 2011, my heart was split in two. My diva, my hard headed, independent beautiful little girl, Teagan, passed away in the night. She was 15 months old. The most probable cause was mesenteric torsion.

She was opinoniated, bossy, independent. She could do a mean alligator death roll when she didn't want to do what you asked her to do. And had an ego that knew no bounds.

She was only 15months old, but I remember more stories about her than all my other dogs combined, the trouble she would get herself into. As a young pup, maybe 10-12 weeks old, she decided that she didn't want to be walking over the creek on the bridge, she'd rather be in the creek. Problem was the bridge was about 4 feet above the creek bed. And there was no water in the creek. Not only did she jump, she leaped exuberantly high up in the air. The look on her face on the way down was priceless: Oh s**t, this is gonna hurt. Splat she landed, got a mouth full of rocks, shook it off and race off into the pasture to chase the big dogs.

She could play stick like none of my other dogs. Darcy is world class, but Teagan ran circles around her.

She and Deacon got real good at reducing reusing and recycling socks. He'd eat one, throw it up and she'd swallow it back down. Socks...mm, mm, good

She was fearless when it came to the retrieving games. The only problem was, she thought that since she worked so hard to get the bumper that it was her's. Unless there was a long line on her, you weren't getting it back. So she was sent off to big girl camp to learn that there are consequences for ignoring momma...

The first report I got from the trainer was all good. The second, kind of funny and glad I wasn't the one having to deal with her. She thought she could get a way with the crap I put up with. Unfortunately for her, the trainer is a former Marine Drill Master. At one point he told his wife to shut doors, close the windows and ignore what she heard coming from the kennel.

Remember her alligator death roll ability? The second day she was there, the trainer gave a leash correction, a little pop on the leash and collar. She threw herself on the ground and pitched a hissy fit that would have done a New York City fashionista wannabe proud. She rolled around and around and around on the end of the leash, until the trainer told her in no uncertain terms she was being stupid and that wasn't going to fly with him.

She still tested him though. One of the first things a retriever is taught is the "hold" command. The trainer opens the dog's mouth, places a wooden dowel in her mouth, closes her mouth and repeats "hold". Sounds simple, right? Try opening a dogs mouth when she is gritting her teeth together as hard as she can.

They got through the rough start and when I went to visit her, she most eager to stay with the trainer because she got to do a lot of fun things with him.

She was an awesome cadaver dog-in-training. More methodical and patient when trying to find the source than her older brother and her mother. I still remember at one training, only being able to see her butt as she tried to wiggle her way down into a pile of rocks to touch the source.

I will miss her. I will miss the incredible journey she and I were about to embark on. I'll miss seeing her get her first orange hunt test ribbon. I'll miss the satisfaction of her find some poor lost soul and give at least some peace of mind to a victims family.

Most of all I will miss her in the quiet of the evening when she falls asleep in my lap, belly up, feet stuck straight up in the air, and her head hanging over the arm of my chair, snoring gently as she recharges for her next adventure.

Good bye my fireball. You burned bright, hot and way too fast.

Evil Wee Woodland Beasties

2011-06-20T12:04:00.000-04:00

When out searching, I am always on the lookout for all the big beasties that can harm me and my canine partners. Lions, tigers and bears, oh my! Cora has the habit of finding bear dens, and once found one that was occupied! My teammates won’t let me live down what I looked like running away from the den. And all the occupant was doing was snoozing peacefully, its humungous head resting on its crossed paws.

We’ve run into a few snakes, and saw a few bobcats on the way to tasks.

But, it’s the wee beasties that drive me insane, especially in the summer time. There’s gnats, yellow jackets, black flies, deer flies, big black horse flies, little green horse flies, spiders, centipedes, millipedes just to name a few. All laughing at my attempts to prevent them from invading my eyes, my nose, biting my flesh, and drinking my blood. Over the weekend, as I was hiding for a team mate, I put my hand down as I was sitting next to a tree. And immediately felt like I’d stuck my hand in a flame. Pulled my hand back and it was already starting to swell. Fortunately, it didn’t go much beyond my thumb and now I have a pretty rash! My team mate and I think it was this that got me:

I’ve had one search where I couldn’t search a major portion of my sector because we kept running into yellow jacket nests. On that same search, one of the walkers had to be transported to the hospital after getting into a nest of them. Just last week, I moved my portable mounting block to get on my horse and started running as fast as my fat little legs would carry me down the driveway. It appears that a nest had taken up residence under the block and didn’t appreciate the move to a new locale. The whole nest seemed to come boiling out in a black cloud of anger, just looking for a victim. All of us were fortunate and didn’t get stung, much.

Right now though, my least favorite wee beastie is the gnat. I could be swimming in a vat of 100 proof insect repellant, and they’d still figure out a way to get in my eyes, up my nose or inhaled. They are just wretched. The only thing that works for me is a branch snapped off of the nearest tree that I can wave around like a mad woman. I’ve often wondered what my dogs are thinking when they are coming back to me to indicate and find me furiously waving round this leafy frond over my head.

Then my least favorite wee beastie of them all, the tick. There are so many different kinds, the dog tick, the lone star tick, the deer tick and on and on. I hate them for a myriad of reasons. They are useless blood sucking disease carrying parasites that serve no useful purpose in the grand scheme of things. I might be a little biased in my thinking after having to deal with many a dog dying of Lyme induced kidney failure or the fact that my Finn almost died from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

But, still is there really any use for a tick?

Mountain Laurel

2011-06-17T13:09:00.000-04:00

Mountain Laurel in its full glory is beautiful to behold. You can turn a corner on a hiking trail and be stopped in your tracks by the sight of acres and acres of it tumbling down the mountain side like white water river rapids.

rushing towards you

and tumbling down hill

As you get closer the subtle fragrance tickles your nose. The buzzing bees, attracted by the flowers, are industriously collecting their nectar. The bell shaped flowers, delicately veined in pink, are beautiful in their simplicity.

However, I rank Mountain Laurel and her cousin, Rhododendron, right up there with ticks.

My very first search EVER, after certifying my first dog Ben, was looking for a lost 9 year old girl in a vast tract of harvested timber. Pine trees planted so close together I could barely walk through them. I was able to walk the top of my sector along a two track. Then plunged into the woven thicket of pine branches and Virginia green wire. After spending, what I thought was most of the night bushing wacking through that, I was never so happy to see the far boundary. We broke out of the mess and breathed a sigh of relief (ha!) at the open ground under the set of electrical transmission towers that marked the boundary of my sector. They were set on a slope so steep most of the way down Ben and I were skiing on old leaf litter. We were spit out at the bottom of the sector into a creek bottom. Whew, I thought, we can do some real searching, since it was night time and the scent should be dropping into the drainage.

Oh what a naïve newbie I was. For in front of me was this vast mat of tangled branches of old growth Mt Laurel.

a small smattering of mt laurel

I stopped my team for a moment. Gave Ben some water and a little food. Readjusted my pack, made sure my head lamp was on straight, and had my clippers ready. The Gods of Fate were probably having a good laugh at my expense, because I really had no clue of what I was getting into.

I boldly strode into the Mt Laurel and was stopped short no more than 10 feet in. Head check right, head check left. Headlamp just showed more Laurel, no path, no nothing. Even the stream was clogged with its branches. Got my trusty pruning shears out. The Gods of Fate laughed again.

When I say old growth laurel, there are branches as thick as my wrist and trunks as big around as my leg. All the pruning shears were good for that night was to scratch an itch.

The end of my sector was supposed to be 3 drainages in or about 300 meters. There was no navigating skill I could use to find the end of the sector. The laurel blocked my ability to see the drainages. And in order to pace count 300 meters I had to be able to pace. I am not exactly sure what my pace count is when I am belly crawling under, over and through this crap.

I had to sling my pack underneath me. If I’d kept it on my back, I would have been so tangled it would have taken a bulldozer to get me out of there. I even had to take Ben’s vest off because he kept getting trapped by the snarl of branches and trunks. Once he was free of the vest, he was able to slip and slither through with no problems. Especially when he was in the creek bed.

When I and the rest of the team could finally stand upright, I made the executive decision to head up hill and back to the truck. We weren’t accomplishing anything and could realistically become part of the problem.

That hike back to the truck was a whole ‘nother mess. Some of us were having hallucinations from lack of sleep (I was working on 60 hours of searching with only 5 hours of sleep). My own special hallucination was some weird floating head that looked like it could belong to some long ago mountain man, following me just on the edge of my peripheral vision.

From that very first search, I learned to hate mountain laurel and rhododendrons with a passion. And, yep, a lot of my searches end up in patches of those evil plants. At night. In the rain. And sometimes with fog.

The End of an Era

2011-06-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

Last night I went on my first search mission with out the alpha dog. And I only lasted through one task, before I was too overwhelmed to go on.

Since Finn is 11 years old and is still recuperating from major thoracic surgery, I've been forced to retire him. Finn is actually my second air scent dog, the first one being Ben. He was found wandering the streets of my home town. I am not sure how much he counts, since he was only operational for about 2 years before he suffered a career ending injury to his suspensory ligament in one of his rear legs.

