Living on a dirt road gives an unlimited supply of abandoned dogs. I wish the people who dump them could be caught and put in prison, at least until the pet finds a good home. I am certain that this wish will not come true, but the animals are not to blame. So if I talk about the abandoned pets, I am certain to have an ample supply of stories.
On my way to work one morning, I was greeted by two young dogs. They appeared to be about three months old and were chocolate Lab mixes. The week before I had passed by an abandoned dog and when I returned home it had been hit and killed. I felt bad about that situation, so in this case I stopped. When I stopped the two dogs came to me like they had been waiting for me all along. I loaded them up, turned around and took them back to the house.
My wife Bobbie fixed them a bed in an open crate in the garage. They jumped up on top of the crate and slept on the wire, rather than getting in the crate on the bed, which I thought was unusual. We went to great pains to try and find their owners, but when those efforts failed, they stayed with us. Now when you have a dog named Moses there seems to be a need to have a Joshua and a Caleb, so that is what we named them.
I decided that if they were going to stay with us, they would need to have a job. We set out to train Josh as a cadaver dog and Caleb as an air scent dog. One thing we discovered right away was the fact that they loved to swim. When they got close to water, they would dive in, with no plans to come back. Fortunately, when we worked water, we had a boat. On several occasions, we had to use it to retrieve them. After successfully training our Golden Retriever Moses, we thought we knew what we were doing, but Josh proved us wrong. He just didn’t seem to relate the find to the alert. I began to wonder if he had been dropped off by aliens. He was not hardheaded or dumb, he just didn’t understand our language.
We trained and trained with only a slight improvement. Josh was hard to read. He could find the target source, but would pass it by. He would search and search before returning to the source and alerting. I was having a hard time trusting him. Training continued and eventually he started putting the pieces together. He had struggled to master this trade and when he succeeded, everyone, including me was skeptical.
A few months later our team decided to bring an evaluator up from Florida to certify our dogs. We required that each dog be nationally certified before they could be used on a search. When I signed Josh up for the test everyone thought it was a joke.
There was a light rain falling when Josh started his evaluation. He had to find a buried source, a hanging source, a surface source and clear an area where there was no source. The areas were one acre in size and he had 30 minutes in each to complete the task. Unlike Moses, Josh thought he should use the maximum time in each area. He completed area one in 22 minutes, area two 18 minutes and area three in 28 minutes (the blank area). On the last area, he was getting tired and after about 20 minutes he sat in the middle of the trail. There was no head turn, or anything to indicate he had found anything. I asked him if he was sitting to rest or if this was an alert? When I asked the question, Josh took his foot and uncovered a source that was hidden under the leaves. The evaluator thought it was funny and I immediately claimed the find. By the end of the day and to everyone’s surprise, Josh passed the test. I still lacked confidence in my ability to read him. So Josh just became my buddy and we did not search with him. Today, he rides with me to the dump and accompanies me to the barn to feed the horses. He also wakes me up in the middle of the night when the deer walk through the yard.
