Wichita Fire Capt. Stuart Bevis has been investigating fires for more than 15 years. Last year he got a new partner—the four-legged kind.
Sporty, a 2-year-old black Labrador retriever, is an accelerant detection dog—not your traditional firehouse Dalmatian. Together, they’re one of only 68 such K9 fire investigation teams in the country.
Although they still guide the blind, today’s working dogs also open doors for people in wheelchairs, search for tornado victims, help autistic children communicate, and so much more. Much of what they do is scent-based, and it’s no wonder: A dog’s sense of smell is about 200 times stronger than a human’s and far more sophisticated. Bevis’s boss, Fire Marshal Brad Crisp, who has also partnered with K9s, is fond of the pizza analogy. “Brad always describes it like this: you can smell a pizza, but a dog can isolate every single ingredient that went into making it.”
When those natural abilities are trained and reinforced, the results are astonishing. Bevis can put a teardrop’s worth of gasoline into a bottle cap, fling it into an open field, and tell Sporty to find it. She always does. He could fling 99 more out there that aren’t treated, and she’ll alert to the one that is. He could stuff one with beef jerky, and she’d ignore it.
That’s impressive when you consider that Sporty is strictly a food-reward dog. She literally does not eat except as a reward for doing a task correctly. “She never eats out of a bowl; she only eats out of my hand.” Naturally, Bevis must spend a couple hours training Sporty every day that they aren’t called to investigate.
Ray Racobs’ dog, on the other hand, can pad into a restaurant wearing his therapy-dog harness, curl up his considerable frame under a table, and not once beg for scraps or sniff other diners. (Could your dog do that?)
Racobs’ dog is an 11-year-old golden retriever/Great Dane mix named Oso Oro—Spanish for “Golden Bear.” He’s the star of young-adult novels Racobs writes, in which the dog has telepathic powers. In real life, Oso has spent countless days working his magic in schools, hospitals and nursing homes. Children with reading difficulties can curl up with the gentle yellow giant and try out their skills on an audience of one who won’t correct them. Nursing home residents get a much-needed mood boost when Oso lumbers into their rooms.
His job doesn’t look that tough, but Racobs has seen his big shaggy pooch work little miracles. Racobs’ wife, Lynda, who is also a trained handler, often took Oso to her fourth-grade classroom in Wichita. One year, a boy assigned to her class was so afraid of dogs, he refused to visit his grandmother because she had one. Lynda reassured his mother that Oso was completely gentle, and they gave it a go. Before long, Racobs said, “The boy fell in love with Oso, and all of sudden he’s going to meet grandma because it calmed his fears.”
Doug Keeling sought out an assistance dog for his 15-year-old son, Michael, in part to calm his anxiety. But the teenager’s fear was wrapped around a matter of life and death: his own epilepsy, and the recent death of his epileptic cousin due to a seizure.
“Michael became very much more aware of his seizure disorder and the serious consequences of it,” Doug Keeling said. “He had quite a reaction. He was afraid he would die too.”
Michael’s struggle was complicated by Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder in the autism spectrum that makes it difficult for him to relate to people emotionally. His neurologist suggested the family get a seizure alert dog—not only to help Michael in case of a seizure, but to give him peace of mind. Doug Keeling, a lifelong dog lover who has trained hunting dogs, was immediately on board with the idea.
Through CARES—Canine Assistance, Rehabilitation, Education and Services—the Keelings were matched with Skeet, a compact little black Lab. Michael spent two weeks at the CARES facility in Concordia learning how to work with the dog.
Dogs can’t be trained to alert to a seizure. Scientists still can’t really figure out how they do it, but many assume it’s based on scent. So trainers look for dogs whose bloodlines show a good propensity for scent work, such cadaver or drug dogs.
Michael didn’t even know what to expect from Skeet during an alert. But the dog was his constant companion, even to school. Doug Keeling, an attorney, said they met with a lot of resistance at first from the school district. But the Americans With Disabilities Act ensured his right to bring a service animal to school. “I just pushed and said, ‘This is going to happen.’” And it did, and Skeet was perfectly calm and quiet.
Until one day, when there was a low “woof.” The dog stared at Michael. “Woof.” His teacher asked, could Skeet be alerting to a seizure? They decided not to take any chances and got Michael into a safe position. Within a few minutes, he had a grand mal seizure. It had probably been 10 to 15 minutes since Skeet’s first alert.
The dog also wears a pack that says “Emergency Medical Info.” So Michael, now 23, can go out in public with just his dog, confident that if he has a seizure, people around him will know how to help, Keeling said.
But Skeet has served a therapeutic role in Michael’s life that goes beyond seizure alerts, Keeling said. People with Asperger’s tend to be isolated. But the dog became a bridge for others to reach Michael, Keeling said. People would approach him and ask to pet Skeet. At school, everyone knew him as the kid with the dog. “Skeet became a companion for him as well. He became someone he could talk to,” Keeling said.
Like Skeet, assistance dogs for people with disabilities work around the clock, staying vigilant at all times to their handler’s needs. Some, like Sporty, work according to a partner’s schedule.
“Our dogs aren’t just working dogs. They have to be family dogs and PR tools,” Bevis said, because they do so many public appearances.
When Bevis and Sporty go home at night, she’s playful with his other dog and his kids. “Once we leave the door, she’s at another level. She’s not as gregarious. But she doesn’t go into work mode until I have my food pouch on.”
Then it’s all business. Sporty is trained to pick up on hydrocarbon-based scents from six different chemical families. That’s every known ignitable liquid. When she alerts to a scent, her behavior is to sit down firmly. Then Bevis asks her to show where she smelled it so he can take a sample back to the lab.
Human scientists still have to work their CSI magic to figure out what she found, but K9s like Sporty can really speed up a fire scene investigation. “She can help focus our work down from several hours to 10-15 minutes.”
Good girl, Sporty.