Finn has been my do everything, go every dog. The places we have traveled to and people we have helped are uncountable. Everything I asked him to do, he's done. But my favorite thing is his attitude: "Come on! Let's go see whats around this corner". If I was turned around, which happened more than once when we were out searching in the dark, fog and rain, all I had to do was follow his glowing collar and there was the trail. He is my partner, my protector; he is a part of me.

So leaving him at home brought forth an amazing array of emotions. A part of me is missing and I was unsure in the woods with out him there to guide me. I don't trust another dog as much as I trust him. There was heart aching sadness and with that came the irrational feeling of wanting to quit everything. That I couldn't do this without him.

I wonder how long I will feel like this. Darcy, my new dog, shouldn't have to labor under the unfair load of trying to live up to Finn. She is her own dog and needs to have the chance to write her own story. Just as Finn wrote his own incredible epic.

On his way home from Guyana in 2009 after thoroughly pissing off a fashionista-wanna be by jumping up on her plane seat and leaving his beautiful golden Lab hair all over it.

The Call

2011-06-02T21:45:00.000-04:00

I know my alpha dog, Finn, is getting old. I see him slowing down. I even have a young dog coming up quickly through the ranks to take his place. In my mind though, he is immortal.

Just two weeks prior to what I am about to describe, he’d spent several hours in the mountains near Lexingtion, Va on a cadaver search. And was sounder, both mentally and physically, at 11, than my younger cadaver dog was when the search was over. This was all in the back of my mind when my search team, Blue and Gray Search and Rescue Dogs, were called out to assist in the search, rescue and recovery mission after the devastating tornadoes that flattened Glade Springs, Virginia at the end of April. Finn is an old hand at disaster work. He’s spent time in New Orleans after Katrina and knows how to navigate jungles, both the green ones and the steel ones. So he was the first one I got out of the truck.

He and I were walking down to the first rubble pile we were assigned, and he stumbled on smooth ground, doing a face plant. That had me a little worried. Then when he didn’t want get on the pile; this from a dog that climbed 30’ piles hour after hour in the 9^th Ward, I wasn’t just worried, I knew there was something very wrong.

The following Monday, Finn got up on my picnic table, reluctantly let me hold off a vein and I got two tubes of blood to send into Antech. I don’t remember what I was expecting to see, maybe elevated BUN and Creatinine. Indicators of failing kidneys. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a blood calcium level of 17.3. When the normal high is only 12.

Calcium is delicately held in balance by two pairs of parathyroid glands on either side of the thyroid glands in the neck:

Too high, cardiac arrhythmias occur. Too low, seizures and tetany occur. Both easily lead to death. Low calcium is something most dog breeders are very aware of. Bitches can develop low blood calcium when they are nursing a large litter and develop eclampsia. However, there are very few things that cause the blood calcium to go high, all of them devastating. In school I was taught when there is a high calcium level it is time to search for the tumor that is causing it.

I can deal with mayhem, destruction, broken bones, HBC’s and other assortments of catastrophes as long as it isn’t my dog. When one of my dogs ends up with even the most minor of problems, I become the veterinary client from hell. Irrational, illogical and very emotional. However, a small rational part of my brain was still working and it pushed me to start researching how to figure out what was happening to my heart dog.

As a veterinarian, I belong to a wonderful resource called Veterinary Information Network. With the click of a button, I can get questions answered, research obscure clinical signs, and get help putting all the pieces together. So that is where I started. First, I had to determine if the elevated calcium was a true number and not lab error. That required an ionized calcium level. If that was elevated then it truly was an accurate number and I need to continue to find the source of the elevation. This test requires a lot of special handling of the blood, the most important being the blood has to arrive at the lab frozen. Luckily, I have a lot of ice packs to use for my vaccine cooler and several were sacrificed to the cause. It only took a day to get those results back, and unfortunately it confirmed the levels as being a real number and not lab error.

Back to VIN I went. The next step is determining if the elevation is due to the parathyroids having a fit or if there was a tumor inducing the calcium levels to elevate. There is an interesting test from Michigan State University vet lab called the hypercalcemia of Malignancy Profile. It measures two specific hormones, the Parathyroid Hormone (PTH) and the Parathyroid Hormone related protein (PTHrP). PTH is the hormone that keeps the calcium levels, well, level. PTHrP mimics PTH causing the calcium levels to elevate. If the PTH is elevated, then the parathyroid glands are working over time. If the PTHrP is elevated that means a tumor is producing it making the calcium to go up.

Finn’s results were difficult to understand because not only was his PTH zero, so was his PTHrP. His parathyroids weren’t working and the tumor wasn’t producing PTHrP so what was making his calcium go so high? I’ll probably never know for sure, but all the specialists said to continue looking for a tumor.

In intact male dogs there are two places malignant tumors are most commonly found: in the prostate and in anal sacs. I couldn’t palpate a mass in either one of these places. And none of his external lymph nodes were enlarged (the first place lymphoma likes to pop up). But there are lymph nodes internally that aren’t readily palpable. The next step in this dance was chest radiographs and an abdominal ultrasound.

While I was doing office calls, my two technicians were able to get 3 views of his chest (which is standard when looking for tumors in the thorax). My heart almost literally stopped when I looked at the first radiograph. Sitting right in front of his heart was the tumor. An ugly malevolent mass taking up the first 1/3 of his chest. The first thought that went through my head was he had lymphoma and I only had my boy for another 2-3 months. The next thought was how in the hell can he still feel good enough to continue working? I mean he was just on a difficult mountain search not 2-3 weeks prior to this.

He still needed the abdominal ultrasound done, but I couldn’t stand to be around when it was done. I don’t think I could have held it together in front of all my co-workers if nastiness was found in Finn’s abdomen. So I left.

While Finn had his ultrasound done, I took his rads to the internal medicine DVM at Veterinary Internal Medicine Practice of Northern Virginia for an unbiased evaluation of what was in his chest. By the time I got back to the clinic the u/s was done. I asked them to just fax the results to me, because I was sure all his abdominal lymph nodes were enlarged and I wanted a few more hours of ignorance. Finn snored in the back of the truck on the way home, oblivious.

I got a call from the wonderful Dr. Deppe at VIMP before I even got home. He confirmed that it was a mass. But he gave me some hope when I told him that none of his external lymph nodes were enlarged, that we need to consider a thymoma. A benign tumor of the thymus. He opened up an appointment for my boy the next afternoon to try and get a fine needle aspirate of the mass. There was even better news sitting on the fax machine at home: his abdominal ultrasound was clean, even his spleen looked normal.

Turns out Finn is a grumpy drunk! He needed to be sedated for the ultrasound guided fine needle aspirate of the mass. Not that I am complaining, though. I didn’t want him moving while they were sticking a needle into his chest so close to his heart. But boy was he rumbly grumbly when I picked him up. I soon had the samples winging their way via FedEx air to Colorado State University lab for cytology and also to have a PARR test done. PARR is a test that helps to determine if the lymphocytes are reactive and come from many different lines or if they are neoplastic and all come from the clone of one lymph cell. It’s not cheap but helps with treatment options.

More good news when the cytology and PARR results came back. Cytology was suggestive of a thymoma and the PARR results also pointed in the direction of a thymoma. If you want an explaination of the PARR test click here: CSU PARR test

I was ecstatic, Finn just wanted breakfast.

The results showed up on Monday morning. By Monday evening, Finn was scheduled for surgery Wednesday morning with Dr. Bradley at Veterinary Surgical Referral Practice of Northern Virginia. His clinic is in the same building as Dr. Deppe’s clinic, and I’ve referred many of my own clients to him. He is a surgeon with an unbelievable work ethic and astounding talent.

I was 95% sure I wanted to do this. But there was a small part of me that questioned my motives for doing such a massive, invasive surgery on an elderly dog. But he was healthy otherwise and there was an excellent chance that the tumor was benign. Combine all that with the fact that Finn has given me his all every time I asked him, quieted those doubts.

I had to be at Dr. Bradley’s by 7AM, so in the pre dawn light of Wednesday morning I loaded up Finn in the truck for the 2 hour drive to the clinic. I won’t lie and say I didn’t shed any tears on the way up there. My mind going to the worst case scenarios, all ending in death. And the little doubts that I thought I’d come to grips with were rising up and throwing themselves at me, making me so very conflicted. He just looked so healthy that the irrational part of my brain made me doubt there was really anything wrong with him. I couldn’t stop from trying to touch him the entire way up there. Finn on the other hand, got impatient with me, hurmphed at me and moved to the back of the truck to continue his snooze like he normal does when we are on a road trip.

Dr. Bradley explained how the surgery was going to go. He does his thorocotomies from the left side, and not through the sternum, because he feels they recover more quickly. The difficulty of this surgery was the mass was so far forward, he was going to need to make the incision farther forward than he normally does. That meant that the muscles of his shoulder were going to be involved, not just the intercostals muscles. But, I trusted him when he said that he’d get better exposure to the tumor and was more likely to get it all. As I was walking Finn back to his surgery cage, in the cage next to his was a dog that was going home that morning after her own thorocotomy for a lung lobe abscess. Seeing her made me more comfortable with my own decision to go ahead with Finn’s surgery.

