Ethics of Police K9s, Training, Deployments, and More | SOURCE

Hey, I'd like to welcome everybody to The Source Podcast, everything working dogs. I took a few weeks of sabbatical, I think it is. Is that what you call it? But I took a a few weeks off. I handed it over to my co-host today, and we drastically seen our numbers drop. So I was forced to come back on the show. That way I can give the people, the people, what they want because it dropped. Would you agree?

I know you did great at Weight Watchers. Definitely some of your weight dropped. That's right. I'm expecting an increase in that, especially now that you're back in the podcast studio.

Yeah.

You're not going to be training anymore, but—

Yeah, I walked on campus today and like 4 people came up to me and wanted to take a picture with me and said, "Hey, I've seen you on the podcast. I love it." And then they looked at you and gave you the nasty eye like, "Get away from us." And then they handed you the camera to take the picture.

Yeah, I often end up with the camera in my hand.

Yeah, that's right. But now that I'm here to guide you, my young soldier. I'm gonna put my arm around you and guide you to the ways of more viewership, more listening, and how to like flow through this.

Yeah, well, I'm wondering what's gonna— how this is gonna work because we both had different initiatives when it comes to podcasting. I want to teach people many, many things, and then you're just trying to teach people one thing.

So, well, have you ever heard that saying about the bull? No. You haven't?

I heard the one about the frog.

Okay, tell me that one.

Uh, okay, that's the problem. Frog and the scorpion. It's not just a frog.

Okay, that's the issue. Okay, anyway, you know, this is about the long game, and it's about teaching people and allowing them to learn through our experiences. And sometimes you don't need to give them everything you know on one podcast episode.

That's true.

You need to slow down a little bit and give them something to think about and regurgitate until the next week, and then you can add on that. It's called successive approximation. But I know this is the first time you've heard that. So after we get off this podcast, I'm going to do a specific lesson with you on what successive approximation is, and then we'll work from there. And then every week we'll add to it. Would that work for you?

Absolutely.

Okay, great. But today we get to talk about ethics of working dog deployments, and I've seen a lot of chatter, I say, online, especially people responding to our videos and asking questions and people making ill comments at times in relationship to working dogs or law enforcement dogs. And to, to some extent, I can see those perspectives as well. I'm not naive in a sense that some of those may be justified or at least in their eyes, justified to some extent, right? We always talk about communication and what we do, and it's not what we say, it's how the person receives what we say. And I think in this case, when we're talking about ethics, a lot of people have some misconceptions, maybe what they've seen online, maybe some experience that they've had to deal with. So we have an opportunity today to shed some light on the ethics and the things that handlers really go through to deploy a dog successfully, legally, and I say morally too. So we, we get to jump into that pool, however deep it may be. I hope we can swim in it because this may open up a couple cans of worms, uh, especially between you and I. And probably for some of our listeners that have an opportunity to kind of weigh in on some of this. So let's jump in. You all right with that?

Yeah, works for me.

All right, so when we talk about ethics, what's the first thing comes to your mind? Ethics in dog deployments, what comes to your mind?

Um, First and foremost, I think, is safety.

Safety of the dog.

I mean, I can't help but tend to think about people's rights.

Yeah.

In those scenarios as well, whether or not— because ultimately dogs can't contextualize what they're doing. To them, they're just playing a game, right? That's how we utilize them. But a lot of it comes down to the handler and how that handler is actually using that dog, if he's using it properly. So, um, but yeah, I think about the laws and the amendments and people's rights when we talk about ethics.

And so when you think about those ethics and you say that's what comes to your mind when you're teaching students, are you incorporating that into your training? Are you dialing in on the fact of not just the dog, so working on handler and the ethics of the handler?

Yeah, um, I mean, we obviously go through some courses that go over case law and understanding people's rights and, um, giving that handler— well, for a lot of them it's a refresher, especially with search and seizures, but understanding when it's appropriate to use that dog and what limitations they have as far as using that dog. And when it comes to some patrol work as well, I mean, we really try to have the handlers understand what this tool can do to someone. Um, all of our handlers that come through the course, they do decoy work, and, and it's part of it is for training purposes so they understand how to train with a dog, but Part of it also is, hey, you gotta know what this feels like and what kind of damage you could be doing to someone. So, um, having them, you know, understand what that perspective of what someone might go through if they were to deploy that dog, uh, just to give them that kind of background. And maybe that's something that they could take into consideration of when when or when not to deploy their dog in the scenario.

Yeah, I think that's— that perspective is important because just like some of our listeners and viewers have perspectives, some of our students have perspectives too, because maybe they've been exposed to other handlers or what they've heard or seen online that may not necessarily be the whole truth. You know, it's easy for somebody to see a video that we do and I've seen this. They jump with both feet into the pot and stir it and take it as, oh, that's gospel or that's how it always is. And as we know, we get to see the full picture. And that's something that I've kind of expressed to Maya. You guys know her as the voice of reason.

