Detection dog candidates spend first 6 months in stringent prison program

The first year of a bomb- sniffing dog's life is vital for imprinting. That is when it learns to socialize and grows accustomed to the sights and sounds of its work environment. That is when it comes to understand the trusting but strict relationship it must have with its eventual handler.

For candidate puppies in the nation's largest canine detection training and research school -- Auburn University's Canine Performance Sciences Program in Alabama -- half of the first, formative year takes place inside a state prison.

Many expert dog-training programs work with adult animals, including Little Rock K-9 Academy in central Arkansas, which prepares dogs for police agencies in 30 states, Canada, Mexico and the Northern Mariana Islands. The academy's dogs are raised by vendors in Mexico and the Netherlands, who ensure they have the required personality. As owner and operator Tony Smith says, starting with puppies is risky: "If you fill your kennels with young puppies just to come to find out at 14 months they don't have the necessary drive or temperament to work, you've lost a lot of time, money and space rearing those puppies."

Auburn's program is unusual in that it breeds as well as trains the dogs that will eventually use their powerful sense of smell to sniff out explosives, narcotics and other public safety threats or participate in noninvasive research. Dogs trained by Auburn to follow suspicious vapor trails have guarded the New York subway system, presidential inaugurations and sporting events at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. They have tracked invasive snakes and pinpointed the point of accelerant use in ruins left after arson.

The puppies are born at Auburn's College of Veterinary Medicine canine breeding facility. The dogs, mostly Labradors -- a breed chosen for its sociability and physical resilience -- enter prison after they're weaned. They live with inmates who have earned the right to work with them and who lavish them with essential attention, hone their detection skills and reinforce basic socialization.

They emerge six months later "more mature mentally," said Jeanne Brock, a chief instructor at Auburn. "They have more stamina and endurance."

Then researchers at the Canine Performance Sciences building a couple of miles from the verdant quadrangles of Auburn's main campus take over the training of those with the

drive for detection. Dogs that drop out of detection training are offered for adoption or retained for research -- Auburn scientists are studying the brains of dogs using animals they've taught to sit completely still in MRI machines.

Program organizers say the regimen produces highly disciplined dogs whose abilities rival or surpass cutting-edge technology. And along the way, moments of humanity: Brock recalled an older inmate who cried when he met his puppy. "I haven't touched a dog in 40 years," he told her.

Similar benefits of bonding with dogs have been reported by participants in the Arkansas Department of Correction's Paws in Prison program (adc.arkansas.gov/PawsInPrison), in which inmates raise rescue dogs for adoption as pets.

NOT PETS

Originally, Auburn relied on area families to foster puppies, said James Floyd, former director of the Canine Performance Sciences Program. Despite the precise guidelines the volunteer hosts were given to maintain the dogs' fitness and not spoil them, Floyd said, "you'd visit to check on them and there they'd be, up on the couch, watching TV, being fed potato chips."

About 80 percent would fail to meet rigorous detector-dog standards. "They had been raised as pets," Brock said. "The main problem was lack of structure."

Knowing that service animals had been successfully trained in prisons, the program leaders decided in 2004 to place dogs at Bay Correctional Facility in Florida. The failure rate fell quickly with the shift to a more stringent environment, and now Auburn has partnerships with five prisons in Florida and Georgia.

One of them is Coffee Correctional Facility in Nicholls, Ga., which houses men serving sentences of up to 25 years, for "multiple DUIs to murder, and just about everything in between," said Grady Perry, a former warden.

Perry and his "hall team" led a visitor past the library and the barbershop to the dog-training room, where, on a Friday morning, 10 inmates in white shirts, white pants and slip-on shoes stood in a line, steely and silent.

James Reeves, the co-manager of the prison's dog program, retrieved a black Lab named Keisha from the dog dormitory. She bounded in, and though she looked alarmed by her audience, she quickly found the target odor. In response, the inmates whooped and hollered and clapped, and one of them tossed her a red ball.

Next up was her littermate Kevin (litters are named by letter), who sent his reward skittering across the floor toward the warden's feet. As Perry bent to pick it up, one of the inmates approached. "I'll get it, Warden," said the man, the words "God's Child" tattooed across his Adam's apple in gothic letters. "It's all slimy."

Some of the Coffee trainers are old pros -- one was working with his 10th dog -- while others are new to the program. They live in a dedicated dorm, where the dogs' crates nestle against the inmates' bunks.

Perry says he is tremendously proud of the Auburn partnership, crediting it with improving inmates' morale and behavior. "The incident rate in that unit is almost non-existent," he said. "That dog program just kind of calms everyone."