His surgery was scheduled for 10AM and was supposed to be done by 12 noon. Dr. Bradley called me at 12:05 to tell me that it was a text book surgery and Finn was in recovery. I start letting everyone know my boy is doing well, and I am over the moon! My heart heads back to where it is supposed to be and not in my throat.

Everything comes to a crashing halt when I get another call from Dr. Bradley too soon after the first call. And the nightmare begins. Dr. Bradley is very specific when he says he’s going to call, and is never more than a couple of minutes off. If he calls at another time, he really doesn’t need say much, I already know Finn is either dead or dying.

He’d gone into respiratory arrest.

For some reason his lung stopped working and started filling with fluid. He couldn’t breathe, his lungs were so filled with fluid no oxygen could pass. They tried to pull off some of the fluid with Lasix, but it didn’t work well or quickly enough. So they put him on a ventilator. Later, both he and Dr. Deppe came up with a few reasons why it happened: re-expansion injury or neurogenic pulmonary edema. His radiographs really didn’t match up with either one, but there is not a lot of data on those conditions in dogs because they usually die. All we could hope for was that it was a solitary event and that the ventilator would keep him alive long enough for his lungs to repair themselves.

I called back shortly after Dr. Bradley's first call because I really couldn’t process what he told me during that phone call. Not surprising, after going from a high of him coming through surgery to having him put on a ventilator. Dr. Bradley didn’t give much different information from the first call, but at least now my brain had a better chance of trying to understand what was happening. Didn’t make it any easier though. My precious Finn, my heart dog, my partner, was dying and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

I went around to the rest of my house calls, but I am not quite sure how much sense I made. I think I helped the vomiting dog and the diabetic cat, but I don’t remember. I was just waiting for the call. “The call”. I never wanted that call. I’ve had to make that call to my own clients, but it was shear torture being on the other side. My phone was now enemy number one, but also a life line. I didn’t know whether I should just throw it out the window or just sit and stare at it.

I finished my housecalls around 5PM, but I couldn't go home. He wasn’t there, might never be back there and I wasn’t prepared for empty hole that was there in his place. I tried distracting myself at Barnes and Noble, but kept getting strange looks as I wandered aimlessly around, picking up books, putting them down and the occasional tear. I finally left. There were 4 hungry dogs at home that needed to pee.

I almost made it home before I broke down. Driving and texting can’t hold a candle to how dangerous it is to drive when you can’t see the road for the tears. I don’t recommend it. Dr. Bradley had asked me earlier if I wanted to come up and visit with him. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to remember him as I walked him back to his cage, tail wagging, talking smack to the dogs in the cages as he walked by (he’s good at that), not with tubes in him. That wasn’t him, just a facsimile of him.

Thunderstorms start rolling through as I was sitting at the computer in my office, aimlessly wandering around the internet, when Dr. Bradley’s number pops up on my phone. He was not supposed to call until 10PM when he went into check on Finn, and it is only 9:15PM. I didn’t want to pick it up, just stared at it and it wouldn't stop ringing. Surprisingly, my voice was actually half way normal when I finally answered the ring, when all I wanted to do is throw up. Nor did I drop the phone.

The thunderstorms that had rolled through my town, ended up in Manassass, where the clinic is located, knocking out power to the clinic. Two very quick thinking LVTs ran a power converter from a pick up truck in the parking lot into the clinic, plugged in an extension cord to it and attached the ventilator to the extension cord. Good Lord! A power failure, just makes the whole thing so much easier. Dr. Bradley was just calling after the fact to let me know what happened. His blood oxygen saturation never went below 85% and one of the LVTs hand bagged him until they got the extension cord set up. Ironically, the week before the clinics started a search for a generator large enough to power both clinics in case something like this happened.

I was told not to call before 7:30AM on Thursday. The fact that I got no further calls from Dr. Bradley was a little comforting. Again, I was surprised that I could hold the phone when I called, my hands were sweating and shaking so much. An interesting sensation, to be sitting a chair and feel like you've run a hundred yard sprint there is so much damned adrenaline pumping your body. My heart felt like it was about to explode.
Dr. Bradley calmly told me he’d taken Finn off the ventilator at 6:15 that morning and continued to breathe on his own, maintaining normal blood oxygen levels on room air. And that he continues to recover normally from anesthesia. Normally!

When I went to visit him on Thursday evening, he was weak and unsteady, but who wouldn’t be? He ate like the Lab he is when I was there. While laying on the floor next to him, the LVTs and I talked a little about what happened. More light was shed on what happened, especially the detail about the power converter and the extra tidbit that Finn had turned an ugly shade of purple before he got on the ventilator. No one there really expected him to make it, including Dr. Bradley. Me either. Of all the dogs I know of that ended up on a ventilator, Finn is the only one that lived.

He never looked back. He came home on Saturday with an OMG huge incision on the left side of his chest. And other than a too fast drop in his blood calcium that I am supplementing right now, the biggest issue he’s got is pain from the cut muscles. The anti-climactic news was the biopsy confirmed it was a benign thymoma.

He is sleeping at my feet right now, and nothing is better than that.

My team mate Misty Sampson made this video of Finn working the 9th Ward after Katrina. It is one of my favorites:

Reduce Reuse Recycle

2010-11-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve been off pretending to be a writer and was participating in NaNowrimo, however, I didn’t make the 50,000 word count in 30 days goal. When I first started I didn’t have any concept of how difficult it would be to pull close to 2,000 words a day out of my imagination that actually made sense when read all in a row. After reading the last thing I wrote one evening, the next morning, I had to wonder who actually wrote it, because I certainly didn’t remember ever striking those keys. And, no, they didn’t make any sense.

But that doesn’t mean I and my horde hasn’t been active. Finn, the old man, is still able to put in a four hour middle of the night search on Massanutten Mountain, or as I like to call it, Mass-a-rock Mountain. We were looking for a mentally handicapped person that decided that he really wanted to go for a hike, forgetting that he couldn’t remember how to get home. A lot of people and dogs put in quite a few hours and covered many miles looking for him and the three dogs that went with him.

I like searching at night, because if I could see what I was actually trying to search through, I’d probably turn around and go home. Much of what was in my search sector that night consisted of rock. Big rocks, little rocks, boulders, rocks that like to rock, rocks that hide under leaves, slippery rocks, moss covered rocks and holes that hide. All of them just waiting to break an ankle.

That looks like a field of ferns, but the ferns are covering field of rocks

The beginning of a laurel thicket

One of many rock slides Finn and I encounter on our searches

And then down at the bottom of the rock slide Finn and I were searching was the mountain laurel. After walking across rocks, the thing I hate the most is trying to find a decent path through the woven branches that make up a mountain laurel thicket.

But, if everyone got lost in a city park with walk ways, they wouldn’t need us.

The gentleman was eventually found safe after he set the forest on fire. Literally. He set a fire that ended up eating 10 acres of forest. But he was found and so were his dogs.

However, Teagan and Deacon where feeling a little neglected and hatched a plan to make me pay more attention to them. It consisted of some tag team vomiting and eating of said residue.

Deacon is a dog with a severe sock fetish. The first hint that this was going to be a lifelong problem and that maybe he needs some therapy for this mental illness, was Christmas 2009. He stole the nearly naked carcass of the Christmas turkey from the counter at Mom’s house. Pissed off was the least of what I felt, because I had warned Mom what a counter surfer he was. I thought she knew what I was talking about, but obviously didn’t because she wasn’t watching him while he was in the kitchen with her and I was out with the other dogs. My dad, who is normally very unflappable, comes rushing out the house with an extremely worried look on his face, to tell me that Deacon had inhaled the ENTIRE carcass in about two bites. Fortunately, hydrogen peroxide works well on him, and urrppp up comes the carcass in its entirety.

Then 20 minutes later, a sock. A beautiful yellow tinged, sewer smelling athletic sock. As of this writing, he’s puked up close to 5 socks. Several in my truck coming home from hunt tests and SAR training. I know when he’s got a sock percolating in that stomach of his. He gets tucked up, his ribs start to show a little and he has a couple of days of throwing up small amounts of food. And then it appears, always yellow stained, stinking like something dead that’s been rotting in the sun for a couple of days.

I do nightly patrols to pick up socks, make sure the door is closed to the room that has my socks in it, and make sure the laundry is put away as it is done. All for naught… Because he is a mission driven, sock seeking machine. Nothing and nobody will stand in his eternal quest to find that holy grail of his life, THE PERFECT SOCK.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was upstairs plunking away on the computer, he disappears for a few minutes taking Teagan with him. I get down stairs just in time to see him licking his lips and a large area of fluid on the laundry room floor. My suspicion, that he’d just re-eaten what he’d just regurgitated (canines-giving real meaning to reduce/reuse/recycle). I didn’t think much of it and left to go do my morning rounds. However, when I got back home for lunch, he’d continued to vomit in his crate. So I called the clinic I worked for, in only a mildly panicked state, and advised them to prepare for what is probably going to be the first of many surgical sock retrievals I foresee in Deacon’s life.

