The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 854: Dogs That Hunt Humans

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with former Chief Trainer and handler for the LAPD's K9 Unit Doug Roller. Topics discussed: Getting heavy into falconry; a calling to work with animals; joining the police department; what an apprehension dog is; desirable dog characteristics; prey drive; running into a friendly; smelling fear; bite ratio; when dogs pay the price; buying a protection dog; training tips; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. O'hoi, turkey hunters. Turkey Week is on now at the Meat Eater store. To help you get ready this spring, we've rounded up some of our favorite gear for chasing goblers from Miriams out west to hard goblin Easterns.

We've got brand new meat eater logo wear and seasonings, turkey calls from Phelps, camo from First Light, decoys from DSD, packs and accessories from FHF gear, and a whole lot more. Select products are up to 20% off. From the field to the kitchen, everything you need this spring is all in one place. We've also teamed up with First Light to create the ultimate spring turkey giveaway worth over $13,000.

From now until Sunday, you get double entries for every $25 spent. That's 20 entries for every $25 spent at the meat eater store. check it out now through april 5th at store dot the meat eater.com this is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug-bitten and in my case underwearless we hunt the meat eater podcast you can't predict anything brought to you by first light when I'm hunting I need gear that won't quit first light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

Join today by Doug Roller, who was the chief trainer for L-A-P-D, Los Angeles Police Department's K-9 unit. Doug spent his career working with, this is a big important point, apprehension dogs, meaning dogs that catch people. So, In the dog world, you got detection dogs, guns, drugs, whatever. You got tracking dogs, which could be used as like rescue dogs to track people lost out in the woods. But his career is in using dogs to apprehend folks. He was a handler for seven years, then spent 17 years as the head trainer working with apprehension dogs. I met Doug, I don't know, a couple months ago.

Yep. I was at, I was with a friend of mine, Shane Yates, who's been on the show before. I was hanging out in a setting very similar to this on a couple of couches in a living room. And Doug was kind of blowing my mind with this whole world of dog use and dog training that I was unfamiliar with. So we're going to kind of recreate that conversation about just an intricate, very detailed, in-depth use of dogs. kind of blows your mind. Before we get into the police work, which is fascinating, man, and the, in the dog, and the training and all that.

I want to talk about your background a little bit. I didn't, we didn't talk about this when I met you, right? But, but Corinne was telling me that, that you got one of your initial introductions to working with, sorry, that one of your introductions, not even to dogs, what am I saying? You were into falconry. Oh, police work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Train, I guess.

in training or whatever. Yeah, that's come up before when I've talked to people. Like, you know, they'll say like, you know, what drew you? I don't know. You know, you're raised. And I was raised in a family that was very loved animals and the outdoors and all that. Did a lot of camping. And I don't even know how it happened.

But I guess I had parents also that, you know, did the right thing and allowed me to go directions that they saw. But that maybe was not instinctual, but just, I, gravitated toward that. Yeah. And I remember getting my first falcon. It was a little tiny falconette that I bought at the pet shop. They bought for me. It's a little from India, as small as falcon in the world.

And I had it like a pet. And it ended up dying on me because I didn't take care of it properly. But then I started reading. I got into all the books. And I was very young at the time. And then I got into birds of prey and trapping them and catching them. We got my falconer's license in California. Oh, really?

Huh? And I was a very young age. probably about 13. I couldn't even drive yet. But because I got so much into it, I was on the verge of getting my master falconer's license at a really young age, and then the fishing game got a hold of me. I don't know how that occurred. I think he just came over to approve my muse and my equipment, and he said, hey, we need to rehab birds once in a while that are injured or mistreated, whatever birds of prey.