I think she's the one that gets hurt the most by the comments.

She does. Well, she takes it personal. And because— and in her defense, the reason why is because she sees the full picture of what we do here. And, you know, part of the— what we talked about in the past was how do we relate everything that we do here to somebody? Because just seeing that capture— and I have people that call me, go, hey man, I see you guys are doing great. Really? Why? Because I've seen online you guys are, you know, posting these videos and doing all this. Well, yeah, absolutely. We would— why would we put an image that doesn't show we're being great or the things that we're doing is being great? My point behind this is it's easy to take a small caption and turn it into whatever you want to. That's marketing. But the reality of it is she knows what you go through as a trainer here. She knows what each of the staff members go through in a sense of how they care about every single person they have an opportunity to train or every dog they work with, or for that matter, every dog that comes into our kennel, how much work each of you guys put into that. Which then when she gets an ill comment about some things or ill comments pointed at law enforcement, she takes that personal. I do. We've tried to lessen that because we also have to consider everybody's perspective. Would you not agree with that? And we've talked about this in training. Sometimes we train stuff that we see it from our perspective, but we don't see it from the student's perspective. And when we talk about ethics, I think there, there's a conversation there that needs to happen in a sense. To not only educate people, but also to acknowledge that sometimes maybe everybody's not as ethical as we would like them to be. And because of that, it is a conversation we need to have, 'cause we only know what we do here. We don't spend time worrying about what everybody else is doing. And that's something I'm very diligent about. I think we've had these conversations before. We don't care what's going on on the sidelines. We need to focus on what's going on in front of us and where we're headed, because you can get caught up in all that mess.

Absolutely.

You know, and so I'm not naive enough to think that everybody just does the right thing all the time, especially when you have a tool that, like you brought up, that can injure people and can be done maliciously at times. When somebody has a tool that can lend them to search a car based on what the indication or alert that their dog gives them. And we also know that there are some triggers that the handler can do and actually teach the dog to cue off them. Would you not agree with that?

Oh yeah. We often deal with that too, and trying to get students to understand You know, and they might not get the full picture at first, but I mean, how often you see a green handler that as soon as the dog hits odor, before the dog even sits down, they're stopping their feet and they're staring in amazement, right? And even small things like that. But those are— I think I kind of went over it in the podcast before, but there's things like that that, you know, we take the time to try and prevent as much as possible is cueing the dog because, and I've seen the comments as well because Maya loves bringing them up to me, but people argue that, you know, we cue our dogs and we can make the dogs sit, and that's why even the way we set up the final where the dog is looking at the source of where the odor is at, he's not looking back at the handler. We try and make it very What's the right word to use? Try to make it very straightforward. I mean, there's no way that you can kind of pick it apart because at the end of the day, we don't want to waste people's time. You know, I mean, the idea of giving someone a dog they can make sit in front of a car wherever they want, you know, that's wasting the department's time. That's wasting man hours. And we've already talked about, you know, the manpower shortage, you know.

Yeah. Yeah.

We've— these officers, at least the ones that come through us, because that's the only ones that I can speak of, you know, I've always had full confidence that they're using their dogs and deploying them properly because that's just the way we've taught them. That's the way that they know.

So, well, you know, the, the great thing is, is you've only been taught one way. Which is this way.

Yeah.

And I would tend to agree those are things that we wholeheartedly try to avoid, right? We test. It's not about how the job gets— it's not about getting the job done in our eyes. It's about how we get it done. And I, especially trainers, I try to drive this point home to them. Yes, anybody can teach a dog to find drugs or track a person, but it's how we do it is what really separates us. The minutia, the, the very fact that we pay so much attention to very specific details, and that goes back to how we train our handlers to try to mitigate any of those risks, which is putting more independence in the dog. Because dogs are smart. Dogs will learn to focus on us versus focus on the task at hand. But I teach that way because of the problems that I had when I was a new handler, when I first got my dog, and the way that I was trained. And I was very much trained to get the job done. The focus was not on violating someone's rights or to get the job done on a deployment. The focus was to get me through training, get you through cert, get me through cert, right? It wasn't to prepare me for the real world.

Yeah.

And because of that experience, I saw how it really hindered me as a handler. And if I wasn't the way that I was, my career as a K-9 handler would have ended probably before it ever got started because I had so many issues I had to work out. And I know some of our listeners have dealt with that in the past. And I don't want this to be focused on the fact that, oh, this is what we do, look at this, because that's not the point. The point of this is, is to say that we focus on these types of things because we have seen the shortfalls, not only in our own experiences but other dogs that we see.

Yeah.

And we watch other dogs work, whether they're trained by us or someone else. And we're picking up on those minute details that tell us that that dog is not reliable or there's going to be problems down the road with this dog or this team because that dog is not trained.