So I get to the clinic early the next morning and get started on his radiographs. I make all the other veterinarians at the practice look at them and tell me there is nothing stuck. And had to be persuaded not to send the rads off for a radiologist to put their mark on them signifying that there wasn’t a foreign body trapped in his small intestine. But, both of them did feel a mass in there. As I was leaving, one of the docs made me promise to call her and tell her what he craps out. In my crazed Munchausen by Proxy fugue state, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to get him back up there for the surgery I sure he needed.

We get home safely and when I open the door to the laundry room, I nearly pass out from the stench that greets me. It appears that Teagan had pushed Deacon away from the magnificent mass of vomit that he regurgitated for her and ate it, sock and all. For in her crate was a beautiful yellow sewer smelling athletic sock, that she’d very carefully re-eaten everything around it but left that splendid sock for me to see.

In the middle of that night, Deacon leaves me a present of a sock on the dining room floor. Wrapped very prettily in poop.

Training tips for search and rescue dogs

2010-09-10T07:29:00.000-04:00

Training Tip #39: when leaving the house to set up your evenings training, make sure you put the puppy in her crate.

Addendum to Training Tip #39: latch the crate door.

Paths Unkown

2010-09-06T19:40:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago a beautiful silver balloon drifted into my yard, having lost all its helium. Made me wonder who lost it. Was there a child somewhere that cried when it floated off? Whose birthday party did it drift away from? Did a young man give it to his first love, and she lost it?

It also made me think of other things that wander into my life that I wasn’t aware I was looking for. Those things that make us travel a path we weren’t expecting or planning on. There is only one thing that wandered into my life I can remember that definitely pointed me down a trail that I had never planned on, and that would be my first search dog, Ben.

Ben

I’d been with my search group, Blue and Gray, for about 6 months. I’d come to realize the time commitment needed and the monetary commitment as well, so it was time for me to look for a dog. I was in love with my college dog, Jack and wanted another one just like him. He was a big dog, with long luxurious golden hair that paid homage to his mixed heritage; he was ¾ Golden Retriever and ¼ Great Pyrenees. He was as beautiful as he was tough. So I went looking at Bernese Mountain Dogs. They are stunning to look at, and in my neophyte enthusiasm, thought they were working dogs. All the dogs I saw were beautiful and exactly what I thought I was looking for, but something kept holding me back from committing to a puppy.

At this time in my life I was boarding my horse at my friend’s farm, Mountain Run Farm, where she also had a small boarding kennel. I was out finishing up a ride, when Kari comes rushing down to the barn to tell me that I needed to stick around. She has the perfect search dog for me.

Some clients of hers were boarding their dog at her kennel until their house was finished being built as the place they were renting didn’t allow pets. They frantically called Kari one afternoon, they had just picked up a Labrador on the road near their apartment building that they thought had been hit by a car. Could she help them take care of it? Why they didn’t call the emergency clinic, I’ll never know, but in karma of the universe, they weren’t supposed to. Kari actually told them to go directly to the emergency clinic, but they wanted her to look at him first.

I was expecting what I call a cur Lab, to step out of their car. A cur lab is a dog that nobody can tell what breed it really is but kind of looks like a Lab so that is what they call it. They usually are whippet thin, with a whip like tail and a pointy snout, with a vague wave to a distant relative that may have been a Labrador. The SPCA is notorious for calling everything a Lab, because that is the easiest to adopt out. Especially if they are a black dog.

But, from this tiny car, out steps this big beautiful yellow Lab, with a gorgeous block head.

It was love at first sight, both ways. I was completely and absolutely in love, the kind where music should be playing and little hearts floating around. And all that was wrong with him was a raging ear infection.

He was not the most gifted of search dogs, but he was patience personified. Patience to deal with my mistakes as a novice trainer and the patience to not get frustrated with me when he couldn’t understand what I wanted from him. He was a teacher, that was his gift. I was lucky to have such a dog such as him, it made training the rest of my dogs that much easier.

Most SAR dogs are trained using toys, and for months I tried to get him to play tug, but it was beneath him. I spent 6 frustrating months trying to get him to work for a toy, because that’s what everybody said I had to do. This dog, though, was incredibly motivated by food. One day he got out of my house when my pet sitter came to let them out to do his business. She called me frantically, knowing how much he meant to me. I remembered it was trash day and told her to just follow the trail of turned over trash cans. Sure enough, she found him at the fourth trash can happily munching on what, I don’t know, but content.

So I switched to training him with hot dogs. He was certified in 6 months.

His only find was a suicide in the Blue Ridge Mountains, before he suffered a career ending injury to a suspensory ligament in his rear leg. He led me down this path I am on right now and he was the first step. The second step of which was getting Finn, my current search dog. Then my second HRD dog Cora, and have bred two litters of Labs. I am training director for my team. And with Finn, I’ve been deployed to New Orleans after Katrina and to the jungles of Guyana, South America on HRD missions as well as numerous local missions.

In 2005, I lost him to cancer and still think about him almost every day. I saw his ghost in my bedroom doorway, right after I put him to sleep. He didn’t want to leave me, but I told him I’d be ok. He did good with me and it was time for him to go and help someone else.

Little did I know what was in front of me that first day I saw him step out of that car.

Princess Prissy versus the Tomboy

2010-08-19T22:42:00.001-04:00

When Cora was younger, I never knew which one was going to come out and play. During training it was ok if Princess Prissy was out. Not so good when we are on an actual task. In the past, when we were at a cadaver search, I always brought out Finn first, because the Prissy vs Tomboy issue with Cora. Even though, strictly speaking, Finn is cross trained for live and deceased and Cora is HRD only.

A couple of years ago I made the conscious decision to use Cora first on a mission in Charlotte, NC. In this particular situation, we were surrounded by multiple news trucks and two news helicopters were hovering over head. We (me and another canine handler), talked over how we wanted to attack the site. Then we had to review it with representatives from the local LE and a couple of agents from the Justice Department. And this was the time I decided it was Cora’s turn to go first. No pressure! The plan was for Cora and me to take the grounds with its accompanying construction site hazards: equipment, debris, and pits dug for no reason that I could tell. And the other dog team took the half built apartment complexes, with the idea the subject may have been buried and the murderer hoping to have the grave site covered in concrete.

I get Cora out, hoping and praying Tomboy is here and not Princess Prissy. I break her (“hurry up”, her cue to pee), get her costume on (collar with the bells on it) and tell her to “go find”. And boom, she’s off like a shot. She’s ranging around, nose stuck to the ground. I figure she’s getting her ya ya’s out and turn to say something to my walker. I don’t think I get more than a couple of words out when my walker points to something over my shoulder. I turn around, and there is Cora the TOMBOY, sitting, just barely, with her butt doing a wiggle dance and tail slapping the ground madly. She opens her mouth to bark and I throw the ball to her to fill it. I don’t want her barking to bring every single camera pointing at her and broadcasting that we found something until I figure out what she’s trying to tell me.

It turns out that what she found wasn’t what we were looking for. She marked the area where 3 weeks previously a homeless man had been attacked and bled out. From that point on I trusted her, and her confidence in herself because I believed in her skyrocketed.

So over the past couple of years I saw Princess Prissy less and less and Tomboy became the norm.

Until this weekend.

I also do hunt test competition with my dogs. It is a great way for the dogs to have fun and I don’t have to be in charge of training. So I get up at 5 AM on Sunday morning to be able to leave for field training by 6AM, since we have to on the field early to beat the heat. I work her son, Deacon, first. He’s a monster in the field and he had a great time picking up the bumpers. Go to get Cora out of the truck, warm her up and then walk to the line to send her for a bird.

“whaaa???? You want ME to RUN across thistle, and briar's and cut cedars to pick up a stinkin’ bumper?? I believe you didn’t talk that over with me, Princess Prissy, ruler of all things prissy.

“Talk to the paw.”

I had to handle her to on a stinking single. Arrrghhh! I made her do it and then do it again. And then a blind through the same crap. She looked like haven’t trained her in a year. Then we had the walk of shame back to the truck. I should say, I had the walk of shame. Cora could have cared less.

That evening, I took her out to do some HRD (cadaver) work. I had the problem set up from the evening before, so the area was saturated with scent and made for a little bit of difficulty. But nothing she couldn’t handle, and has handled before.

Finn got to work first because he had been left at home a lot. He did well. Got Cora dressed in her costume, a pretty collar with Buddhist prayer bells that tinkle with a pleasing sound. Got her to “hurry up” and then sent her to work.

She promptly peed near the source to show her displeasure (at what, only she knows), so back into the truck she went.

Princess Prissy showed herself to remind me that Cora does not like being second fiddle to anyone or anything.

I planned her next training with Princess Prissy in mind, to remind her that even though PP doesn’t like to work in tough terrain, that makes no never mind to me, Head Alpha Bitch, ruler of ALL THINGS DOG.

So I set up her problems is a field of this:

And then made Princess Prissy work through it all:

And she was perfect, even if she did dance the dance of sissy feet through this ground cover:

Even better, on our search today in Giles County near Blacksburg VA, in the rain and the acres of impassable thickets of mountain laurel, she did her work well and with enthusiasm. While I shivered in the rain and thanked which ever deity in charge of dogs for giving me back my Tomboy.

