Hatchett's former dog, Misty, was put to sleep May 19 after getting cancer the squad lost another dog to retirement earlier last year. After five years, ownership will pass to the fire marshal's office. The trip to Maine and schooling for Yingling and Canyon were underwritten by State Farm Insurance Co., which owns the dog. Yingling repeats the exercise several times, rewarding his 2-year-old black Lab at each success with a handful of dry food. The arson dog gets it right the second time, sitting in front of a tin that Yingling scented with two drops of gasoline, and bobbing his head to indicate the location of the accelerant.Īt the scene of a suspicious fire, the dog's bobbing head points arson investigators to surfaces that are sampled and analyzed in a laboratory. At the training wheel, he gets it wrong at first and sits in front of a tin containing a decoy. Hatchett expects he will be called to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympics and has provided services for dignitaries.Ĭanyon is also a food reward-trained dog. The agency provides the dogs and training on condition that they be available for duties on the ATF's national response team. After that training, Hatchett joined her for a 10-week explosives detection training program beginning in mid-July.Īccording to the ATF, canine graduates are capable of detecting more than 19,000 explosives odors. The federal agency receives many of the dogs that do not complete the guide-dog program.ĪTF trainers taught Gilda to sniff out the odors of five basic explosives groups and to identify 20 explosives scents, such as gunpowder, plastic explosive and ANFO, the fertilizer-and-fuel oil mixture that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Hatchett said Gilda was originally part of a guide-dog training program but either "washed out" or failed to develop rapidly enough. Hatchett, 45, a former Baltimore police officer, said some of the more than 360 calls received last year were routine trips to pick up illegal fireworks, but that many involved investigation of suspicious packages. Rhonda Trahern, chief of the ATF's canine operations bureau, said the "amount and range of explosive odors" that ATF dogs are trained to detect are "higher than any other program."
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