Would you be interested? And, of course, I'm a kid. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. So they started bringing me birds to rehab, you know, like, Cooper Hawks, red tails um you know sometimes a prairie falcon in that area so that that actually fueled that but then i got very much into i joined a falconer's club and i got really into falconry and then some of my buddies in high school we all got into it and and i got guys right now that i kind of lost touch with but they're really into it i mean they're i left it because i my my life went to another direction i got into the dog thing but you were you were tuned up on trained up on kind of like mental

trained up on working with animals. And not only that, it was like being able to utilize an animal in the natural environment and hunt prey. There's something really neat about that. Uh-huh. Like, there's certain birds you go hunting with, you hunt from the fist. Um, you know, you, you, you, you're going to, uh, look for jack rabbits or bunnies or whatever. And you've got to have the dog appropriately trained, the can, the bird appropriately trained for that. But then you also have the falcons which are taught to hunt from the stoop so you actually teach them to wait on you okay there's involved like bird dogs the dogs will flush the game your prairie green or your prairie falcon will come up and stoop down and take them out got it um then these guys put transmitters

on their birds and everything else because some of these stoops can last go for miles got you want to lose your bird so they've got to track him down there he is with the uh the duck or the grouse or whatever, you know, a mile away. So it's pretty neat stuff, though, when you really get into it, at least for me it was. What made you, what was your decision process and becoming a cop? That's kind of, that's interesting too, because I had no, I had no thought about being a police officer. I was selling real estate. I was 19. I was making a ton of money. I was doing and buying and sell foreclosure houses, fixing them up. Probably on my way to making a lot of money. You know, I had like rental properties and all this other stuff.

And I was at 19, 20 years old. I had some investors I was working with. So one day, this buddy of mine says, hey, why don't you come on a ride along with LAPD? Uh-huh. And I even lost track of this guy, but it was somebody I knew at the time. So he worked southeast, which is a, you know, the Watts area, very busy, very violent. Yeah. And, of course, I rode with a sergeant.

And I got hooked. I go, this is neat. Uh-huh. This is like, I mean, for me. It just was really, you know, it was an adrenaline rush, dangerous. I'm seeing a world that I never was exposed to. Got it. I mean, I'm upper middle class, you know, white boy growing up in Southern California.

Here I am in a really bad area. Yeah, yeah. But I liked it. So for the heck of it. And you bring up so many memories, God. I was married to my first wife, and she just didn't like that. But I went ahead through it. She did not think she was going to be married to a cop.

But I went in, I put in. Like this caught her by surprise. Yeah. She just wasn't like, we are not going there type thing. Anyways, that's another story. But I put in for the application in September. And shockingly, I was accepted and I was already getting ready to go into class in December, which is pretty fast. And, yeah, the rest is history.

And you got right into dog work. No, I didn't. Oh, okay. LAPD is a big department. at the time was about 6,500 cops. Now it's about 10,000, but now they're losing guys left and right for all the nonsense going on.

So they get in a canine unit with L.A. K9 wasn't, there's a division in L.A. called Metro. Metro has SWAT, mounted unit, A, B, and C-Paltoon, and then K-9. But when I got on Young, K-9 was off doing their own thing. They weren't in a specialized, unit.

Okay. So back in the old canine, there was, when it started like in the late 70s by two guys, Sergeant Mooring and the guy named Darne Arnell, it blew up. I mean, a lot of departments in the country had canines, but L.A. didn't. And these guys were like the fathers of our canine unit. And they went out and researched, did a lot of work, got the unit going. And they were housed out of West L.A. division. and they wanted to be part of air support.

They did not want to go to Metro. There was a lot of ego stuff going on. But as the unit grew with two like four or five handlers, these guys are getting into shootings like a lot, more than SIS, more than some of the other specialized units because they're hunting down armed suspects all the time. And it was a lot of violence back there. The canine handlers are finding themselves in more shooting incidents.

Probably they were getting more shootings back then than any unit in the, in the department. Got it. The department chief gate says, uh, you know, what's going on here? You know, we, we need to put this, this unit into Metro. And, you know, there was always the perception like, what are they doing here? Why are all these shootings occurring? Okay.

You know, even back then, you know, are these guys a bunch of cowboys, whatever? But I don't think it was that. I think it was more like, you know, back in the late 80s, um, it was a really violent time. It was like, you know, the stats, people, People talk about crime and where it is now, but back then, I mean, just as an example, there was about one of some of the years, there was a 22, 2,200 homicides in LAPD alone. And now for the whole city. And now you're lucky to break 100, 130.