Nature's Lullabye

2010-08-14T22:41:00.000-04:00

At dusk, the drum roll of a soft summer rain, added to the sharp call of the cicada mixed with the chorus of crickets.

And I am lucky enough to be sung to sleep every night this way.

If I got lost in the woods, would anyone care?

2010-08-13T21:45:00.000-04:00

Probably not. I am usually the one finding those lost people, not the findee. Well, actually my dog is the finder; I just tag along for the ride.

But I have a young dog coming up, Darcy, that is due to start her wilderness certification this fall and winter. And the main thing I am terrified of failing is my land navigation. I’ve been doing this search stuff for close to 15 years and the last time I was tested on my navigation was eight years ago when Finn got his certification. Since then, I’ve been the one who’s been teaching and testing people on their ability to navigate. Nothing like the evaluator being evaluated. I think it’s going to be more stressful testing Darcy than when I tested Finn the first time. Yep, you read that right, the first time. I failed my first 160 acre test with Finn and had to make it up 3 months later.

This past weekend, my search team hosted a seminar taught by Rob Speiden of Natural Awareness Tracking School . So there I was, Saturday morning, sitting and listening with rapt attention to Rob going over the basics of land navigation, like I’d never been shown a map or compass or spent the past 15 years navigating safely in the woods. I like to say I’ve never been lost, just momentarily disoriented. Then I bought a GPS, and whoosh, there went my ability to rely on my own sense of direction. We reviewed Mr. Mercator, how to shoot a bearing and, in our first outdoor class of the weekend, we determined what our pace count is (mine’s 62). That means it takes me 62 paces to cover 100 yards. But that’s on flat ground with no obstacles. I am going to find out how accurate that is in the afternoon when we are out in the woods. I've never navigated using a pace count, always used terrain features. Here's how I do it: hmm, that looks like the mountain I am looking for on the map, there's the drainage I've been looking for, wait a minute, how many drainages was I supposed to pass before I got to the one I need to search, crap, I think I need to turn around and count them again, but I really don't want to climb all the way back down the mountain, I think I can make the terrain features I was looking for fit what's supposed to be on the map....Search to the top of the drainage, wait I was one drainage too far, head back to base by searching down the drainage I was supposed to go up. As you can see, I need to fine tune my navigation a little.

I am confident in my abilities, especially since I’ve been doing this for 15 years. And you know what, confidence means jack, when you are learning something new and trying it for the first time. Which I was with pace counting. I was 50 yards south of the first point I was supposed to find. At least my pace count was right on. The next few points I did well with, but then again, following the whole group makes it much easier too.

We did night nav as well… again I was glad the group was there. Oh lordy, do I need to practice before I get evaluated this winter! At least when I am on a real search I can use my GPS.

The fun part of the whole night was having a short search after everyone, well almost everyone, got back to the parking area. Yep, one of the team got lost on her way back to her car. However, it was a status one and we all went home to rest up for Sunday’s training.

Sunday’s training was about clue awareness and tracking. I did pretty good with the tracking. My team and I were able to follow two tracks to the end of them.

Not so good with clue awareness. Before we got to class, Rob had set up a clue awareness scenerio. A missing 10 year old boy that liked to play cards and pick up golf balls when his dad was out on the golf course. He had set out 10 clues. I found exactly: zero clues.

But this is all that I found:

And I tracked them for a short distance, although Rob said it was too easy because their foot prints where too distinctive.

It’s a good thing I have my dog along to help me, or I’d be totally useless out there.

Little Sisters

2010-08-04T22:40:00.001-04:00

Deacon

Teagan, the evil half sister

My youngest girl, Teagan, at 18 weeks is a holy terror. She has no qualms about taking off after the big dogs like they are moving targets just for her. The problem is, two of those big moving targets, Deacon and Darcy, really don’t care for her very much. They don’t mind running over her or running her into the pasture fence because she can’t turn quickly enough. They don’t mind when they go for the ball and she is going for them, T-boning her.

This is all passive aggression on their part. They really don’t want to give up the treasured youngest child spot in the pack. That means that they don’t get all the pretty love and attention, they aren’t the youngest and the cutest anymore.

Deacon is particularly put out. Whenever we are in the dog truck and they are in the back seat, more times than not I can see the Deacon man maneuvering himself in several different ways to push Teagan out of the way. His most favorite MO is to sit on her. Now he doesn’t overtly plop his big ass down her (he’s 95 lbs and she’s only at 35 lbs). Rather he waits until she’s got herself settled, her rear on the padded seat behind the console, and the front half of her body draped over the console, flowing down towards the floor. Deacon decides at that moment he wants to stand on the console, look through the windshield and help me navigate. He very carefully puts his front feet on either side of the sleeping puppy. And waits for me to go around a curve so he can slide off the console, losing his balance. Oops, I fell down, is the look that I get from him. But he doesn’t move. Even with Teagan squirming and wriggling to get out from under his fat ass. I swear, I think he sits down harder, becoming one with the back seat. Most times I have to forcibly remove him, pushing him as hard as I can over to one side. The look he gives me, priceless “what was that for?”.

His next favorite thing to do to her, as her older brother, is to go on a walk about with her. Then run home as fast as he can, leaving her behind. He’s only done that a couple of times, fortunately. And I’ve been close by when it happens and can call her home. He also likes to dart off into the woods at full speed when we are out on a walk. That doesn’t sound so bad, but he likes to run straight at a tree and turn at the last minute, hoping that Teagan will run straight into it. So far she’s been agile enough that hasn’t happened.

All Darcy’s ever done is clothesline her and make her limp. And make me think she’s broken a leg.

Barney's Rock

2010-07-28T23:03:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday evening, Blue and Gray SAR Dogs got a call for a missing person in Marshall, Virginia. I rushed home from work to pick up the dogs and switch trucks, when no more than 10 minutes down the road another page came in, subject found. Big sigh of relief. But, another call came in for a lost berry picker. Only this one wasn’t the next county over, but about 300 miles away in deep southwest Virginia, Wise County to be exact.

I had to psych myself up for not only the epic overnight drive without sleep, but also the next day: 8 hours of searching and the reverse 300 mile trip home.

We were looking for an older gentleman that never returned from berry picking. He has lived in the area all his life and intimately knew this part of the Jefferson National Forest. The police found out that his favorite spot to hang out at was a place called Barney’s Rock. Problem was, no one, not even his family knew where this place was.

Barney’s Rock is named after a local guy. Sometime in the 60’s this Barney got in trouble with the law. And, rather than face up to his crimes, he headed up into the mountains with his daughter. They came to an unfortunate end though, passing away up in this little hide out. No one is sure if they died of natural causes or what happened.

So the team is sitting at base, waiting for their tasks, but the search management team hasn’t made it there yet. There is nothing more impatient than a dog team waiting for something to do, you really want to give them something or they can make the search managers life miserable. We are doers not planners. To us time is our enemy. We want to be out there looking for the subject, not sitting in base and chit chatting. We are trained from the very beginning how to attack a search, what the subject profile is and how to develop an initial search strategy. One of my teammates finally had enough of waiting and developed three dog tasks, starting from base and radiating out. Laurel Strotter and her dog Baby were searching along the top of a ridge, when Baby takes off. She goes over the top of the ridge, through some thick mountain laurel, and Laurel loses sight of her for a little while. Baby comes rushing back and indicates and takes Laurel back to…. Barney’s Rock! She and Baby found it.

Baby is trained to find articles as well as people and she found some articles that our missing person left behind at the rock. This only the second or third mission Baby has been on as Laurel just got her certified this past spring.

Barney’s Rock is a boulder as big as a house. The original squatter, Barney, quite inventive with the caves under it. He picked the most spacious cave and made it into the main living area. He put up a wall of stone to block off the opening of the cave and make a doorway.

He was clever to design the fireplace and chimney so that the smoke dispersed without a sign. He put the chimney in a large crack between two halves of the boulder.

Can you find the chimney?

the fireplace

I don’t know that I could live like that for too long without absolutely losing my mind. Mainly because of my claustrophobia. But black doesn’t describe how dark it is in that small cave, even when we were there in the middle of the day. And cold, even in July.

the spacious living accomadations

back porch

front porch

haute cuisine

The day I got there (the first day, I tried to make it, but woke up with food poisoning, bleh), the search managers were calling for HRD dogs (cadaver dogs) because he’d been missing for so long and there’d been absolutely no contact with the family. So my task was to cover the drainage from the road up to the Rock and down the ridge on the other side. The police officer that was with said that it only took him and his team 30 minutes to get to the top earlier in the week, but they weren’t looking for a body, but wanted to try and sneak up on him.

With an HRD dog, you’ve got to work much more slowly. Because scent can do funny things and trick you. So as a handler you’ve got to be able to think about not only major climate conditions, but also the microclimate. What is the air current doing around that large rock, is scent being drawn in or can any scent escape, what about that hole there, is it big enough for someone to fall into, if the person is deceased, have the animals gotten to the subject and are there places small enough for things to be cached.

