Emily Fuerst, Sagorika Sen, Wanyu Zheng, Yong Lee

CCTP 506

Transcription

Interview with Jessie Smith: Dog Trainer and Handler

Emily Fuerst, Sagorika Sen, Wanyu Zheng, Yong Lee 4/29/2013 Below is a transcribed phone interview between Jessie Smith and Yong. Jessie Smith works for Vohn Liche Kennels in Indiana where he is a trainer. He has worked with military working dogs for approximately 14 years as a handler and trainer. We were able to interview for him for over 30 minutes, however we transcribed 12 essential minutes of the interview. Enjoy!

Yong: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jessie: I joined the Army in 1992 after graduating high school, was... did four years in the army, got out at, I was from originally from Georgia, so I got out of the Army and naturally I went back to Georgia, became a police officer, worked for a local sheriff’s department and county police in the town of Albany, Georgia for nearly 10 years. In 2006 I went to work for the Marine Core as a dog handler and trainer and that brought me Kenny’s trainer’s courses in 2010. Kenny liked me for what I had to offer, my attitude and my presence about me so he offered me a job and I turned it down. I wasn’t ready to move my family this far North, because I was born and raised in Georgia…that’s where I lived and that’s where I wanted to stay and about May of last year I was going to a conference in San Antonio, Texas and I was interviewing for a job in Washington State with the rangers and I called Kenny to see if he could give me any background on the guys interviewing and he said, “what are you there for” and I said I am interviewing for a job and in his words he said “That’s bullshit, if you are going to move to Washington State you can move to Indiana.” And I said “yeah you have a point” I told him I would be in Texas next week and he said he would be too because he was teaching and while we were in Texas we talked about a job and then I moved my family up here and I have been here since June of 2012. Not quite a year yet, but all in all I had my first dog in 1999, so from 1999 to 2013 I have been either handling or training dogs for 14 years …15 years.

Yong: Okay, great can you tell us the difference between trainers and handlers?

Jessie: Basically the handler’s course, the handlers are basically someone who handles a specific dog …or maybe you handle two dogs and you work a dog for a number years and then you move to a different dog. When you are a handler, you handle a single purpose dog or a dual purpose dog, meaning just an explosives dog or just a narcotics dog or he can do two tasks meaning he will be a drug dog and a bite dog or a bomb dog and a bite dog. When you are a handler, there is really no distinction between a single purpose handler and a dual purpose handler. My dog can do multiple tasks. When you are a trainer, you have the opportunity to see and supervise a dog and supervise its training and encourage the handler to do better and to be a better model for the dog problem solving. So you see a problem developing within the dog’s training and you develop a training regimen to fix that problem or if a handler and dog are not bonding together, you make the decision to separate the two and place him with a better dog that suits his ability and then find somebody else to work that other dog. A trainer is actually a problem solver, you find, you locate the problem whether it’s the handler or the dog and you fix those problems. A handler may not have those abilities because he is more focuses on getting better with his specific dog and not really worrying about everyone else’s business. Yong: What specific breeds of dogs do you work with?

Jessie: We used a wide, wide range of dogs, our top three are obviously the German Shepherd the Belgian Malinois and the Dutch Shepherd but we have specific contracts that let us use labs, golden retrievers, Brittany spaniels, cocker spaniels and some pit mixes in some cases. Any type of sporting dog, the bird dog type we can use, especially for our military contracts that are off leash, because there they have that capability anyways. We are just hawing the skew towards a specific task.

Yong: Are there certain breeds that are better suited for certain tasks?

Jessie: Yes, obviously when we were talking about a dog that is going to be a bite dog, it’s going to have aggression issues or be aggressive towards humans. We are not going to convince a lab or a cocker spaniel that it can fight a man. Those are specifically wind up being regulated to the German shepherd, the malinois and the Dutch shepherd. Any of the dual purpose police dogs that is normally the three categories it falls in. Every once in a while we will see a Rottweiler mix or a Great Dane mix of some sort. 99.5 % are going to be from those three breeds.

Yong: From the time you start training with the dogs till the time they are ready for some type of duty, about how long is that process?