Yeah. So look at exponentially. Dude, that's the thing about like crime statistics, get manipulated so on. Yeah. Like, people have this perception that it's this perception that nowadays crime is so bad, but when you look at like crime trends, 100%. It's really just not. It's not.

They have, even cops that I've worked with that are new, they can't even believe the numbers all throw out. The amount of searches that I did, for example, you know, in canine, it just, you don't hear about those numbers. That's why our dogs were so, for a training word, seasoned. Yeah. They were so good at what they did because they had so much action in those days. Exactly.

Yeah. But back to that. So when I put in for the unit for K-9, I put in for Metro 2 because at the time they were in that crossroads, like they're going to bring you to Metro first and then you get selected at K-9. Okay. Well, back then I was the last group of guys that came in straight from patrol. I was working rampart, very busy division, and then I went straight to Kana. And then things evolved after that where you had to go to Metro, do about a year in Metro, and then be able to put in for K9 or SWAT. And now they're called high risk positions where you actually get-k-9 is a high-risk position.

Yeah, just like SWAT. You get more money. You get hazard pay. You get a take-home car because, you know, it's deserved, I guess. Yeah. But that's that history of that. So, you know, I did, it was a process. I got in.

And I got in pretty young. I got in less than five years on the job, which is pretty young for that kind of a year. Is that right? In L.A., yeah. I mean, guys in the other departments, they might get in after a year or two. But in L.A., it's a lot more competitive. The expectations are a lot higher, all that stuff. Good, bad, or indifferent.

Yeah. Let's jump to some definitions here. Explain to folks what an apprehension dog is. Okay. In that, like, juxtaposed to a detection dog, a tracking dog, like, explain that specific term. Well, in where I, you know, my shop, our claim to fame in LAPD, canine. Now, within LAPD, there are several cany units that are separate from metro cany. Okay.

So you've got metro canine, which is the apprehension dog, the dogs that actually are, are, are taught to search, find suspects, and if needed, they'll bite them. LAPD still has a policy of finding bark, which, um, not a big fan of. And, you know, I hate to say that, but I'm just not a big fan of it as things have evolved. And we can get into that later. Well, yeah, we got to come back to bite and bark. Yeah, that's a big deal. Because that's not, people aren't going to know what that means.

They won't. They won't. And then it needs to be explained. But that being said, that's Metro. And we have done some tracking in the past. We put a lot of time and effort into it. I did a lot of experiment with the tracking dogs. It's very time consuming and it works.

Okay. But the problem is we just don't have the environment for that. You know, most of our searches, the vast majority are going to be containments, like a perimeter search. You know, we lock down a block, two blocks, three blocks, or a building or a warehouse, and then we systematically clear it. Okay. With numerous dogs sometimes. Oh, really? Yeah. And then you have the detection dogs. And for most departments, that's, for most departments, because of money and economics, they'll have what's called dual purpose dogs. That means these dogs also are apprehension dogs, but they'll also find narcotics or firearms or bombs.

Okay. And, you know, you can't do more, more than one odor with one dog. And we can talk about that a little bit. Like, I can't have a dog that's trained to find narcotics, find bombs. Really? No, can't be done. Shouldn't be done because it's just not there's legalities of it. You know, what's my dog really hitting on? Um, that's why you- So when you see a, if you're in the airport and it just happens to be there's a dog day,

there's a guy in the airport, that dog isn't looking for everything. That dog's looking for a thing. Yes. And there's, that's another whole discussion. They have what's called vapor wake dogs now where the dogs are taught to just scan by people as are walking and they'll alert on them for maybe narcotics or maybe bombs depending what he's trained for. Okay.

But you're never going to know. And, uh, you know, it's, it's funny because back in the 90s, early 90s before vapor wake was ever termed, we were already experimenting with that. With what? With dogs that were taught to go ahead and detect odor by following somebody. Okay. Like an action. Instead of just pinpointing odor at a specific location, they were taught to,

find and follow. So a guy would be in the crowd walk and also a dog would alert, show a body, a change of behavior, and start following that person. And then you can have time to go ahead and do what you're going to do. Um, man, okay, we got a lot of balls in here because this is something I want to talk about. Because when we talk before, you're talking about the difference between a dog whose nose is on the ground and a dog whose nose is in the air, but apprehend, so back to the Apprehension. So back to the Applant. It's all stuff I want to talk about. Yeah. Like I said, you got to keep guiding me here. So, because there's so much the, I want to talk about this stuff.

