Tracker Dog Protects Elderly Couple From Thieves | Pet Heroes | Pets & Vets

hi i'm jason mccoy and welcome to pet heroes humans and animals often form unexpected and unique bonds but how do those connections impact our daily lives well we examine two very special relationships which surpass everyone's expectations canada's banff national park is renowned for its natural beauty and splendor visitors come from around the world to enjoy this vacation wonderland and charged with their well-being is public safety manager mark ledwich well um these mountain parks these four contiguous national parks banff yoho kootenai and jasper you know are the busiest national parks in the country and particularly band park you know it's an iconic place in the world and we literally get millions of visitors that come through the gates every year ensuring the safety of these visitors sometimes requires the use of highly trained dogs scott ward is a retired national park warden living in the picturesque town of canmore alberta at the eastern gateway to the banff national park i started as a national park warden in 1970 and i spent all of 1970 to 1980 doing a back country front country type park warden work i came back as a park warden dog handler and i did that job for 17 years and went through three dogs in my career as a park dog handler we go through the rcmp police dog training center so our dogs are trained in all the police service skills as well as search and rescue it was the rcmp training center that paired scott with a memorable young canine partner smokey was given to me by the rcmp in the spring he'd been in training already but was too immature to pass the training so they said take him for the summer do some training with him come back in the fall and hopefully he'll be mature by then scott makes it his personal mission to take smokey under his wing the time spent training together not only helps sharpen smokey's tracking abilities it also develops an essential relationship between him and scott the bond was strong between the dog and myself because we had to have it to work together basically find it you have to praise the dog at the end and the only thing he gets in certain things like tracking is the verbal praise of the handler good boy that means a lot to keep the dog motivated after an intense summer of training scott and smokey are about to have their skills and their partnership put to the test a retired couple's road trip through the rockies takes an unexpected turn for the worse when their motorhome experiences engine trouble soon a car pulls over behind them and the relieved couple believes help has arrived but these seemingly good samaritans have some very bad intentions four youths rush into the motorhome and steal it abandoning the seniors on the side of the road once underway the thieves tear the motorhome apart desperately searching for anything that might be of value until they find exactly what they're looking for a vacations worth of cash but it's not long before the rv sputters to a halt again now stranded without a ride they pulled into the woods the day we got the call was may 24th i'm pretty sure it was our first ever real tracking call this is what they've been training for they head for the truck smokey was uh wired for sound basically he heard the siren going and he would start spinning in the back and yelping and howling and very excited to do something by the time the rcmp got the call they had a helicopter in the air looking for the motorhome they spotted the motorhome back in the bush on a secondary trail that ran off the trans-canada highway towards the bow river the motor home was sitting there the suspects were not to be found so they wanted to know if i could pick up a track with the dog in the vicinity of the motorhome i said yeah i need somebody with me to go with me as backup he said yeah we'll send one of the members with you so i started casting the dog around the motor hole by now the track was approximately an hour and a half old i started on the track i looked back and there was no rcmp back up with me by now i'm about 30 meters from the motor home when i look back and i yell they're not hearing me anybody coming so now i've i've come to a point where i have to make a decision do i sit around and wait for someone to come with me or do i just keep going with the scent fading smokey is getting anxious and scott makes the critical decision to track the four young criminals without police backup the thing that you're most worried about in a situation like that is you don't know anything about these suspects you don't know whether they're armed what their criminal records are whether they have a history of violence they've just perpetrated a violent offense that's in the back of your mind dr connie varnigan is a professor of psychology at the university of alberta she shares her insight on the bonds that form between humans and animals the bond between the handler and the dog has to be very very strong because that dog has to be able to pick up very subtle cues on the part of the handler and not just obey commands so you don't have time to say smokey go catch that bad guy you have to be able to direct your attention towards the bad guy and smokey to run towards him immediately in calgary rcmp officer bill hamilton receives an urgent call from dispatch was common practice for calling me to assist parks canada dog counters in criminal matters their main mandate is search and rescue in the national parks bill races to the scene with his canine partner kelly an experienced and efficient tracker who's raring to go it's very important when you're working a dog to be to be out at the call as soon as possible because time is always a factor bill and kelly are still half an hour away scott and smokey are on their own but smokey soon finds proof that they're on the right track tracked through the bush for about only about 50 meters and the dog indicated under a stump and i looked and there was a clothing and a sleeping bag had been stashed underneath the stump goods stolen from the motorhome so i just marked that spot and off i went on the track again and then the dog about 25 minutes into the track indicated another pile