Many things go through a handlers head while they are working their dog, we don’t just walk behind them. It took me and Cora about an hour to make it up to the boulder. She kept getting drawn up the drainage next to the boulder, but nothing ever panned out. We waited for the other dog team to make it to the Rock, giving Cora a break and some water

Me and the other handler figured out what our next task would be from that area and off we went. I went down the ridge on the other side of the drainage. I turned to take one last look at the Rock before we headed down, and it was completely gone. Couldn’t see the cave and I was only 50 yards away. What a great hiding place, but not any longer.

can you see the cave?

Here’s what the out come was: http://www2.tricities.com/news/2010/jul/23/hubert-ramey-found-facing-charges-ar-348747/

Coffee with a Diet Coke Chaser and an 80’s Pop Sound Track

2010-07-24T20:00:00.000-04:00

So why am I driving down Interstate 81 with a cup of coffee in my hand, loaded with enough sugar to put an elephant into a diabetic coma and listening to Madonna, Huey Lewis and the News, Debbie and New Kids on the Block? Because I have an 8AM base call 300 miles away, in southwestern Virginia and I left my house at 10PM to drive through the night to get there on time. And there is nothing like caffeine and bad music to keep you awake.

I hate coffee. The smell of a fresh pot of coffee makes my stomach acid churn and my nose burn. I made it through four years of vet school and its attendant late night without the ubiquitous cup of joe at my side. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I really don’t want to run into a tractor trailer or a guard rail at 75 miles an hour.

Trying to stay awake for the 5 plus hour overnight trip from my house to Coeburn, Virginia, was nearly beyond me. Therefore the need for a more efficient caffeine delivery system: hazel nut coffee with chocolate creamer and four packs of sugar. I made it to Marion, Virginia before the inevitable circadian rhythm pulled me under.

I ended up taking a nap at a rest stop near mile post 50 close by the town of Marion. I figured I was pretty close and since it was only 2AM, I could stop for a little bit for a rest. I didn’t realize that I had another hour and half of driving ahead of me before arriving at base. My F150 is an extended cab, with blankets and padding to make it a soft place for the dogs to sleep while they are in the truck with me, and it doubled as my bed that night. The hardest part was trying to convince Cora to move to the driver’s seat. She’s been scolded enough that she was very reluctant to sit up there while I was stretched out in the back. She wouldn’t go easily and actually tried to sit on my knees and stretch out to the console between the front seats, her butt higher than her head. She was painful to watch, all crumpled up in that position. After a little more urging from me, she realized that it was probably more comfortable to get into the front seat.

After only an hour and half of sleep, and complete lack of REM sleep, the rumble of the tractor trailers woke me up and back on the road we went. With the weird hangover shakes that come from too much caffeine and too little sleep. Sucks, cause I didn’t have any fun getting that hangover.

It was still hard trying to get through the last little bit of the trip. I am glad I couldn’t see how steep the drop offs where the cliff disappears since it was still dark. We all made it to the base with more than two hours to spare. Kind of a good thing, since I could feed the dogs in time for it not to be an issue while they are working, but I still could have used the extra two hours for some sleep.

The dogs could nap, but I couldn’t and I still had another 15 hours in front of me.

Teagan the Terrorist

2010-07-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

Teagan at 10 weeks, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth...shoes are another story.

Four months ago, my beautiful girl Cora, had a healthy litter of pups. All yellows, my favorite color Lab. The first month, Cora did all the hard work; feeding, cleaning, keeping the squirming bundles of joy warm and dry. My turn came the second month, after their baby teeth came in and Cora had absolutely no interest in letting her litter of piranhas nurse on her anymore. In the middle of taking care of everybody, I felt like it would never end. But my caretaking of the little ones came to an end and all, but one, went to their new homes. For someone else to clean up after them. You can see them here: http://glendairlabradors.com/puppies.html

I kept the boldest, most independent of them all and named her Teagan (which means beautiful in Irish, or poet). Oh, the hopes and dreams I have for her. So many things to do, so many places to go and people to meet. There is so much on her little shoulders, it’s amazing that she hasn’t collapsed under the weight of it all. But because she’s a dog, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care whether she gets her AKC champion, a Master Hunter, or if she can find people. Her favorite escapade in the entire world is to run full force into whatever dog is in front of her. If she can make them yelp she’s happy, if she can bowl them over she’s ecstatic. If she can get the others caught up in her puppy crazies and chase her round and round and round and round, her days work is done!

I wanted to keep the pup with the most outgoing fearless and independent personality. I did, but she personifies, be careful what you wish for, you may get it. All the pups I’ve had before her, adored me and couldn’t wait to do whatever I asked of them. Teagan on the other hand has given me the paw more times in the eight weeks I’ve had just her, than all my other dogs have ever given me in their entire lives, COMBINED!

She is fearless. At training, a team mate of mine has a van full of German Shepherds that go absolutely ballistic if anything or anyone comes near the van. Her preferred choice of entertainment when I let her out of the truck is to go around to the back of Misty’s van and stand there. She’ll watch the dogs go mad, flinging themselves at the crate doors, screaming at the top of their lungs, slobber flung far and wide and generally lose their marbles. She doesn’t run, her hackles don’t elevate, she doesn’t bark back at them. She calmly squats and pees in front of them, marking her territory, then wanders off. Ignoring me completely as I am trying to call her back to the truck.

What Parents Ask Us to Do

2010-07-05T15:12:00.000-04:00

Parents are always proud of what their grown children have accomplished. They brag to their friends over their accomplishments, the doctor, the lawyer, the business man/woman. The good mother, how good their grandkids are, and so on. So, if they have some bad plumbing, they call the son that can fix things. Health problems, call doctor. Trying to set up a will, call the lawyer. I am a veterinarian, but they don’t have any pets. However, I do train cadaver dogs.

Their part of the county is still wooded and the road behind their house is tree lined and a good place to go walking. But, they haven’t done much of that lately. When I went home over the 4^th of July weekend, my dad asks me to do something for them. About 3-4 weeks ago a body had been found on the road behind their house. And they didn’t find out about it until it was in the newspaper:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/2-arrested-in-death-of-silver.html

They ask me to go out and look for the drop site. They were just so excited that they might be able to gossip a little with their neighbors. There are so many things that went through my head, the loudest: "how cool is that" and the other thought was "some people have all the luck"! But, there are several ethical things that doing what they requested that would have been compromised. So I didn’t look, I walked the dogs in opposite direction. Very tempting though.

Stop and Look

2010-06-22T07:04:00.001-04:00

When I was younger I loved to travel. The farther away I could get the better. My favorite trips where to Great Britain and the accompanying lands, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the land of my forefathers. Every winter I would try to go out West to visit my brother in Salt Lake City at the base of the Wasatch Mountain Range of the Rockies. I am a granny skier, means that I like to ski, but slowly. And the skiing in Park City was absolutely amazing. Not very many people and gorgeous slopes. I would also weasel my way into the avalanche patrol group to see if I could watch them work their dogs.

Then I bought my little slice of heaven here in Virginia and I only leave it under extreme duress.I love Virginia and all her variations. Our mountains are not as grandiose as the Rockies, but they are breath taking in a quiet slowly overwhelming way.

Fridley's Gap, Massanutten Mountain

In my travels around the state on the various searches I get called to, I get to see many parts that most of us don’t even think about. Let alone know about. From the Dismal Swamp to the Blue Ridge to the western most boundary, the Allegheny Mountains and everything in between. I am however, not a flatlander. I need to see what might be behind the next curve on the backcountry road, what the next little valley may be hiding.

We tend to forget that in our own backyard, there are scenes of beauty that we don’t need to travel thousands of miles to experience. That point was driven home to me when I was heading home from a search at the Homestead, in Hot Springs Va. I stopped at the top the mountain ridge that separated Calf Pasture River valley from the James River and got out to look around. The day was clear, bright and the scene breathtaking I felt I could see for miles.

In the Capital Reef area of Utah, there is an observation point that says you can see for 90 miles in every direction. Where I got out after my search, at the top of the mountain ridge, I don’t think I could see for 90 miles but I could see probably 10 miles before the mountains closed in.

Even around my small parcel of land the quiet beauty sneaks up on you. A walk in the first light of a summer morning, the crunch and creak of the newly fallen snow under your boot and the delicate lacey patterns of the dormant trees in snow above your head. And then in the fall, the surprise of a flock of turkeys strutting across the pasture or a doe and this year’s fawn grazing beside the horses.

Don't forget your backyard. Stop, and look at it through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before. You'll be surprised.

Landscaping the power company way

2010-06-04T23:24:00.013-04:00

In April, my local electric company contacted me to let me know that they were going through my little hollow to clean up the right of way that our electric lines run through. I thought that was nice of them to let me know, but didn’t really think much of it.

A couple of days ago I was sitting in my office when a helicopter comes buzzing over my house. The electric company has an interesting way of accomplishing their landscaping tasks. Stunning, actually.

My electricity went out when the helicopter went over my house so I was thinking bad things were going on. So I was a bit relieved when an electric company guy pulls up my drive, hoping he had some information. He did, but it wasn’t what I thought.

