5 Tails of Heroic Dogs Saving Lives and Sniffing Out Crime

[Music] not all heroes wear capes some of them wear collars [Music] and to these brave hounds no task is too rough here are five canine superheroes here to save the day a certified avalanche dog like tally can do the work of about 30 rescuers in the same amount of time their sense of smell is 10 times greater than ours and if someone's buried in the snow or not even buried but just lost in the woods the dog can smell their scent coming up through the snow pack and tell me where to start digging to find that person we are the first responders and a lot of times if things go well into our training we can facilitate that rescue without putting anybody else in harm's way and be done quickly and efficiently and all go home safely we gotta find somebody i know you want to find somebody okay let's go search my name's hunter mortensen i'm an avalanche technician here at breckenridge ski resort with my ski patrol partner tally and we've been working here for eight years together we're really fortunate here at breckenridge we have six avalanche rescue dogs on staff today tally's hearing with her co-workers and friends is boudreaux the golden retriever and a up another mountain purebred mutt the years of the big saint bernard and swiss mountain dog with the barrel under their neck those dogs are built for the mountains they're sturdy they're hardy they can do it but what we're finding is they don't travel well in the snow and they're not as fast moving across the snow and avalanche rescue is all a matter of time so we're looking these days for dogs that are a little bit on the smaller side a little more nimble and a little more quick so the training we start him six to nine months old and a lot of it is just basic obedience and then we start building from the obedience into actual hide-and-go-seek type games and then we build up from there into big snow caves where we'll bury a person almost six feet deep if we have enough snow and then the dog will start searching and having to find where that scent's coming up to play the game and all they're really looking for is that person who they think has their toy oh that sounds good girl it's about two full years of training to take your last certification test for an avalanche rescue dog and handler so i'm certified to work with tally ready my whole last eight years of my career have been spent with her every day all day when we have to do our thing we're really dependent on each other and i couldn't do what i do without her and so it's an amazing partnership and i'm really honored and proud to be a part of this program and work with a dog like her blakely has the most difficult job at cincinnati zoo he has to play with babies all the time [Music] he's never shown any aggression or snapped if he gets upset kind of like any mom would he just leaves the room you are so cute my name is don strasser and we're at the cincinnati zoo and botanical gardens blakely is a five-year-old australian shepherd we got him from a rescue and i use him in a nursery as a nanny or a companion dog this is about you and you're taking a nap blakely's here for the main purpose of teaching the babies the correct animal cues as they grow up so when they are introduced back to their own kind they know what appropriate behavior is he teaches them how to play how to interact i can tell them no don't bite me but i'm not an animal and i don't give the same cues that he can so we make a great team [Music] smile for the camera blakely has worked with cheetahs ocelots a token battered foxes a warthog wallabies to name a few he's working with four baby cheetahs right now it's been a long seven weeks for him with these little cheetah cubs and he's i think tired because he's on alert for 24 hours a day if they start making too much noise he'll come and get us like something's not right something's not right he's kind of like a second set of eyes for us too a lot of times they still recognize each other like dale the talk and he raised when they see each other he'll they'll still run up up front and grunt at him and he'll kind of jump up on the wall and it's kind of like hey how you doing thank you yeah well i i like to think i have an office but i'm pretty sure it's his [Music] world war ii saw lots of heroes winston churchill de gaulle commander eisenhower but one you probably don't recognize is smokey a yorkshire terrier and the tiniest war hero of all time i feel smokey and i were destined to be together that's bill nguyen a corporal at the time and smokey's owner he bought smokey for 6.44 cents during his time serving in the pacific theater i think that if she fallen in anyone else's hands she would never have been what she was and she was remarkable smokey followed bill through 150 air raids 12 combat missions and once even led bill to safety during a japanese bombing well we'd look around we got eight of our buddies all wounded around where smokey and i were if smokey hadn't taken me there i would have been standing with the other guys smokey also accompanied nurses on their rounds at a u.s army hospital in new guinea smokey gets credited for being the first therapy dog on record back in bill's hometown of cleveland smokey became famous doing tricks on tv shows she could walk on a drum she could ride a scooter smokey died a celebrity in 1957 but she wasn't forgotten she has memorials in ohio pennsylvania australia hawaii tennessee but her biggest legacy popular belief is that smokey's the reason