Sure. Like I first want to just clarify, like, what you mean by apprehension, how it's different than a tracking dog. Right. In my world, now, a tracking dog is an apprehension dog too. Okay. But, um, basically these dogs are trained to find and locate, whether it's tracking or air sending to go ahead and find somebody and bite them if necessary or not bite them

depending on the circumstances. And we can talk about that, you know, a lot. Yeah. everybody's got different methods. I train a certain method that's a little bit unique, not as unique as it used to be, because a lot of the, a lot of,

I think teams are catching on to the, when we search in LAPD, and a lot of units that I work with now, with my business, I teach what's called off lead searching. Okay. And we utilize this tool, this electric caller here.

And some of your audience, I'm sure it's familiar with it. Oh, yeah, all my bodies that have, trained dogs use collars. Got the Garmin 550 or whatever they use. And that's what we use primarily. That's what I like.

But our dogs are taught to primarily air scent and find the suspect, you know, pinpoint the odor, change of behavior, bark at the odor, let us know the guys inside that cupboard or that shed or whatever. That's primarily what we do because of our environment. There's some guys like out here in Montana. They do a lot of tracking. They do both. And they'll actually hit a track. and, you know, they might be in the track for a half mile or a mile and find a guy in some bushes in a creek side or, you know, maybe it tracks to a building. And then they turn into the, but they do apprehend too.

So at the end of the track, they have a chance to maybe take the guy into custody with no force. Maybe he takes off runs. They send him on them. They take them down. Yeah. Just give me. So there's like a, there's like a fundamental difference between, I'm going to give you two scenarios. One is a scenario you're in an agricultural.

rural agricultural area. Right. And you know that a guy has gotten out of the car, like yesterday, got out of a car and ran off through the woods. Right. That's scenario one. No one knows where he is now. Scenario two is he comes into this building. Right?

Like these are different, these are different dogs. Well, they'll do both. Okay. It's not a big deal. A dog can be taught to track with different commands even. Like one command might be, you know, you know, You have them on leash, you find out where the guy was last seen. Some guys, some guys might even do discrimination where they show a, um, a part, you know,

a jacker or something the guy might have left. Okay. That's another thing we can get into, but generally speaking, they'll pick up a track and nose on the ground and they'll go footstep to footstep, but they'll also do what's called trail because they're air sending at the same time, but they're taught to be get their nose on the ground. Okay. And these dogs are specifically trained.

Like, for example, if you. you're going to have a tracking dog, his nose needs to be trained on the ground immediately. Okay. In other words, if you take that dog and start teaching him how to air scent, it's going to be very difficult to get his nose on the ground. So that's got to be trained first because the dog's going to go, well, you know, if I want to go to A to F, I want to skip everything, which is air senting. But with tracking, it's more diligent and the dog's got to learn to put his nose on the ground and follow footsteps. crushed vegetation, skin rafts are falling, you know, like on a curb or, you know, it's amazing how a dog will pick up on this stuff. But he's got to be exposed to all these different environments to be a good tracking dog.

Yeah. And it's got to be followed up on. But like I said, if you try to take one of our apprehension dogs that are trained to AirSent, they've been doing it for three or four years, it'd be very hard to get him to track. Got it. Because they're not going to want to do it. Very difficult. So that's a little bit of the training thing on that.

I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms

and the IHeart Radio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now, we're running the ultimate Spring Turkey giveaway, and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience,

gear from SIG, a shotgun from Binelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light, and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your buddies or family members. Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway,

the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF gear in the Me Eater store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered as easy. Just head over to the First Light contest page at firstlight.com. Fill out the entry form in your inn. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around.