Yeah.

To a certain standard that we have learned to pick out. So when we talk about some of the ethical considerations that a handler has to make, and you touched on them, which were safety of the dog, right? We got to keep that at the forefront. But I have to say this kind of upfront, Simon. Soldiers go to basic training, right? You did. But there comes a time—

I got to cut you off.

Okay, go ahead.

You call me a soldier.

Okay.

I wasn't really a soldier.

What were you? Tell me that again. I was a Marine. Oh, okay.

What's the difference there, um, since you brought it up? We're aquatic. Okay, I think that's the difference.

But you guys also work for the Navy, right?

Yeah, they needed a dance partner.

Okay, okay, I'm getting understanding. So yeah, well, thank you for that because many of us didn't know that.

So yeah, and many, many people haven't served like yourself, so—

Okay, yeah, I appreciate it. And you still serve You just serve in a different capacity. So getting into that is, is really leading us to the point of— and what I was leading into with that comment was the fact that there came a time when there was reality, and reality meant that you were a Marine that was here to protect our country. With that being said, your mama couldn't call your commander and say, hey, you guys are being too rough on my kid. You're yelling at him, you're making him have discipline, you are making him run PT. Because at the end of the day, you will prepare him for reality. And the reality is, is this world is ugly, and you are going to be faced with things that most of us can't comprehend. I'm saying all this to lead into, yes, this is a dog, and this dog serves their partner well and does a great job, but they're also being prepared to protect people's lives. They're also being prepared to minimize risk for all those around them, and sometimes that takes very pointed training. Sometimes that takes a lot of strenuous activity to move their heart rate up so that they can deploy for an hour or more on a search. They can track people for miles on end. So it's not all parties, is what I'm trying to get to. There comes some soreness, there comes some heartache, there comes some mental things that we have to work on with a dog. Which most of your outside world don't see that. And that's why I always say there's no comparison, or very little comparison, between a law enforcement or a military K-9 handler and what they have to prepare for, and somebody that's doing this for a hobby or that's working a dog on the weekends, you know, for sport or for titles and such. There's a vast difference in there, and I'm not saying one is better than the other by any means, but I also want people to understand that there's a vast difference in that approach than there is preparing a dog to go out on Saturday and run a hot dog truck.

Yeah, or routine.

Or routine.

And that's, I think, one of the things you brought up, and what really comes to mind is probably one of the best classes I got here at CCU was actually taught by you. And it was a class that you were kind of working—

Yeah, imagine that.

Well, you were workshopping it. It was still kind of rough at the time, but it was about distractors. And I think that kind of put a lot of things into focus because I remember as a young trainer, dogs getting distracted by something, whether it's a toy or something like that. I mean, and a lot of young handlers try to do this is is, oh, let me get that toy out of the way so he can work, right? And you kind of put it into perspective there where, you know, you got to be able to work through that type of stuff, right?

Yeah.

And the challenge a lot of these handlers have as far as training is they need to come up— they have to be very creative. They need to come up with scenarios. They need to test it out, right? Um, I think we did some off-site training about last week or something And, uh, that off-site training, going to a different location, gives us the opportunity, and it's awesome to be able to identify it in training as well, to identify those deficiencies that maybe we don't have over here because there's something in an environment that isn't here but maybe out there. Yeah, and give us that opportunity to work at it. But, um, if you don't identify it in training, the next place you're going to identify it is in deployments.

Yeah.

And you try to prepare as best as you can, uh, with your training, but I mean, it's unpredictable. You never know what you're going to come across, and you can try to prepare for everything, but there's always that one thing you didn't think of, right? And yeah, um, you know, as far as law enforcement goes, I bet they see some interesting stuff out there, right? I mean, I hear a lot of deployment stories You know, and especially when people have issues or a certain thing happened on deployment and it's like, man, I didn't think of that, but I can put that in those scenarios. Yeah, we got to prepare for that.

So, but it, but it's also that inherent risk as well though, right? Because although you prepare to keep that dog and that handler as safe as possible, There are some situations where you put a dog in a situation that you know is risky. You know that this dog may get hurt. And I know a lot of people don't like hearing that, or you're going to have people that say, well, you shouldn't do that. I get that and I understand that, but I can give you several examples where that dog saved multiple people from being hurt. I mean, think about our dogs that go to Iraq or other combat zones or just threat zones in general, and they're out there detecting bombs. Well, there is a small percentage of those that were killed or injured while doing that. The vast majority came home and were able to live a long, fruitful life after service. But the reality was they were put in harm's way knowing that, and it didn't end well. But it kept so many other people safe and gave them the ability to come home. I think about Walker County many years ago where the handler and K-9 Tonja were serving a search warrant on a suspect that was wanted, and they sent the dog in to clear the building. And as soon as the dog rounded the corner, the guy shot the dog. But that could have also been the team that rounded that corner in normal instances, and the first person or more would have been shot in the face, or, or more. So the dog yes, lost her life, but she did it doing something that she loved, and she did it doing something that saved other people and gave them the opportunity to come home to their wives, their kids, their mothers, their fathers, and all that. Most of those people have never been put into that situation either.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I think at the end of the day, you know, if a dog could understand You know, if the dog had an option, you know, and can actually understand the risks involved, like that bond and relationship that you have with them, I'm sure that they would give their lives for us.