Jessie: Again that varies between the smartness of the dog and its willingness to learn. We have seen dogs are literally ready to advance till the next ….we have a specific way we teach, which I covered already a little bit. We do the box room first and when they’re ready to leave the box room, we turn right around to our training building. We have a training building that has the odors separated, which is right behind us. So once the dog can conquer the task and understand the task in the box room we go to the training barn. Once he leaves the training barn, we take him to the saw mill and then to do cars. We consider a dog who has done those four venues finished. Now he is not complete but the odor initiation is finished and he is ready for harder tasks, he is ready to understand the owner can be anywhere, high, low, deep – any type of different things. We will do more training after that but he can go through those four venues in as little as four days, sometimes.

Yong: Wow

Jessie: And then maybe the next dog takes three weeks but then we call them fast trackers and then the average dog that takes a little bit longer to pick up the task – but they will finish out just as nicely but it just takes a little longer. So anywhere from four days to a month, that it would cover it safely.

Yong: Just to review the four venues you mentioned were the box room, the barn, cars and I think I am missing the third one that you mentioned.

Jessie: The Saw Mill Yong: Now is the box room, sort of just like a... um... a fake scenario?

Jessie: That is where we do all the odor training, so that’s where we play our show game with the dog and play hide and go seek with the box.

Yong: Oh okay I see, Gotcha

Jessie: That is where all of the initial training is done and then he learns the odor recognition there, we train odor then sit and then you get the ball. We do all of that in the box room and then the dog doesn’t leave there till he has the task, till he understands. You can add this so everyone understands that room is FUN, fun, fun, fun. It is made to be...it is supposed to be the best time the dog ever had, it is not made to be classroom type drill, drill ,drill – it is made to be fun. We have the dogs in there from anywhere between 8 to 12 sessions, so he will go to the box from anywhere to 8 to 12 times to get the ball. We always want to end on a good note. Literally the session will last 10 minutes and he may do that twice a day but that’s it. It’s not like we go in there and pound him, pound him, pound him till he figures it out. Its real short sessions and we take the opportunity to advance the dog when we see the window of opportunity.

Yong: And so do each of these venues get progressively more challenging?

Jessie :Absolutely, you are right. Back to the rules of susceptive approximation, the rooms in the training barn are small, let’s say 10 feet by 8 feet for the room, with furniture in it. When the dog can accomplish that we take it to the saw mill, the room is probably 14 by 14, so every room, every time we take it to a new location, the rooms get bigger, the highs get higher, the highs get lower, the highs get deeper, the highs get whatever, whatever venue we take it to, the dog learns something else and learns it can be somewhere else.

Yong: How would you say that the training methods you use today, how have they evolved from the Vietnam era when the dogs were also used in service?

Jessie: I will say this, without being negative, we have learned that Kenny’s process, there are other people that are doing it because they have learned it from him but he was the ….the theory is this, dogs can smell multiple odors at once…meaning when we smell a hamburger, we smell the hamburger, we don’t necessarily smell the tomato, lettuce, ketchup. It’s called the stew theory and the way it is described is using a pot of stew at your grandmother’s house. When you walk inside, you smell that she is cooking soup; you don’t necessarily smell the peas and the carrots and the onions and the celery and the tomatoes and the hamburger meat or whatever she got in it. We don’t smell that, we smell stew! But when dogs smell something, they smell everything that is in it and they can could talk or write it down they could tell you every ingredient that is in there. The Government still uses it to this day; they believe in this, they teach it. This is a theory that everyone agrees on, dogs can smell multiple odors at once and describe them if they had that ability. Based on that theory, the other government agencies that are out there still teach one odor at a time, they teach how to find X and then how to find Y and then how to find Z. Because they do that, it takes a lot longer than what Kenny has done. Kenny, when we teach a dog how to find drugs, we teach them how to find all the drugs at one time, every one of them. The same with bombs, we teach them to find 12 different odors at once and then when we turn around and go into the training bomb, the one we discussed earlier, the odors are separated. One odor at a time and the dogs learn that while I was in here I smelled all these things together but in these rooms I can sit when I just smell marijuana, when I just smell cocaine, when I just smell heroine, when I just smell meth.