of clothing hidden so they'd stash some more clothing so i marked that spot and then started tracking again and i only tracked about another 10 minutes and i've tracked again in a big circle right up to the trans-canada highway when i got to the close to the highway i could see all four of the youth standing on the edge of the highway so i yelled uh you know police freeze they looked back and saw me coming with a dog and ran across the highway so i ran up to the edge of the highway ran across the other side and right away two of them gala two of them ran into the bush so i yelled into the bush uh fellas better come over i'm sending the dog in after you turn the dogs in hey guys come on now so they came right out and gave up all four of them so i've proned all four of them out into the ditch radioed the banff warden office who radioed the rcmp who said that i had the suspects up the road and in about five minutes several police cars showed up and took the suspects into custody an underdog no more smokey's first tracking call ends in a successful arrest scott believes smokey came through in the crunch because of the training and the special connection between them i think the chemistry between smokey and i allowed smokey to become a good tracking dog because we had the summer to build that chemistry the relationship based on the animal's temperament the human's temperament the animals learning the humans handling is always going to be a little bit different and that's why we go through this long training phase a lot of times in the beginning of the formation of the bond there's extra release of oxytocin a hormone that's important for nurturing and forming of relationships so we've got intellectual relationships emotional relationships neurobiological relationships so we've got lots of different types of ways that that bond is being formed even though the thieves are no longer on the loose there's still something missing when i arrived on the scene i learned that during the robbery that a large amount of cash have been taken from this couple scott said no he located the individuals but no cash i was trying to figure out where this money could be that the kids had stolen from the motor home and at first i was quite convinced it would be along the track this is a prime example where one dog had worked a track for a period of time and was probably somewhat fatigued as the dog hunter would be as well and then i would arrive on scene i've got a fresh dog i'm not tired and so i would take over and the dog would probably be more effective rested than unrested with kelly now in search mode scott and bill cover the track again but despite recovering everything else that went missing they still can't find the money so we continued the search following the track out to the trans-canada highway where the two girls were arrested and the two males had fled to the other side of the highway and then all of a sudden bing the light bulb went on when we didn't find it that they they'd run across into the bush within seven minutes kelly had located it was indicating an area of mossy area and dug underneath it and found a bundle of cash and it consisted of american and canadian cash a successful case is always a positive reinforcement for both the dog and the handler both scott and myself with our respective dogs brought this case to a successful conclusion shortly afterwards the elderly couple were able to resume their holiday charges have been laid against the four violent thieves and thanks to smokey and kelly the couple got all of their stolen property back including their missing cash it was smokey's first mission and he exceeded everyone's expectations even his handlers smokey was slow to learn things but once he learned them he would stay with it forever once he learned to track you could virtually he would go until he dropped so he was a really really good tracking dog smokey definitely realized his full potential smokey was so tenacious that i had really good success with him over the seven year period in the field with dozens and dozens of great successes so when he retired he went with another uh park warden who lived near golden so smokey went to live on the farm and lived another four years roaming around the farm free as a bird and had a really good retired life too great retired life for a pet hero smokey and scott ward had an incredible relationship it brought out the best in both of them and it helped put away four violent criminals coming up we've got the story of pugsley a unique pig with a pretty outrageous attitude who forms an unexpected connection that takes everyone by surprise sherry burnette is an interior decorator living in cambridge ontario i'm the mom of a 21 year old young man with autism and tourette syndrome sherry's son jay currently lives in a 24-hour care facility but spends weekends at home with his mom the main thing is with jay is if you think of it sort of as an input output input works he understands everything you say like a lot of autistic people but there's something wrong with the output he has trouble communicating which leads to a lot of frustration rebellion anxiety and like a lot of autistic people he has ocd it's just challenging it's different you've always got to be thinking outside of the box lyndon perriken is the executive director for autism calgary he helps us understand the challenges of living with autism someone with autism who's had impaired development communication might not get a lot of really obvious signals that really cue a person into how to understand a conversation and also may be coupled with maybe over sensitivity to light or sound or under sensitivities while you're trying to communicate with a world without the natural tools that the rest of us take for granted you're going to develop certain kinds of behaviors to cope with that world the behaviors really are more of a symptom of the challenges of living with that condition jay and sherry tackled this challenge with the help of an unorthodox four-legged friend huxley when we got him was eight months old he is a vietnamese pot belly pig pure black and he's a little devil pugsley burst into sherry's life during a very difficult time in jay's