Well, put it in this perspective: not everybody is meant for law enforcement, the military, a soldier, or in your, in your words, to be a Marine. Right? Not everybody is. Not everybody's cut out for that. And sometimes you think you're cut out for it sitting on your couch. But when you get put in that situation, how many people leave basic? I think about me going to college and playing college football and the number of kids that left during summer camp because they couldn't cut it. Because what they envisioned sitting on their couch or at home before they got into the situation was vastly different than when they were put in that situation. The, the minute— the mental toughness you have to have, the physical toughness, and getting pushed to a point that you never thought that you could get pushed to. But yet there's people that do that every single day, and at the end of the day, they would take a bullet for you. And I equate that to that dog that love— absolutely love what they do. They're cut out for that job.

Yeah.

And if they were doing something else other than working, they would be tearing people's stuff up. They would end up in a shelter because people can't deal with them because they just want to have something to do. And they do it with extreme commitment and no thought whatsoever. We were joking with one of the handlers at Carson a couple of weeks ago, and even the handlers there, like seeing his dog and how intense his dog was when it it was time to work. We were joking and saying this dog was preparing for group because this dog, everything it did, it just did it with like full-on, like no hesitation. Oh, you want me to heel? Okay, I'm healing up. I'm healing, I'm healing, I'm healing. And it was just funny to see that because the commitment from that dog, it, it knew nothing else but to go 100% into that situation. If you ask that dog, if that dog could talk, would you rather be doing that or sitting in the backyard? He would 100% say, I want to be doing this.

Yeah. And I mean, speaking of ethics, you know, you mentioned like dogs like that, they're going to find something to do. They're going to tear stuff up. And, you know, I always bring up like, for example, with crating, you know, people say that they don't think it's ethical to keep a dog in a crate or you know, any of that stuff. But I always say, well, I mean, would it be more ethical to let him chew on something and injure himself?

Yeah.

Get a stomach blockage and possibly die? Is that more ethical? Or is it more ethical to keep him crated, take him out to work, train with them, work with them, and him enjoying his life, right?

Absolutely.

So I mean, as far as ethics go, yeah, I mean Taking a dog that's not meant to be a pet and trying to have them live the pet lifestyle is a waste of potential, and ultimately that dog's not happy. That's why he's tearing, that's why he's being destructive.

No, you're absolutely right. Uh, now do we take great care in teaching the dog to be as safe as possible, teaching the handler to be safe, especially in a training environment, right? Like, we never put a dog in a training environment where they can get hurt. One of the first things we teach our trainers is how to evaluate and assess the area to make sure it's safe to train in, what to look for in a dog, early recognition of heat distress or other things of that nature. On top of that, teaching those handlers how to safely handle the dog, because all those things culminate into a deployment to be as safe as possible.

Yeah.

So I don't want people thinking that you just inherently put a dog at risk just because there is calculated risk in law enforcement or in a military dog. When we're dealing with a sport working dog, we have the luxury to say, no, I'm not getting into that situation because you don't have to. But in a law enforcement or military application, sometimes that's the best tool to use. To keep everybody else safe. And it's unfortunate, but it is the reality. And I want to be the one to tell people what the reality is versus the media or somebody else telling them that, oh, we just don't do that. Well, if it was your son or daughter in that situation, you had the opportunity to let a dog go clear a route before your daughter or your son went down that route to detect if there was mines or other things there that can hurt them, would you rather do that or keep the dog in the base and allow them to step on mines and all. Yes, there's multiple layers of detection, but by none and by far it has been determined and shown time and time again, even when technology is used, that dogs serve one of the best functions of detection capabilities there are. And there's reasons for that. And there's been— there are companies out there that have tried to circumvent that.

Yeah, I mean, you got the most expensive defense contractors working on that and they still go back to dogs.