The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April. 13th, 2000, 26. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. There's a thing you explain to me with the dogs you work with the apprehension dogs is, what was the term you used where it's kind of almost seems like something from maybe more popular in movies and TV shows and the reality is like, you show them like a hat, like the guy's hat, right? And the dog's like, got it. I'll go find them. Right. But you were explaining me that the apprehension dogs you guys train with, they're smelling something very different. Yeah, we talked about that, remember. Yeah. Yeah, there's a thing, and it's true.

It's a fact. It's been studied. There's a thing that when you're in fighter flight, you put off a certain odor. It's enhanced scent. Some people call it fear scent. A dog that has had, a police dog that has had numerous habits. apprehensions will be seasoned on that odor. And it's, it's not, it's not race specific. It's not, it's something that the body goes through, you know, noradrenaline, epinephrine, all these

changes happen in the body when you're a fight or flight. You know, I think I was, reminds me I was watching a show once on boar hunting. Okay. And, uh, these boar hunters are out there. And they were talking about what they go through during a bore. In fact, I knew a guy, uh, one of the guys on a unit, Vita used to go boar hunting in Catalina. Okay. And hunt these things down on the caves. And, you know, back in the day...

Catalina Island. Catalina Island. And he would carry nothing more into 3.57 with a little scope on it and going to caves and hunt him out. And I guess you can imagine the adrenaline and the fear at the same time that not only is going on in your own body, but also is going on in the body of the boar. Because when he's corners, he's in fight or flight too. Yeah.

So that's kind of what a suspect does. When he's in fight or flight running from the police, he puts out that odor and trust me, he does. Yeah, you mentioned to me that this, you're like, you're dealing with people who this maybe is the most excited and scared they've ever been in their life. Yeah, I mean, we talked about it. I mean, I found guys after, and some of them weren't even bit, they were just scared, excuse the language, shitless. Yeah. And they, they end up defecating on themselves because they're so scared. from, especially if they're bit by the dog.

Yeah. And some guys aren't. Some guys are very aggressive. They're yoked up. They're, they're, they're seasoned criminals. They're prisoners, you know, prisoners and all that. And they take it, they take anything like a champ. But this is what you want to do with the seasoned dog over a period of time.

When you're training a new dog, you obviously can't, they've tried to. They can't bottle fear scent. Okay. There's companies that have tried to and I've, I've tested them, experimented with them. And I'm not seeing it. So the best you can do, this is old school stuff, just kind of funny. But I remember when I was a brand new handler, and I'm in the unit. And it was a guy named John Hall had his little dog named Liberty.

Rottweiler. We don't use Rots anymore, but it was his own dog, you bred. And the dog was still in training. And they're messing with me. And, you know, I'm a new guy. And they said, okay, we want you to hide over here. And I want you to put this face. mask on because he's going to go for your face.

He's not going to go for my face, but he wanted to put that fear in me. Oh. So that when I'm hiding and we're doing a training scenario, the dog will supposedly maybe hit on me at being a little scared. Yeah. And it did get to me. I'm thinking, shit, I'm a brand new handler. I knew a little bit about dog.

Did some dog stuff before I got in the unit. I'm like, this dog's a face spider, really? And you're hiding? So just that kind of thing. It wasn't going to happen, but he was trying to recreate that. Yeah. But you can't. You really can't.

You can only do it by funny, real bad guys, really. So if one of these apprehension dogs that's experienced, if I took, like, it sounds, it's an outlandish scenario, but let's say you had someone that just was in a high-speed chase, crashes a car, gets out of the car, runs. But in all of a sudden, you could nab that person and put them in a lineup of 100 people. And the dog walks past the 100 people. the dog's going to go, this dude, he might, has the odor, I'm interested. He might, but, you know, lineups are very strange when you're doing that.

You know, you've got to have so much corroborating evidence usually, you know, it's like, yeah, you have to be careful on that. Relying on a dog for court purposes just to discriminate on somebody gets you in a bad place. Got it. not not not to get too much into the ways but there was a a program the sheriffs were using for a while and I'll keep the guy nameless but he was running a bloodhound and he was claiming to do all this stuff dog can you know pick up on a drop of blood a week old he can hit that track he can find that guy three miles away going through the the the streets of l.A. and all this other stuff and I'm like

okay wait a minute that you're you're you're making up stories I didn't believe it And I did some training, not with him, but some observations. The department wanted me to look into it. Robbery Homicide wanted to look into it. And I mean, I'll just say it. It proved out that he couldn't do it. But what sealed it was, he put a guy in jail based on what he said, the dog. It found this guy who was some kind of rape shooting suspect.