development he was changing you know he was going through puberty and he started running away more he started becoming more aggressive more destructive it just got very very difficult around that period we'd be in the backyard and he'd be playing nicely and i'd be doing a little gardening and all of a sudden he'd vault right over the fence and he was gone it becomes increasingly challenging for the single mom to keep jay out of harm's way i was determined he wasn't going to get away anymore but he did he got away again one time we were in the car and i stopped at a stop sign and he just jumped out the car door and took off he was gone i had to you know pull the car over as fast as i could and run down after trying to catch him [Music] jay is also becoming well known to local police another time he got out his bedroom window at my house slid down the icy roof and broke his wrist so we had to then put plexiglass over all the windows as well as locks and all the doors jay begins to express his frustrations in other ways as well he liked to kick holes in the walls he only kicked it you know low levels back then it's okay so we there were so many holes in the wall we just couldn't keep patching them i had to wainscot the entire house every room finally sherry receives a call from jay's school he's just run away after having jumped from a second story window huxley came in and the story in around about 2006 it was a sunday afternoon sherry's niece drops by with a bit of a problem she's picked up an interesting new pet that her family won't let her keep all his cousins were over and and came pugs in the laundry hamper and once he got out and started racing around getting into everything she found him extremely amusing jay was just delighted with bugs from the first it was like love at first sight sherry has owned plenty of dogs in the past but had never seen jay connect with any of them after seeing the magic connection he has with pugsley she decides to give him a home after all how hard can it be to take care of a little pig it's like having a perpetual toddler in your house they get bored they'll rip up the carpet they'll eat the drywall they'll pull the wallpaper off the wall sherry burnette and bob amy live in arthur ontario where they operate the ruby ranch pig sanctuary we take in unwanted abandoned pigs a lot of them end up here because people don't realize how big they're going to get they do make good pets if you're willing to accept their idiosyncrasies pugsley was usually in trouble for something i would tell pugsley off and pugsley would talk back [Music] and they would just sit there grinning and beaming with pugsley around sherry notices some dramatic improvements in jay's behavior ugly just made him laugh so he just enjoyed him too he was just very therapeutic for jay he was like the the ideal pet for jay but then after a while i noticed that the worse pugsley behaved the better jay behaved it was like when punsley was acting up he had stolen jay's role so now all of a sudden jay's got this new role chase the good boy now if the pig was less well-behaved it's taking some of the attention away from from jay who may not be thriving on that amount of attention it's all about the connection the human animal bond is pervasive in all ways whether it's with a highly trained animal or a pig just happens to show up one day pugsley's arrival makes a world of difference for sherry and jay his social life got better his quality of life improved he was able to go more places do more things because he didn't have to be the rebel anymore pigs sense thing about things about people they sense when someone is different and when someone needs to be gentle you have to be gentle around them they just they just know those kind of things as the years pass jay is finally able to move into a group home where he'll receive the 24-hour care he needs sherry decides to relocate in order to be closer to jay that meant once i'd made the decision that i had six months to find a home for pugsley because it was highly unlikely that i would be able to rent another place that was zoned for our pigs i got on the internet and started contacting pig sanctuaries in ontario sherry finally finds the perfect home for pugsley she and i share the exact same name first and last we're both sheri burnett and she took that as a sign or fate that you know this was meant to be and i believe in that stuff too so i thought about it and yep that's too much coincidence and we took agreed to take pugsley in sherry and bob make room at the trough for pugsley he is the the boss of his own little herd he's got two younger pigs who he's in charge of and he's living a great life he's having a great old time now it was a hard adjustment but now he's really doing well he's really happy whenever she can sherry brings jay out to the ruby ranch to check in on their old friend pugsley i believe pugsley's a hero he helped a young man find comfort in a scary world i didn't expect pugsley to to heal jay i didn't expect it they're kindred spirits they're both ornery strong-headed rebellious determined rebels both of them my niece poetry take his apple in pugsley's a hero he's a hero in my book that's for sure pugsley and jay formed a unique relationship that not only allowed jay a chance to be a good son but also provided an unexpected opportunity to better communicate with his mom and in the case of smokey and scott ward it was their incredible connection that helped them form such a great partnership bringing out the best in both of them for more information visit cmt.ca pet heroes [Music]

Channel: Pets & Vets

Views: 956

Rating: 4.5555553 out of 5

Keywords: Animals, Animal Documentary, documentaries, nature documentaries, nature documentary, pet heroes, pet saves owners life, pet saves human, pet saves owner, Pet Heroes, pet heroes season 1, Dog saves owner, animal saves human, animal saves people, tracking dogs, tracking dog training, tracking dogs in action, autism dog therapy, k9 dog, police dog training, police dog takes down suspect, tracker dog training, police dog tracking, police dog tracks down fleeing criminal

Id: 9S9N4FG-6UQ

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021