Do you ever wonder how the power companies keep the massive miles of electric lines clear of trees and limbs from falling on them? I found out. They hire a company that flies helicopters and huge 30’ chainsaws that are attached to the underside of said helicopter by very long chains that fly around cutting trees and tree limbs. That sounds deceptively straight forward. However, the right of way is only 15 feet on either side of the electric lines. So the pilot needs to be able to keep the saw within those fifteen feet, not hit the wires, not run into the tops of the trees, and doing all this with the wash from the helicopters rotors making the trees and saw move as wildly as if in the middle of a thunderstorm. And sometimes do it backwards. All the while hanging out the side of the helicopter to see what he is doing, he also is also trying to fly the copter without it running into the ground.

So on Wednesday of this week, I start hearing the helicopter fly overhead and the power company truck drives up my driveway. Mainly because I have two horses in the pasture next to the power lines whose right of way is being cleared and they wanted to see if I could get them out of the pasture and up on the hill behind my house. I knew right away that this guy wasn’t a horse person. There is no way you can hang on to a frightened horse, let alone two at the same time. Because there wasn’t any way these horses have ever seen a helicopter close up like they were about to and calm isn’t a word I would use to describe my horses. One is an ex-racehorse and the other has about as much common sense as a pea hen. She also weighs close to 1200 pounds.

Watching the horizon for enemies

I go down to the pasture and get the halters ready just in case they do something stupid like try to jump the cattle guard and not making it. Whatever the power company was paying the pilot, it was certainly worth it. Especially when it came to the horses. He was smart enough to stay at one end of the pasture long enough for them to become somewhat accustom to the noise and sight of what he was doing. It also allowed them time to race to the other end of the pasture to watch the whole show. The pilot finished the first half of the right of way, and rather than continue straight on thereby pushing the horses into a tighter and tighter corner, he picked up and started at the far end of the pasture. This pushed the horses to the end of the pasture that was already done and they could hide out under the trees that weren’t being trimmed.

Here's what it looks and sounds like

Here's the view from the other side

The pilot put on a great show and I was late for all of my house calls, but it was worth it. My neighbor and her kids were down in the pasture with me just having a grand time. She remarked that she was glad the trimming was almost done because she was tired of chasing the helicopter.I found out that she’d been driving the kids around most of the morning, urged faster and faster by her oldest boy who is a machine maniac, following the tree trimmer. An unusual thing to be doing on their summer vacation!

All in all, it took him about 20 minutes to do everything. I spoke to the power company guy after the helicopter left the area and he said that if they’d done it in a conventional manner from the ground, what that pilot did would have taken a week and half for a ground crew with 5-7 men to do. The next step was for the poor guys that had to come in behind the aerial tree trimmer and chop up all the debris he left behind.

What A Fine Mess

2010-04-25T19:51:00.012-04:00

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

2010-04-24T11:16:00.011-04:00

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...

2010-04-14T11:01:00.009-04:00

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.

2010-04-04T19:31:00.003-04:00

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.

Ramblings....

2010-02-14T22:04:00.008-05:00

There is an easy way to kill old 4wheel drive trucks. And I found out today. Fortunately, it wasn’t my truck.

Today was the first day in about a week that I felt it was safe enough to try and get Big Brown Betsy, my ’96 Ford pickup truck, down off of my hill. She’s a wonderful truck and I love her dearly, but at her age her 4WD is a bit iffy. There is a small stretch on my driveway that it has to work or I could end turtling (upside down and can’t get back up). Today was also the day that I decided to get out of my mid winter funk and go do something, torn hamstrings be damned.

I have three places that I like to hike when I get tired of walking around my place. The problem is we still have 3 feet of snow on the ground and the going into the National Forest is hit or miss.I tried Slate Lick Lake first. The two track was not barricaded but there were no tire tracks, which proves that not everyone with 4WD vehicles are crazy enough to tempt fate on an unplowed National Forest road that leads to nowhere. And I wasn’t about to try and break a trail through the snow drifts. I wouldn’t have made it more than 100 yards before turning around, which would have made for some grumpy dogs that were excited about hiking more than the driveway at home. A quick turn around and we head to Paul State Park. Too many people there already. Since I had four dogs along with me, I didn’t think that would work out too well.

Famous last words: watch this!

There is an old quarry near my place, back in the National Forest that I love to hike around, but I didn’t think that would be open either. I am glad I went as it was open, barely. The road hadn’t been plowed, but there were many sets of tire tracks of some of the red necks trying out their 4WD, or stupid college students with Jeeps. So the crazy ones ended up at the quarry rather than the lake. This is where I learned how to kill a truck.

I parked at the last clear area, got the dogs out, locked up and headed out. I don’t think I’d gotten more than 100 feet before the first evidence of trouble. Someone had gotten stuck and spun their wheels so much the holes were at least 8-10 inches deep. Since the truck wasn’t there, I figured the tree bark that was plastered in the bottom of those holes had given them enough traction to get out.

A little further on was when I saw the first drops of transmission fluid. The mistake of many people when they are stuck is to gun the engine, sending the wheels flying and the transmission whining.

It looks like something had been shot

Which is the exact wrong thing to do, because slow and easy gets the job done when slipping and sliding. And it keeps the transmission from imploding. Then there was an even bigger blob. Poor thing is hemmoraging like it had been shot through an artery.

From the amount of transmission fluid I saw, I was amazed that the truck wasn’t abandoned where it got stuck. But I guess they got lucky and got out. I don’t think they are going to get much farther than home, if they get that far.

The rest of the hike was a pleasant end to a nice day. Although why the dogs thought it was good idea to go swimming the snow melt run off is a mystery to me.

Alpha Dog

2010-02-09T21:26:00.005-05:00

I woke up this morning with my main man, Finn, not moving so well. I figured that he wrenched a lot of muscles trying to keep up with the young ones in the snow, then the irrational part of my brain kicked in, and I knew he'd actually ruptured a cervical (neck) disc and that he was about to become completely paralyzed. So he came with me to work for a full work up.

He ended up with a raging urinary tract infection with some struvite crystals thrown in for good measure. The good thing was, I was so busy at work, I didn't have time to brood on it and let my irrational side of the brain take over. I could easily have worked this into cancer of the spinal cord.

Anyway, I got home after dark and still had to go to feed the horses. Since Finn still wasn't moving very well and there is two feet of snow on the ground, I decided to leave him back at the house. The other dogs had a great walk in the snow (Deacon was able to get into the neighbors trash- had a little come to Jesus meeting over that), the horses were happy to get their hay and I was ready to go back to the house.

Walked through the door to the scene of dog food EVERYWHERE. And Finn sitting on the couch looking as innocent as a baby, with the only problem that he was the only one left in the house and had no one else to blame it on.

The moral of the story is don't leave the Alpha Dog behind even if it is for his own good. Or at least make sure the dog food is safely secured.

How to play in Snowmaggedon

2010-02-07T15:48:00.007-05:00

Over the weekend my little hamlet was slammed with snow storm of almost biblical proportions. It wasn't as big as the blizzard of 95, where some areas of the mountains got almost 4 feet of snow, but this was close. I was trying to finish my morning appointments and get the ubiquitous milk and bread for the big snow in, and headed to WalMart for supplies. It turns out that the morning rush is when all the AARP members were out and I was able to move about three shuffling steps an hour. I eventually got home in time to avoid the worst it.

During the snow, the dogs, at least the younger ones, had it right. Run until you drop, sleep in front of the fire and repeat.

I have two young Labradors whose favorite game to play in the world when I am down feeding the horses is "stick". Basically you find a stick, poke the other in the side, take off at the speed of light and wait for the other to catch up and grab it. Then the two of them run around, grunting and coughing, twisting and tripping until the stick breaks. I think the goal is to see how long the stick holds up. I never really understand the whole reason for it, although, Deacon and Darcy will play until they both drop. However, two feet of snow can really put a damper on how much running a dog can do. Deacon makes up for the lack horizontal motion by trying to leap in the air.

If you are a horse, like my Lady, you don't play in the snow. You just endure.

And my neighbor just finished plowing me out. Right in time for the next storm!

Cora

2010-01-27T23:15:00.007-05:00

Cora came into heat last Saturday and hopefully in 12-14 days she’ll be ready to be bred. In the mean time though this is where I’ll find Deacon and Finn.

Cora in the crate and Deacon and Finn circling her like a shark in a feeding frenzy. Fortunately, Finn and Deacon get along really well, so all they do is moan their lust to Cora. She’s quite funny in that even when she is standing heat, she won’t let them touch her.

Cora's baby daddy is a stunning dog at Belquest Kennel in Mount Airy, MD. He's BISS Gateway's Nothing But Trouble. He's got several dogs in his pedigree that have given the breed a number beautiful working dogs. Not only is he gorgeous, but he's a sweetheart and loves to play ball! Here is a link to his webpage:

http://www.belquest.com/trouble.html

What I am going to have to do over the next week or so, is figure out when it is going to be the best time to take Cora up for a visit with Trouble. I do this by measuring her progesterone levels. When it gets above 5.0 she should be ready. On her first day she was only 0.2. On her 8^th day, she was still only 0.4. By her 10^th day, she’d jumped to 2.1. Which means that a hormone called LH has started to rise and she will probably ovulate in the next couple of days. It takes a couple of days after ovulation for the eggs to mature and be ready to be fertilized.