Not every inmate is eligible. To apply, inmates must have a high school diploma or its equivalent and be free of disciplinary reports for a year -- a considerable challenge, Perry said. "These aren't heinous individuals," he said. "They're men who've made mistakes, serious ones, and they deserve to be forgiven. And the sooner they can forgive themselves, the sooner we can."

Working with the dogs, he said, speeds that process. "A lot of these guys have never been given a lot of responsibility, and this is their chance not only to be a responsible adult but a responsible citizen."

That sense of duty is explained in a mantra displayed on a wall:

You Can Design It

You Can Make It

You Can Hide It

K9

We Will Find It

Striding past, Perry and Brock, the Auburn instructor, paused at the end of a row of bunks, an empty crate brushing their knees.

Until a few days before, the crate had housed a dog named Joel, who had graduated and gone back to Auburn. "I know you're wondering," Brock said to his trainer. "Joel is doing great."

The inmate gestured at the metal grate, onto which he had taped a photograph of a Lab. It was not Joel but a look-alike from a magazine. Possessions are few here, some flimsy, all of them essential. As was this one, a reminder of a dog trained to protect, who may have already done some of his best work.

MOVING TARGETS

The Canine Performance Sciences building's otherwise humdrum conference room is crowned with the skin of a 13 1/2-foot python caught in the Florida Everglades, where Auburn dogs have stalked the invasive snakes.

For many years, dogs here were trained to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs) -- homemade bombs -- that had been planted in a parked car or stashed in a village bazaar. That focus changed somewhat about eight years ago, when Auburn's scientists and trainers were approached with a new challenge: how to detect an IED that is on the move, carried by a would-be bomber.

"The first application we were pointed toward was mass transit," said Paul Waggoner, a program co-director. The idea was to preserve crowd flow while identifying suspicious individuals. If you make people walk through checkpoints like the kind in airports, Waggoner explained, then "mass transit becomes nonmass transit."

What was the most effective way, Waggoner and his colleagues wondered, for dogs to patrol crowded areas?

They found their answer in the work of Gary Settles, a mechanical engineering professor at Penn State whose research had shown that humans produce thermal plumes that emanate from our bodies and entrain gaseous particles. Most of these particles, like traces of perspiration or perfume, are benign, but the plume also can betray contact with hazardous materials, like those used in bombs.

Instead of screening each person, then, the dogs could inspect the "human aerodynamic wakes" that trail behind people in motion and alert a handler to the presence of explosives.

If that sounds fairly straightforward, "it's a bigger challenge than you think," Waggoner said. "Dogs naturally want to interrogate things and people, and not open space."

VAPOR WAKE

Among the first animals trained under the new protocol were dogs deployed by Amtrak in 2007, and the rail service has used more than 70.

Buoyed by the dogs' advances in tracking air currents, Waggoner and Craig Angle, a co-director of the Canine Performance Sciences Program, began experimenting with even more elusive targets, including pathogens. In a video shown to a visitor, a dog named Baxter sniffs at the cabinets in a vacant house used as a research site, alerting when he finds a swab of a nasty cattle virus.

Researchers want to know, among other things, whether dogs can find viruses that affect livestock, in the hope that ranchers would no longer need to destroy entire herds to eliminate a few sick animals.

On a day cold by Alabama standards, a black Lab named Gus ignored the biting wind and sprinted through a pavilion in a grassy clearing at a training site to scrutinize half a dozen wooden boxes, each with a hole in the top. One of the boxes hid a powder that mimics explosive chemicals, and when Gus alerted on it, he was given a toy.

Gus and his sister Gala had returned to Auburn days earlier, after six months with prison handlers. While Gus had immediately stood out, Gala was tentative, "a little more squirrelly," said Terry Fischer, a chief instructor. As she hunted targets in the brush and gamy husks of felled trees, she looked to her trainer Bart Rogers for help. "Coyote or whatever else she's smelling out here, it just shut her down," he said.

In the next few weeks, Fischer and Rogers would work with the dogs on increasingly challenging tasks, adding to the number of boxes and then moving on to vehicles and complex settings like warehouses and power plants.

If one of the Auburn research projects proves viable, dogs like Gala will no longer be able to seek aid from their handlers. Borrowing driverless-car technology, the scientists are exploring ways to have dogs detect on their own. The goal, Waggoner said, is to examine wide areas where bomb-making components are stored "before they're live."

"It's about getting to what people call 'left of boom,'" he added.

Celia Storey contributed information to this report.

ActiveStyle on 08/03/2015

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