They do. And there's no doubt I've seen handlers lose their dogs. I've been— lost my own dogs. And when I say that it's one of the hardest pains that I've ever felt Bar none, it is. However, I have put my dogs in situations where we got out of it and I was like, luckily I had him, or man, we scaved out of this one because this was risky. But it was for the betterment of something else. It wasn't just for my own enjoyment or whatever, right? So when we look at deployments, we spend a lot of time training handlers how to do things as safe as possible, but at the same time, we also train them that a dog is not the catch-all tool. And that's what a lot of handlers think. Oh, I got a dog, I get called, I go and it's a dog call. We spend a lot of time teaching handlers how to make that decision. This is not a dog call. This is not the best tool for this situation. Utilize one of the other tools that you have in your, on your tool belt or available in order to accomplish the mission, because that's really what it's about. And do it as safe as possible, but do it in a manner that it is truly the best avenue. Yeah, so some considerations that need to be made, I think: safety, safety of the dog, safety of all those that are around. Would you agree, or what's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, um, I mean, like you said, it's all calculated risk, and that's a determination that you need to— that we expect our handlers— we expect our handlers to make those decisions based on those factors. But at the same time, you know, we talk about temperament and we go back to the selection process. You know, we do the best that we can to make sure that, A, we're pairing a dog and a handler team that can work together.

Yeah.

We're, you know, I guess you could speak more about it, but dogs back then were a lot less social than they are now. Sociability is one of the key factors that we look into. So, you know, we try and do the best that we can on our end from the training side, right, to ensure that we're making proper dog selections, preparing those handlers, and then we're giving the handlers all the tools that they need for safe deployments and training that dog for any scenario that they may come in contact with.

Yeah, you know, and then some of that risk, you know, we look at too setting up testing procedures and training certification and those things. You know, I go back to, uh, like a comment I read yesterday about a guy saying that, you know, the dogs false alert and then the dogs waste their time being out there half a day while they search and things of that nature, right? Listen, there's nothing that's perfect, right? I only know one person, perfect person.

Is it Pat Picard?

Close. He's a close second. So we go back to God, God being the only perfect, right? The only perfection that we could ever weigh up to. I'm making this point because Yes, there's always going to be imperfection in every trade, in everything. You look at machinery, look at technology.

Have you seen people's welds?

Right, there's imperfection in all of that. You know, you get a computer and eventually it's going to crash because there's imperfections there by design. But that's another time, that's another topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my phone just went out and No joke, later that day after my phone broke, guess what? I get a text that says, go get the newest phone that just came out. Yeah, right. So anyway, my point behind this is whenever there's humans involved and a handler that is working with a dog with a mind of its own, there's always going to be a margin of error there. There's no dog team perfect. I was a close perfection, but— or as close to perfection as you can get. My point behind that is there's always that margin of error, but you try to minimize that margin of error as much as possible. I would never sit here and say every solution can be solved with a dog, or every dog team that we've ever trained is 100% reliable, or anything of that nature. There's always that human nature. But there's also checks and balances in place to also help with some of that. Obviously, if we know of— and I've been fortunate in my law enforcement career, I haven't met or been or worked around unethical people, just haven't. I know some people out there have, but then I look at other professions and every profession has unethical people that work in it. Okay, let's take doctors. Okay, my daughter's in the medical field. There's doctors that have performed unethical things and done unethical things. All right, there's also doctors that have performed procedures that maybe weren't according to the books, but it was the best option to give this person the ability to live further or to help this person. It's a practice. Just like dog training and dog deployment or dog handling is a practice. Yeah, there's no hard set facts and rules. We navigate the legal system based on what the decisions that are made in the courts, but sometimes it takes something bad happening to make a decision and give us guidance on how we should operate as well. So that's one thing that we tell our handlers here: you don't guess at an alert. You don't guess on whether you're right or wrong, and certification's set up for that. And we put these guys in situations, and girls, to test that as well, and we document that.

Yeah.

So if we absolutely see a problem there, we're going to notify that we— and we can address it and notify the department, say, hey, we're having this issue. And this team—

what I hear from a lot of handlers especially is, you know, people tell me like, this is a hard course. Like, this is stressful. Yeah, but the stress is by design.

That's right.

We put you— we put these handlers in these stressful situations because I rather— I always tell them this too, because I get some perfectionists. Man, I can't believe I screwed up, or, oh man, like, got, you know, I messed up that track. I'm like, hey, it's fine. I want you to make mistakes here. It's okay to make mistakes here. I rather you make your mistakes here Yes. Because you have people around you that can address these issues.

That's right.

And we can work on them here and identify them here. I will always take a mistake during training over a mistake during a deployment.

Yeah, that's right.

Granted, like you said, there's some things that are out of our control and we identify some issues there and we can't prepare for everything, but we want to do our damnedest to prepare for everything that we can here. And like I mentioned earlier, we do put them through a lot of stress because it's a privilege getting to work a dog. That's right. It's not an easy task. It's not. And we've, we've seen people come through before where, you know, they come in, they're like, oh, I'm getting a dog, he's going to be my best friend, I don't got to do— no, there's a lot of responsibility. So when we hand a dog over to a handler, they got to sign a contract that they're going to be caring for this dog. It's almost like having a— you're going to have a kid, he's going to be with you everywhere. Like, you're not only responsible for deploying him correctly, you're responsible for making sure he's healthy, fed, and taken care of. We're pretty much giving you a child.