The boys started getting really interested in her on Sunday, so I knew things were starting to progress! I drew more blood yesterday to measure her progesterone, and her level was 5.7, which means she's just ovulated. The best time to breed is about 48 hours after she ovulates. Of course, there is a massive snow storm scheduled for this weekend, so I hope to get things done before it hits.

Here's hoping for a beautiful healthy litter in 9 weeks.

Old Dogs....

2010-01-06T07:22:00.004-05:00

This year my beautiful, smart and fearless Finn turns 10 in May. And on January 1^st he passed what is quite possibly his last recertification for wilderness search and rescue. Even at 10 years of age he can still search circles around the younger dogs on my team, and he proved it with this recert. He was required to search 40 acres in less than an hour, and find any and all subjects in that task area. It took him 10 minutes. He’s been everywhere and done everything, so that you can’t trick him. We try to do that with the older more experienced dogs when we are setting up training exercises so they don’t blow through things and actually get a decent work out, but the Finn man can’t be tricked. He worked so fast that I didn’t have time to take any pictures while he was working. All I got was him at the end with my team mate that was the subject for the test.

Finn was given to me almost 10 years ago, even before I knew that I needed a new search dog. A friend of mine realized that my first search dog was not going to be able to recover from a blown tendon that I was trying to rehabilitate him from. So she gave me the last pup in a litter of Labradors she’d just had. At nine weeks this yellow ball of fur ended up in my life. As he grew up and learned about the job of a search and rescue dog, the I never would have guessed the places his ability would take me. We were in New Orleans after Katrina and Rita to assist with body recovery. And just this past summer we were in the jungles of Guyana, South America looking for a flight crew that went down in a small airplane in November of 2008. He was the oldest dog on the mission and did better than some of the younger dogs.

I am also a state evaluator for dog teams and on the same day that I was recertifying with Finn another team mate of mine had to recertify with his dog, Jarod. Jarod is another old timer at 8 years old. He’s a Border Collie that probably has more years in front of him than Finn does. It’s fun to watch these older guys do their job. They adore being able to get out and show off their stuff. The only way that I can tell that Jarod isn’t the youngster I remember him as, is the more noticeable gray mustache on his muzzle. I don’t even think that he’s lost a step from what he was as a 3 year old.

January 1^st was what I called the geriatric day. Finn is 10, Jarod is 8. His handler, Brian Rock has been recovering from a horrible rotator cuff surgery he had way back in May, and I’ve been recovering from multiple orthopedic injuries. All I can say is, I am glad they were older and were able to get through their 40 acre recerts in record time!

Winter Tracking

2009-12-27T20:58:00.007-05:00

Winter time tracking can be very rewarding. Especially if the weather cooperates after a big snow storm. I was lucky this past snow. We got over two feet of the frozen stuff and nothing was moving around in it. Then we got a couple of days of 40° days and a day of rain that brought the snow pack down to something easier to walk through. For both human and animal. Yesterday evening and today, the dogs and I took a hike up behind my house and into the National Forest. I have flock of wild turkeys that wander around my little hollow, but I haven’t seen them in a long time, so I wasn’t sure if there any left in that flock. Yesterday evening I got my answer, they are still around and have been closer to the house then I realized.

The other animal that I’ve got an over abundance of is deer. At one point this past summer I had over 20 does grazing in my pasture! So the hunters in the area have been thinning the herd down to a number that the land can realistically provide for. However, those does had other ideas. The man I gave permission to hunt on my property asked me more than once if I’d seen any of the deer that had been so abundant during the summer. They’d taken to hiding during hunting season and only moving around after dark. We may not be able to see them during the day, but they’ve developed their own deer highways not more than 100 yards from my back door so they can move around easily.

Today, I ventured further and went into the National Forest that my property backs up to. I am glad that I did. I was able to follow the trail of a solitary fox as he made his rounds on the ridge I was hiking along. Marking the trail as he went.

A little further down the trail, I came across a family of racoons as they were scavenging. I was tempted to follow their trail a little further, since it was obvious. But I was starting to lose the light and wasn't equipped to be out after dark.

What I was really looking for was evidence of the bear that had taken up residency in the hollow, but there was none to be seen. So I guess he was hibernating. I am actually kind of glad of that. One of my dogs, Cora, has a penchant for finding bear at the wrong times! Several times, while on a cadaver search with her, we’ve come upon a bear in its den. I am not sure I’d want to disturb a bear while he was hibernating!

Country Folk

2009-12-20T12:58:00.004-05:00

I love where I live. It is everything I've ever wanted, secluded, on a hill, up against the National Forest with enough land for two horses. With the absolute best neighbors ever! Starting Friday night and lasting until Saturday night we got the biggest dump of snow this decade. Four of us live on a private drive so we don't get our road plowed. But that is no problem, because out here where I live, are good country folk that take care of their neighbors.

Two of the guys that live up here subscribe to the notion that the difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. They started plowing last night, with their 4 wheel drive tractors loaded with dump buckets and scrapers.

One of them, though, lives at the very top of a tall ridge, and thought he could do more than was physical possible with the 4-wheel drive tractor. Over the bank and down the hill it went. Oops!! This morning I wake to the sound of a huge piece of machinery creaking its way up the drive. I get down to the drive, and a massive lunk of an excavator is lumbering up the road to my neighbors house. In short order the tractors are out and they are back to plowing the rest of us out. In less then 10 minutes my part of the drive is clear. I love my neighbors, or as we say "they are good country folk"!

Country Mouse, City Mouse

2009-12-18T22:20:00.010-05:00

I decided to believe the hype about the storm of the season and headed into town to get a new set of rear tires and brakes (something that shouldn't have taken more than an hour, hour and half but ended up taking the entire day-something about not having the right size tire, ugh!). So I loaded up my boy Deacon, and headed in so he could get some town time.

My house is up on a hill, in the trees and backed up against the National Forest. The dogs could go days before they ever saw another person. Now, since they are search dogs, they need to see more than one person every two to three day, so I try to bring them into town to socialize them.

I got the truck keys to the right repairman and headed out with Deacon. And as soon as he found the first up right structure, he marked it. I have a theory about why my boy dogs mark so much and it has to do with their search work. It has to do with them not trusting me being able to find my way back home. At least if they mark the path they took out they can follow their own scent to get back home.

In typical Lab style, Deacon had no problem with the cars whizzing past or stopping at the curbs before crossing the streets. His favorite thing was passing by all the restaurants that line Court Square. He kept trying to persuade me that he really should be allowed to go through those doors and follow those most interesting scents to their source.

I needed to drop off something in one of the offices in downtown, so I made sure he had his search vest on and Deacon took his first elevator ride.

He got to meet all the top brass on the city's fire department.

So my sweet country mouse had his great adventure in the city and felt like he's lived there all his life.

Winter Solstice

2009-12-15T11:14:00.004-05:00

Winter solstice, an ancient day of celebration. This year it happens at 12:47 PM on December 21^st. That’s when winter starts, but it is also the longest night of the year and then the daylight gets longer. Winter is a time for rest, renewal and all that crap, and training dogs in the dark. I shouldn’t mind doing that, training in the dark, since a lot of our searches end up being at night.

But there is something slowing and inertia-like about coming home after dark and then trying to pack the dogs up to go out and train. Let alone trying to stay warm.

The good thing is that the dogs don’t care if it light or dark, just as long as they get to work or, in their mind, get to play.

Can't Train

2009-12-11T14:45:00.007-05:00

For the past six weeks, I've been dealing with horrible muscle injuries due to to my inability to remember that I am not 25 any more! And it is driving me crazy.

I've been a SAR dog handler for the past thirteen years and usually train every day. This forced inactivity has been a real eye opener for me. I am fortunate that my dogs have been very patient with me and are content with the once daily jaunt to the barn to feed Lady and Ben. The one who has suffered the most is my younger dog, Darcy.

She is, by far the most ball driven dog I've ever trained. And talented to boot. Most times I don't feel like I am a good enough trainer for her. But, through the various health issues, hers and mine, she's about 6 months behind on her training. She was unlucky enough to develop the brain form of toxoplasmosis when she was 10 months old, and was very close to death. That knocked her back 3 months. Then I've been out for 3 months with my own orthopedic problems.

So it looks like Finn won't be able to retire when he is 10 years old like I'd planned. However, if he continues the way he's going, it looks like he'll be ready to go until he's 12! Not that I'd mind that.

A River Runs Through It

2009-12-10T19:48:00.000-05:00

Gledair, means valley of the oak. Well, my little valley got flooded yesterday! We had six inches of snow that melted when the rain came. And we had bunches of the unfrozen AND frozen stuff. Luckily there are some high spots the horses could kind of keep their feet dry.

Tonight, we are supposed to have wind chills in the teens or lower. I want to be nice to my guys and put some blankets on them. Lady was having none of it took off running when she saw me drag her blanket out of the barn. A little sweet feed and some coaxing, and she got her blanket.