Republished for the wider promotion of this alert.
Dear Fellow Dog Lover,
Because you signed up on our website and asked to be notified, I’m sending you this special recall alert.
On July 7, 2015, Carnivore Meat Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, announced it is voluntarily recalling two batches of its Vital Essentials raw frozen dog food due to possible contamination with Listeria bacteria.
Listeria is not only dangerous to dogs, it can be deadly to small children, the elderly and those with autoimmune disorders.
The affected products were distributed in 12 U.S. states.
A colleague back in England was speaking to me recently about a series on BBC Television about forensics. The series is called Catching History’s Criminals: The Forensics Story.
Apparently, the third in the series Instruments of Murder (For UK readers the link is here.) included fire being used as a criminal act. That episode featured a dog named Gunner who was a fire forensics dog. To the surprise of both Jean and me, while we were very aware of the sniffer dogs used by the police in many countries, neither of us had previously been aware that dogs were used, at times, in the determination of the cause of fire.
Now listen to Nikki Harvey of Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service in this YouTube video:
Published on Jul 23, 2013
Trained from a puppy by his partner in crime and handler, Nikki Harvey, Reqs (pronounced Rex) qualified as Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service’s new fire investigation dog in April this year. At a special event on Monday (22 July) Reqs launched his Twitter account and demonstrated his skills at Longfield Training Centre, Stevenage.
The 22-month-old black Labrador is taking over responsibility for helping to investigate the cause of fires in Hertfordshire and surrounding counties. His predecessor, seven year old CC, will work alongside Reqs until he retires.
Richard Thake, Cabinet Member for Community Safety and Planning said: “The work that Reqs does is critical in assisting the Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service team and it plays an integral part in community fire safety. Reqs is exceptionally valuable and receives the same high degree of training that we afford all frontline fire personnel.”
From six months old Reqs was trained to sniff out traces of ignitable liquids such as petrol, white spirit and lighter fluid which can remain present even after the most severe fire. Fire investigation officers use Reqs to assist them in determining the cause and origin of fires – whether deliberate or accidental. At the event he proudly gave a demonstration of sniffing out accelerants in a house and a car, as well as riding on an Arial Ladder Platform (ALP) that reaches up to seven floors, can be used as a water tower to extinguish large fires, and forms a safe platform for working at height.
Hertfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer Roy Wilsher said: “Reqs helps out on serious and non-serious cases and knowing what starts a fire helps us enormously in getting important fire safety messages out to the public. We want to prevent fires and keep people safe and now that Reqs is on Twitter his followers will learn a lot of useful tips to prevent accidental fires.
“I use Twitter myself (@HertsFireChief) and social networking is a great way to spread our safety messages across Hertfordshire.”
Fire investigation dogs are used for their speed and accuracy and are proving very successful in their work. Reqs and CC have assisted in many high profile incidents including suicides, fatal fires, arson attacks and murder investigations.
Reqs’ handler, Nikki Harvey said: “We’ve been training together for nearly two years now, which has given us the opportunity to get to know each other and build up trust which is essential. Ongoing training is now part of Reqs’ daily routine and it’s important that he always enjoys the ‘game’. I’m really looking forward to putting Reqs’ new skills to use.”
Reqs is the third fire investigation dog for Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service and is sponsored by Hatfield based company Computacenter UK Ltd, who also sponsor CC and his predecessor Browza. Clare Rafferty, Head of Corporate Events, Computacenter (UK) Ltd said: “The Fire investigation dog is a valuable asset to the Fire and Rescue Service and we are yet again delighted to extend that sponsorship to Reqs who is very worthy of stepping into CC’s shoes.”
And to demonstrate that these wonderful dogs undertake these roles both sides of the “pond”, here is a video from Denver, Colorado:
Published on Feb 23, 2015
Victoria travels to Denver, Colorado to check in on experienced arson investigator Jerry Means and his third arson dog, Riley. Jerry shows Victoria how he continues to train Riley, visits his office at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and takes her to a burn building to demonstrate live fire and extended training for Riley. Part 1 of 2
All of which seems like a great nudge for me to republish a post from Learning from Dogs from September, 2012 that explained a little more about the incredible power of the dog’s nose! See you tomorrow.
It showed a dog dancing to music, or quite possibly, a dog scratching its back against a wall that someone had cleverly set to music. The video had been sent to me by Chris Gomez.
Then Dan, a brother to Chris, and a close personal friend of mine for 35+ years, sent me the following. This is in a different league to Saturday’s little video. This raises questions as to how the dog was trained to perform like this? How long did it take? What’s the story behind the display?
All I could discover, from the blog Sun Gazing was, “This dog dance was performed at The Open European Championships and totally blew the crowd away.”
Trust me, this is going to have you spellbound!
Enjoy!
If anyone can provide the answers to my earlier questions then Dan and I would love to hear from you.
For reasons that I’m not entirely clear about I haven’t yet settled back into my planning routine for daily posts since our Internet service was restored.
The effect of familiarity on dog–human interactions.
Introduction
You will remember that a couple of weeks ago, Professor Marc Bekoff generously gave me permission to publish his essay Butts and Noses: Secrets and Lessons from Dog Parks. The essence of the essay being that dog parks are gold mines of information about the behavior of dogs and humans. (Post published by Marc Bekoff Ph.D. on May 16, 2015 in Animal Emotions.)
The good Professor then went on to say that I was free to republish any of his essays so long as the usual accreditations and links were provided. So yesterday, I started going through the many html links in his essay, that essay may be read here, looking for posts that would interest readers of Learning from Dogs.
Dogs and their human companions: The effect of familiarity on dog–human interactions
Andrea Kerepesi (a), Antal Dóka (a), Ádám Miklósi (b)
(a) Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
(b) MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, Budapest, Hungary
It’s a very interesting piece of research. I’m going to include the Abstract in today’s post and recommend if anyone wants to read the full article that they do so here.
So here is the Abstract.
ABSTRACT
There are few quantitative examinations of the extent to which dogs discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar persons. In our study we have investigated whether dogs show differential behaviour towards humans of different degrees of familiarity (owner, familiar person, unfamiliar person). Dogs and humans were observed in eight test situations: (1) Three-way strange situation test, (2) Calling in from food, (3) Obedience test, (4) Walking away, (5) Threatening approach, (6) Playful interaction, (7) Food inhibition test and (8) Manipulation of the dog’s body.
Dogs distinguished between the owner and the two other test partners in those tests which involved separation from the owner (Test 1, 4), were aversive for the dog (Test 5) or involved playing interac- tion (Test 6). Our results revealed that the owner cannot be replaced by a familiar person in situations provoking elevated anxiety and fear.
In contrasts, dogs did not discriminate between the owner and the familiar person in those tests that were based on obedient behaviour or behaviour towards an assertive person (Tests 2, 3, 7 and 8). Dogs’ former training experience reduced the difference between their behaviour towards the owner and the familiar person in situations requiring obedience but it did not mask it totally. The dogs’ behaviour towards each of the humans participating in the tests was consistent all over the test series.
In summary, dogs discriminated between their owner and the unfamiliar person and always preferred the owner to the unfamiliar person. However, the discrimination between the owner and the familiar person is context-specific.
This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Canine Behavior.
Learning from Dogs 