That's right.

Right. So we, like I said, I mean, we just, we do the best that we can to prepare them. And I think, you know, some people Just like the dogs, like some dogs can do bite work, you know, some, some people can work a dog, some people can't.

Yeah.

And we stress the point so that, you know, those one, you know, some people come back and tell us they're like, hey, I just, I can't do this. This is too much for me. And that's fine. Yeah, that's absolutely fine. It's okay to admit your limits as long as you try the best that you can. But if you have limitations, I'm not going to fault you for it. I actually respect it more so than going out there and, you know, fumbling it and violating some of those ethics just to check a box. That's right.

So yeah, I mean, there is a lot of pressure too, you know, with that handler being out there especially alone. And that's one thing we talk about in training is you're going to have those outside pressures, people thinking you're perfect, people thinking that there's drugs in the car when there's not. And we spend extensive amount of time for that dog to work independently of that handler to minimize that dependency and to minimize the fact that those, those cues that may come from the handler. But on top of that, to also teach those handlers that there's always somebody watching you and there's going to be pressure, people telling you, hey, we just need to get into this car, or we just need this. 100%. You go by what your dog is telling you.

Yeah. And you know, you know what's a great way to prepare for that? I think one of my favorite things to do during training— I kind of get joy out of it because I watch the handlers freak out— but just doing all blanks.

Yeah, no, you're right.

You ever done that with a student and they're like, oh, my dog doesn't work, he didn't alert on anything, I screwed up?

Yep.

And then like You give them that realization when you tell them it's like, yeah, he didn't alert because there was nothing there. Trust your dog. Yeah. And they're like, oh, shoot. Yeah. Yeah.

No. And that's, you know, part of that training process with those guys is not to give them that falsehood that there's always going to be something there. But even in, especially in tracking, and I'm just coming off a tracking course, exposing them to times when they fail and they see that they didn't find the person or they messed up on this track and don't give them that win. And a lot of people think, well, you always got to make a reward at the end of a track or a find on a car, but that's just not so. That's what we condition in training. That becomes your expectations in the real world, but that's just not the case. You're not going to catch everybody. On a track. You're not going to find everybody on a track. You're not going to alert on every car that you sniff.

That track isn't only going to be a quarter mile.

Correct. Yeah. And we— it's our job as trainers to expose them to that. Absolutely. 100%. Yes. Are those things that we learned over the years? Absolutely. Because we see the shortfalls of it, but we can't be naive. And really, we're doing this podcast today on ethics because We can't be naive enough to think there's not any bad apples in our industry. Handlers killing their dog, dogs alerting to every car that they run. But I've also had great administrators and great K-9 supervisors that have approached us to review tapes and records when they see these things, because every dog, every car that you stop your dog's shutting an alert on. And if they are, there's, there's probably something going on. And having great administrators— and that's why I said I've, I've been privileged to work around some great people in my career because I've had those administrators say, hey, I just— I'm not saying there is, but I want to make sure there isn't, and I want you to look into this. And the ones that have been discovered where It has. They've taken appropriate action as a result of that. But it's also up to us to also see as trainers having the ethics. And we talk about this with our trainers that when something's not right, that we don't cover it up. We address it both with a handler and with a dog. Not everything's dog— I mean, handler related. And I see a lot of people that try to say, well, oh no, it's not that. It's not the dog. It's the handler. And so they always point the finger there. But I say we have to take an objective look at that to really determine where the root cause of this problem really is. And sometimes the truth is ugly, but it's even uglier when we don't address it. And with a handler talking about ethics, those are things that we have to train our supervisors to also acknowledge that not everybody has the same intentions as you would hope. A lot of times, you know, and we've seen that happen. But it's just not in law enforcement or in the military either. Like I alluded to, every profession has some margin of error there.

They also— every profession has a code of ethics, correct?

That's right. And has policies and procedures to guide you in the right way.

Yeah.

But why do we have case law? Why do we have policies? Because something has happened in the past. Absolutely.

So it was an outlier. Although the majority follow it, there's always some outliers. And yeah, you're right. I mean, we can't be blind to that, and that's the truth.

Hey, listen, here's the reality. When we first started CCU, when it was me and Kran training together, we had zero policies. We had zero written Guidelines? Zero.

That's chaos.

Not with me and Corrine, though. Me and Corrine knew exactly what we needed to do. We knew exactly how to clean kennels. We knew exactly how to take care of dogs. We knew exactly what we needed to do on the training field. We knew the documentation we needed to give it to— give to our clients. We needed nothing. You fast forward now, we pay people to write policies. We pay people to research. We pay people to do all these things now that we never had to do. I mean, we have workers' comp insurance now, which we never had in the past when it was just me and Kren.

Yeah.