that yorkies are such a popular pet so thank smokey the world war ii dog for all those cute little yorkies in the peak of summer in italy when the beaches and lakes are full of swimmers the lifeguards keeping everyone safe bring in some much-needed assistance [Music] [Music] aqua since then furuto has found that dogs make ideal lifeguard partners they remain calm under pressure and instinctively choose the safest path through the water currents back to shore once in the water they're able to keep [Music] [Music] to keep up with these numbers the school has over 350 certified rescue dogs and each year takes in new recruits [Music] after about 18 months of training they learn how to jump from speeding boats and helicopters safely among other rescue techniques italy is the only country in the world that recognizes these certified canines as actual lifeguards but the value of this is catching on so the school is starting to expand abroad humanoid we as humans have always used dogs to help us get what we want and what we need we make amazing teams because we've evolved together and they make a massive difference in conservation by finding things that we couldn't possibly find to give us information to help save species our dogs use their sense of smell to find everything from endangered species to invasive species and wildlife crime which is something we're really proud of [Music] come on guys let's go for a walk i'm megan parker i'm research director and co-founder of working dogs for conservation easy wait we're an organization that binds dogs from rescue situations shelters or career change dogs we train them as detection dogs for conservation projects around the world right now we're on the way from the kennel to the armory to pick up two new elephant tusks and a leopard skin and a pangolin to train on we're treating the dogs on new samples that might be finding scats of endangered species doing a population estimate finding live animals that are endangered that are very rare helping fight wildlife crime in africa by having dogs find ivory and rhino and bushmeat and guns and ammunition that are used for poaching this dog searching for gunpowder they can detect microscopic larvae and water they can detect one species of fish in a moving stream that needs to be removed from the ecosystem before it harms more animals or plants you could imagine like well we could build a computer that would sense odors or a sense particles of some object in the environment except we can't build anything that fine like dogs are actually the best technology and the best able to detect something and then tell their handler what they [Music] know i started out as a kid training dogs when i was 10. and i just kept that interest i became a biologist and i got my phd studying african wild dogs this has been like a theme i guess for me in my life i do have dogs myself i actually live with three dogs two of them are working dogs one is retiring he's on the couch i'm guessing oh they're both on the couch um [Music] this morning we started tuli on an endangered bat that she'll be working on it's really simple at first when she smells the bat she sits and gets her toy [Music] it's going to work yes good girl and then we moved to really complicated scenarios where the dogs learn to find the scent of an endangered animal in a very hard to find place most of our dogs come from shelters or from a situation where somebody can't keep a dog like this we look at anywhere from one to two thousand dogs before we find a dog that meets our standards and can make it to the field as a working dog for conservation we're gonna run utah on the kickfox scat is there anything particular you want to work on he's solid yeah he knows these dogs have really high energy they want to play with a toy and without a job their energy gets misdirected into like tearing up your couch or killing the cat or jumping through a window or chasing whatever so these dogs are really hard to have as pets but when they have a job and have a great home it's an awesome hi combination oh my gosh i know we haven't worked together since cameron says a lot of the dogs that i've personally trained i thought it would be really hard at first to have them live in another continent but the care and the bonds that they have formed with their scouts and how hard they work and the kind of work that they do when i see them they are working it's an awesome life for them our work is important it pairs these two things i care a lot about which is taking dogs that are on death row and then they get to amplify all this conservation that we care about that we want to do the dogs are making the world a better place they really are making wildlife safer in places where they work you

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 62,037

Rating: 4.9459777 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, New Releases, Great Big Reels, Nature & Animals, nature, animals, canine, dogs, superheroes, pups, pets, rescue, heroic, zoo, lifeguard, saving lives

Id: rRCMER2Yrog

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

REMINDER: Silly/Fake jobs are only allowed on Saturdays & Sundays

Please report this post if:

• It is a silly job posted Monday - Friday

• It was posted recently and received a high score

• There is no indication what the dogs job is

• It is a pet dog guarding a house

• It is a sneak shot of a service or guide dog

Click here for a full explanation of the rules.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.