Utility Title for working detection or SAR dog - Page 2

"Will you have to appear in court in regard to narcotics that your dog finds? If so, could training in Utility scent training be used to discredit the dog? If dog is certified, does certifying agency have a view on this?"

Exactly where I think the issues would lie. I don't have to go to court for my narc work (private sector only). But, could a SAR dog be called into question for working Utility? Say, a cadaver detection dog that misses a find?

In my case that's not an issue (I don't do HRD) but it's an interesting issue nonetheless.

Over here its unlikely that the situation posed by ZweiGSD would apply; if (and its quite a big if) a Search & Rescue dog found a survivor or a body and there was a drugs stash found with them (for example), the Search Dog handler might appear in court as a witness at some point ... but that would not be guaranteed, if Police etc were also involved from the beginning of the event, as they probably would be, the Handler as witness would possibly not be seen as essential to a prosecution. Its even less likely anybody would get into asking questions about what else the dog was capable of / had trained in. Differences between US system of justice and ours ?

SAR here mainly uses air scenting dogs then calls in a ground tracking dog as appropriate, but I cannot so far find any evidence of a 'ban' on a qualified (Level 3) air scenting dog then going on to do Tracking training (under whichever Sport or other discipline used). So presumably such a dog - or, conversely, a Track-trained dog which then undertook air scent training in order to be a SAR volunteer - would eventually be competent in both. When you are desperate to find someone lost, I'd say that was an advantage, rather than a disadvantage to be proscribed against.

@hundmutter - tracking/air scent are seen as two disciplines of SAR in that the dog is still looking for live human scent so usually SAR people don't have issues with that (they sort of stretch the issue with HRD if you ask me, haha). Don't get me wrong, I agree that dogs that are competently trained can indeed do all these things. The problem for SAR people seems to come in when the dog is trained to find something other than human in addition to doing SAR work. I think there could potentially be issues - say, a bird dog trained to hunt birds and also do SAR - but as typically it is not allowed on this side of the pond, I don't know if anyone has ever done it and been successful at both.

That said, for my own SAR team - if a great bird dog trainer wanted to join and learn SAR with one of their bird dogs, I would have no problem letting them join and try. A novice handler/first time dog owner or trainer, different story.

Besides the possibility of confounding training being used by defense attorneys, is the paperwork drill that could get really complex, depending on which combinations of training/certification were involved. Do entries on one set of records need to be duplicated or referenced in the other set(s), or is it better to keep everything absolutely separated? One of the biggest things in court for K9 of any type is the paperwork/records of training and real-world deployments. Everything has to be in order or the defense will exploit it... in some cases pushing it as a falsification by either omission or commission that can have consequences to the veracity of the handler and/or dog in both the case at hand and other cases, including opening up opportunity for appeal.

Another area if concern is department policies. Is there any possibility titling/civilian training/etc. could be viewed as a violation of any policy? Or simply not covered and therefore a gray area that defense could exploit or maybe the jurisdiction's attorney would not address/defend? Especially if the dog is owned by the department/jurisdiction?

You may want to contact your jurisdiction's staff attorney and/or whatever organization is doing your current certification(s) and/or your union/personal attorney for guidance or possibly drafting something up to cover handler/dog... at the very least, get ahold of any relevant statutes and case law.

@gscat - Just FYI I'm not a cop. I work in the private sector only, we don't do law enforcement.

:-) OK. But if you contract out to law enforcement, some of those things could impact at those times :-)

Oh yes definitely! People doing that kind of work should follow your advice. I just wanted to make it clear I'm not an LEO.

 double post. Sorry. 

To OP. In training where the dog is taught to find an article of the owner, the original idea of olden days - the original purpose of this exercise - was to locate lost items of the owner. Like keys or wallet. For example, you can teach your dog to locate your TV remote controll, which may be very useful skill for dogs of some people :).   This stage of detection or tracking training where the odor  of the handler  is being tracked is in many systems of S&R training or detection training used as a foundation for further training of S&R or detection. As you know, in detection, the dog needs to determine odor of narcotic or other odor, like a cadaver, explosives and so on. One of the odors may be owners odor and that is not detrimental to a further teaching of detection or tracking which then it will not include owner's own odor. ( Read the bold text below)

Thus In early stages of S&R training or in let say, beginners ZVV tracking or in detection training dog at first looks for articles of the handler which he hides for the dog or in case of tracking or S&R the dog tracks the handler.  This is not in detriment to future detection training or tracking of let say the victim in S&R. To teach the dog to look for handler's article or handler's track is a quite standard way to teach the beginning fazes of tracking or detection. This teaching faze communicates to the dog what to do which is to on command track or detect per se ( as an action) and at this point, it does not teach specific odor yet. That comes later and it is not difficult to transfer the dog from handler's odor to other odors.  Dogs are amazing in their ability to differentiate odors. It is like for you to look at pizza. You see olives, tomato sause sausage and so on.  Then I can tell you select olives and you have no problem to do so.  In the same way but with a nose, the dog can distinguish different odors and we can teach them to select them.  Same way as you can teach the dog at first to detect and to look and indicate marihuana and then you can add to it the odor of cocaine, heroin and so on for example. 

That is why I would not have a problem to teach the dog to look for articles of the handler if it is not trained as scent discrimination from odors which the dog will detect in future. In other words, I would not teach the dog to discriminate and look for an odor of the handler amongst articles which have an odor of, for example, of explosive  Semtex if my plan is to eventually teach such dog to detect explosives. However, if the dog in some exercise or competition needs to differentiate the odor on articles of his owner from neutral odors (non-explosive or non-narcotics and so on odors)  or in other words odors which he will in future not be trained to detect, then I would absolutely have no problem with such training. 

 FYI  That is not to say that there may be and are other methods of training. 

@prager, totally agree.

So, say you have a validated Narc dog that is also trained to utility. Could you reliably proof a dog to ALWAYS do the utility SD exercise no matter what other sources are out there, and vice versa? For instance, if you had five narc-contaminated dumbbells and one handler-scented dumbbell, do you think a dog could reliably do the correct exercise?

I'd never try this and it would never happen, but I'm just curious if people think training a dog to distinguish between those exercises to such an extreme extent is even possible.