What part of that was because we were poor and we had no—

Yeah, well, I was wondering what would you do when your dog would bite Kren?

We would laugh, take pictures of it, dust him off and be like, hey, man, let's do this again. I hope the statute of limitations is up. And Kren is a friend of mine, so hopefully he don't come back and try to chokehold me and make me bomb things to cover that up. But, but he did the same thing to me, though, in, in my defense. My point behind that is, is there's always an evolution there. But there was one thing that I heard, and I go back to this because an Atlanta radio show host said this one time I was listening to the radio years ago because somebody was complaining about law enforcement speeding and This radio show host put it in great perspective, and they said there's perks to every job. And I was like, what is this joker talking about? And the perks to that job was this. He said the fry cook at McDonald's, I guarantee you they go through there and take a fry out or two and eat some fries when they want to. That's the perks of the job. You on the other side of the counter walk around there and start taking fries, you're going to jail. But that's the perks of the job. If you want to eat fries for free and have a— and indulge yourself in a little bit of that, go work at McDonald's. You get that perk as a result of working at McDonald's. Just like sometimes a police officer can speed a little bit. He's been trained properly how to drive. They've had extensive training in high-speed driving and vehicle maneuvers.

Should have a clean driving record.

Should have a clean driving record. But on top of that, sometimes they have to speed to get where they need to go. That's the perk of the job right now. You don't do that maliciously or anything of that nature, but sometimes you may exceed the speed limit to get there. But even being a dog trainer now, guess what? I can come here and groom my dog whenever I want to. I have a grooming station I can use. I can brush my dog, I can give it a bath, and guess what? I get food at a discount. Because I work here. But that's the perk of the job. If you want to get some of those perks, get into that line of work. But I'm sure everybody that's listening has small perks of their own in the industry that they work in. I'm saying that because even in law enforcement as a dog handler, we can point out all the bad things that are possible or the things that happened or maybe happened to one of our listeners, but sometimes also we don't see the full perspective. And we may have seen that we were treated unfairly or not up to par, but sometimes that's because we don't understand the full scope of the incident or what was going on. And I'm not saying every time, but I am also saying that on the flip side of that, there are things in place to mitigate that. So if somebody was treated unfairly If somebody was searched illegally or there's questions about the validity of a K-9 alert, all you have to do is report it. Most departments, most every department, has an internal affairs division which investigates every complaint. And if they don't, the state certainly does. So there's always a channel to go through in order to escalate in a time when you think you were treated unfairly. And some of that is maybe giving you some understanding. Now, we may not like the answers we get as a result of our inquiry, but at the end of the day, there are avenues. But I can 100% assure you, commenting online or bashing somebody online will never achieve the results that you really want. And so I encourage people to report that. I encourage people if they think a dog is unreliable or a dog searched them improperly, that's a violation of a Fourth Amendment, which is protected by our Constitution, like the freedom of press. So with that being said, use those constitutional rights and protect your rights, but there's also a right way and a wrong way to do things. Now, things that are done maliciously and on purpose, that's a whole different level. But I can 100% say that I've never worked around somebody that I said, man, that's an unethical person. And I'm talking about in the law enforcement realm. I've worked around a lot of people and worked with a lot of people. Now, there's people I didn't like in my profession, and I just stayed away from them. Maybe I didn't like the way they dealt with people. Because it wasn't the way that I would deal with people. That's okay. I just stayed away from them. But I've never seen anybody in front of me steal things. I've never seen anybody in front of me that maliciously violated somebody's rights, because if they would have, I would have 100% reported it right then. But I've been blessed to work around a bunch of great people, people that have great hearts. And I can assure you, if an IA investigation gets opened up on somebody, that's something stressful, whether it's proven false or proven to be an accurate complaint, that police officer has to go through a lot. Even if it's not, um, if it's not justified, meaning the complaint, or not substantiated is the, is the term, it's still a lot of stress that they have to go through. It's not just swept underneath the rugs, at least not the agencies I've ever worked with. Are the ones that I know. And I know a lot of chiefs and sheriffs, and I don't know a single one that would ever intentionally cover anything up or protect somebody that was doing wrong. Just don't know them. And I have that inside perspective that most people don't have. So yes, sometimes complaints are valid, and I get that. But in all, I just don't see the unethical people in our industry. Not to say there isn't any, sure there are. And I'm sure people that comment and make comments about the unethical approaches that some canine handlers have could be justified in their one incident. But the vast majority— how many canine handlers do we have in this world? 200,000 K-9 handlers in the world, or in the U.S.? In the U.S., 200,000. I would venture to say the, the amount of unethical handlers are very low. Now, the amount of handlers that may not have been properly trained, I could say, probably raises that level up a little bit. Okay, I would acknowledge that because— but in that case, maybe they don't know, or maybe their department don't know. So there's always that margin of that you can shift either way you want, and I'm not discounting that, but just the people that I come in contact with, I just don't see a lot of that. What about you? Um, I mean, you get to train a lot of people. Do you see a lot of unethical people running around this place? I mean, I don't know.

