AJ Vargas, CEO of Custom K9 Unlimited, explains how to build a veterinary emergency plan for working-dog programs. Identify a regular vet near your training site and an after-hours clinic, brief all handlers on both contacts at the start of each day, and loop in dispatch. A dog with bloat during evening training survived because the team knew exactly where to go.
Chapters
Hello everybody and welcome back to Source All Things Working Dogs, and this is another week of our short set. This is our midweek training and it's just what it says it is. It's a short set that I put together each week and release it every Tuesday. So I'm glad that you're back here joining us. I'm AJ Vargas, former law enforcement trainer and CEO of Custom K9 Unlimited. This is me, my experiences and perspectives, you, and a mic. Each week I'll bring you training, answers to questions, and things you can put to work right now for your working dogs. So let's get right to it. Today I'm talking about a vet plan and putting together a vet plan that you can put in place that's going to drastically help you to reduce the risk during training and deployments. So here's the importance of this. First, I can go back to the old adage: prior planning prevents piss. Poor performance. You never want to be stuck in a position where your dog is injured and you don't even know where to take them to be treated, especially in an emergency situation. The time to find a vet is not when your dog is hurt or when emergency situation arises, and they can arise out of nowhere. Things can happen. And because of that, we want to be prepared as a handler. But also it increases the likelihood of survival if we get a dog to a vet quick enough. So there's many ailments and many conditions that could arise in an emergency situation that a dog's life could be spared if we get them to a vet quickly. So we want you to be prepared. Don't have the poor performance because you failed to plan. So let me give you some tips on how to accomplish this. It's pretty easy to put together, and this is something that you can start immediately. But I also say this is something for departments or agencies that don't have a plan in place, that just kind of wing it. And I'm always one for training and being prepared for training in an organized manner. I can't stand chaos. I can't stand when I'm in a position where everybody that's around me is not on the same page. So with that being said, I want to develop a vet plan and I want everybody else around me to know that vet plan. So here's some things that we can do to help us develop that vet plan. And like I said, it's, it's very easy to do and very quick to do. May just take a little bit of legwork, but once it's in place, it's set and ready to go. Here's some other people that can use it. Trainers, if you're out training and you don't know where the nearest vet is, there's a problem there. You're tasked with protecting all the handlers that's training underneath you or with you at any of the training sessions that you're at. And unfortunately, as trainers, we get held to a higher standard, so we need to be prepared. So anytime we change any new training location, we always know where our vet is, and especially for emergency situations. So we're going to get prepared before we start training. That way everybody's on the same page. So let me show you what this looks like. All right. First and foremost, we want to know where the vet is during normal business hours. So a lot of people train between the hours of, let's say, 8 and 5. And so during those times they can go to their normal vet. We just wanna make sure it's within a reasonable distance from where we're training at. So most vets open up at 7 and they close at 6, at least in our area. So we know that and we know where we're gonna go for vet treatment during normal business hours. But after that, 6:00 PM to let's say 7:00 in the morning, If we're training at night, again, hosting night training, or if we have handlers staying in our area, we make sure that everybody knows where the after-hour emergency vet is as well. So we already have that mapped out. Now here's the caveat to that. If we move locations, let's say we're training with a neighboring agency or we're doing a net training where we have many different agencies at a location that they don't normally train at, we make sure at the beginning, at the, at the briefing, that we give everybody the vet or the emergency vet that we can take a dog to if something were to happen. And we make sure that everybody that's in the training group knows that. That way, if something happens, the handler can spring into action and all the support handlers that are around can also help, maybe clearing roadways, maybe notifying the right people, maybe giving directions. But again, the key to this is that we do this prior to anything happening. So at the start of our training day, everybody's going to know where the normal vet is and where the emergency vet is for that time period that we're training. And like I said, every time we change to a new location, we know where we're going in an emergency situation. If we're traveling, we do the same thing with our itinerary. We make sure we map out vets that we can take the dog to if something were to happen on our trip. So we want to prevent poor performance, and we also want you to be prepared for that as well. And this may be something that you've never thought about, but how many times have you trained somewhere that you're not familiar with, and you didn't even know where the vet was. Luckily nothing's happened, but it only takes one time. And in all these years, I remember training at a different location, and luckily we did our brief and we had a dog that suffered from bloat in the middle of the evening, and it was about 8:30, 9 o'clock in the evening, but we had already pre-planned So we knew where the emergency vet was and we got the dog to that vet in a reasonable amount of time without hesitation. Everybody sprung into action and we got the dog to the vet. But trainers, remember, you're the ones that are responsible for this. But if the trainer that you're training with is not doing it, we gotta have a handler that steps up and does it. For your departments, pre-plan this. The last thing that I'll make mention of in this planning, especially for an agency or a department, is you want to make sure that your dispatch knows the non-emergency vet and the hours of operation and the emergency vet and the hours of operation. And what we used to do is every so often during our monthly training or among one of the weekly trainings during the month, we would make a radio call into dispatch. And ask them to provide us with the vet that we could take our dogs to at this time. If they didn't respond in a reasonable amount of time, that means they didn't know what that vet was. If that was the case, then we would get with the director of the 911 center and make sure that they did the appropriate training with every dispatcher to know exactly what vet we should be going to at any given time. And most times they have a board that they can put this on. That all the dispatcher has to do is look up and they see the information on the board. So again, one of those things that we implement into our training plan to make sure that we're prepared for the worst case scenario, and that's when a dog goes down. So these are little things that we can implement in our training that can make the biggest differences, especially when something bad happens. So guys, let's think outside the box a little bit. If you learn one thing during these short sets, I'm happy. So let's continue to train and progress, and I'll see you back next week with another short set. Go!