Uh, I mean, for me it's hard to gauge because I'm not out there on the road with them.

Yes.

But the individuals that I've had the privilege to train, I can say without a doubt, you know, they're good, honest people, just from what I know about them from working here. But like you said, I mean, there's— I had an English teacher that told me this before. He said there's two types of stupid people.

And she was talking to you? I'm tracking where this is going now.

It was a he, but yeah.

Well, he was talking to you though. Yeah. I can see why they would have this conversation.

But he said there's two types of stupid people. There's people that are dumb because they don't know any better, like people that maybe weren't trained properly. And then there are people that are stupid that choose to be stupid. And that's— I mean, I don't see very many dumb people come through here.

Yeah.

Um, or people that choose to be stupid as far as law enforcement goes. Uh, so for me, I mean, I really haven't dealt with it in any time that I've had interactions with law enforcement.

And I think our industry has come a long way over the years. I mean, I've seen a big change, and I'm not saying in terms of ethics, but in checks and balances as a whole. And even departments now even being scrutinized on our training from administration. Before, it was just, hey, sign here, we'll send you a check, do whatever you need to do. But now we get more pointed questions about our curriculum. We get more in-depth visits and people wanting to see the actual curriculum and what their handlers are being taught. So that, that's also a good change that I've seen come about. But that's also why we spend a lot of time writing lesson plans and putting all those things in place that should be there as well. Sure. All right, so this ended on this, uh, Simon. If there was one thing Just one? Just one. I'm only giving you one because when I give you more than one, it only confuses you. And I go back to your English teacher. There's two types of stupid people: one that sits on this side of the desk and one that sits on that side of the desk.

Yeah, well, I'd rather not know any better. I mean, if there's one thing that I did learn— I mean, not that I I didn't know it, but it kind of put it into full perspective and gave me a little more appreciation for what we actually do. But I mean, just kind of tying in that what we're doing here in the training aspect, you know, we're making, you know, tying that to the deployments and the efficacy, you know, and how much that we, we push this stuff, but You know, we really, I guess when you're going through the day-to-day training and you have certain things that you need to get through as far as training goes, I mean, getting to actually sit here and think about like what the full picture really looks like and what we're expecting of these individuals that are coming out of this class. So I mean, having that full perspective and that full picture is just something that I think going back into training, you know, that's, that's going to be something that's going to be on my mind.

Well, you know, it goes back to a point that I make quite often with people, the importance of having a law enforcement trainer teaching law enforcement or developing law enforcement courses, because most people don't understand how much goes into that. There's a lot of cool stuff I want to do. With a dog and a team, but we don't do it because of ethics, because of court systems, because of case law, because of XYZ. So we can spend a lot of time teaching TikTok stuff and stuff that looks cool. But at the end of the day, we got to prepare handlers for the real world and for them to be a law enforcement handler. And so I never want to lose perspective to get likes or follows to turn in and just— and take training time away from preparing them for the real world. Because those ethics, those legalities should be at the forefront of all of our programs when we're teaching law enforcement or the military for that matter. But all the law enforcement that comes through here, we listen to what they say. Talk with them, we have relationships with them, and they give us feedback on some places we're missing, some places we need to improve, but also some places we're doing well. And we take that to heart and develop courses specifically for that. So now that you realize that you're really pushing that, how does that make you feel?

Well, what it made me appreciate though is just the how in-depth we are. Even those minute things of like simply just evaluating a dog, like we're looking at that perspective, or we're looking at it from an ethical perspective. And, you know, yeah, I'm testing it for drives and how those dogs are going to interact with the public. Um, I mean, getting to actually think about that, just even the most minute things that we do, we're— while we might not be conscious of it at the moment. We're doing everything as we— as best we can to put an ethical product out there.

Yeah.

And it goes all the way from point A, right? And then a lot throughout the training process. Yeah. So I mean, it's cool to kind of just put that all and have it come full circle.

Yeah. You know, well, I've enjoyed my time. Sitting down and talking to you this week about ethics. Like, you don't hear much about that, and I think in our community we need to address those things. Hey, for all those that are listening to us, I hope you enjoy our podcast. As always, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to share those suggestions with us. We take them to heart, like our training. So hope you enjoyed. Remember, on Tuesdays we do our short sets. Those are still coming out. People are still loving those. We'll continue to do those, still chip away it, some things you can work on throughout the week, and we can give you a different perspective, we would love to do that. So don't forget to like, subscribe, and share our podcast because we can only influence those that we have an opportunity to speak to. All right, have a great week. I'll see you guys back next Thursday, and I'm back here full time, so rest assured I'm here. You're not— you don't have to listen to Simon next week. Go!