A male Hispanic guy did, was already in jail. DNA comes out, proves that he's innocent. He did like five years. got a big lawsuit out of it. And that hurt that program big time. Got it. That was like using the dog's sensory perception. Without any cooperating evidence, the dog nailed them and it caused them a lot of problems.

Got it. Let me ask the same. Let me ask the question in a different way. Picture that you have that same scenario. A guy is in a high-speed car chase, bam, crashes his car, gets off his car, runs all around, enters a house. The house is full of other people. Okay.

there's a whole apartment building, okay, whatever. It's full of other people. You guys are all there. The cops are there. What is the dog, why doesn't the dog just run up to the first person in the house and be like, here he is, I got him. Well, what would we do on that? Because we've had that. Okay.

Many of those, we call him he runs into a friendly. Yep. Or sometimes he just runs into a pilgrim's house, like a non-suspect, totally innocent citizen. Yeah. I can talk all day about some of the crazy stuff we've had, you know, we've had guys run into a house. We know he's in there. We banging the door like some time has gone by.

And we says, hey, is everything okay here? And the, it's like a movie, right? The lady looks at you and goes, yeah, everything's fine. Everything's fine. And I'm like, oh. Oh, yeah, just for people listening. You're not, she's doing like a nod of her head right behind the corn with a gun on her. And she was trying to say, we're good because he's going to kill her.

Yeah. He was, he was, this guy's wanted for murder. So he's got nothing to lose. And we ended up catching him, but we basically picked up on her eye movements like, okay, she's scared shitless right now. Yeah. The guy's right there. And we ended up, um, we ended up trying to nail the house down.

And this guy bails out of a window, crawls up into a crawl space. He hides and we have to gas them out. Huh. Yeah, we have to actually, we had to actually have to use hot gas because, uh, we, what he did was he was ready for the, gas he put a bunch of clothing on his face he was taking it like a champ and hot gas is really hard to defeat it's like nasty you got to be careful because you'll could burn down a house what the swat guys finally did was they kept punching it in different parts of the ceiling and he

had corralled himself into an area where he wasn't getting hit and then finally they put the hot gas right where he was hiding and then he screamed out i'm coming out so that's just another story but But yeah, you've got to be careful about discriminating like that and usually you want to be safe and have cooperating evidence and all that. You're going to put someone in jail, take his freedom away. You've got to be right. No, but I mean, what I'm trying to get at is how does the dog know that he's found the one he's supposed to find?

Well, that's a good point. I mean, after you have, when you put a dog in training, obviously, he's just finding decoys. And that's a really good question. That leads into a lot of good training, right? when you're exposing a new dog, first you get your police dog that has all the right traits. You test them, you purchase them, you put them through the basic obedience, and then these dogs have the aptitude to do what we're going to do.

And we could talk all day on that. But once that dog, before he hits a street, he needs to work in what's called the search team environment. So you might, with us, we have a point guard who's married up to the handler, and we have a rear guard, two or three people behind us. And those folks play a really important part in the search. That's your backup. The point guard usually carries, you know, either a tube or a Benelli or an AR, and he's married up right to the shoulder of the handler.

Okay. So the dog has to get used to all this. He's got to get used to the team. And some dogs aren't. You get them new. Some of these dogs are, they're edgy. They're ready to just, you know, bite anything and everything. And you've got to socialize them and make them right.

not all, but you've got to train them appropriately so they're safe to search with. So you have to teach them how to work within that search team cell environment. Yeah. And you do that outside the search. You might just do a lot of ballwork and playing and obedience with the team around you. I understand. So the dog understands in low drive when he's calm and cool, these are the guys I'm working with. Yeah.

You don't want to introduce that environment when the dog's at this level. It's like trying to teach a human how to do things when he's in a gun. fight. Yeah. The gun fight teaching starts way before the gun fight, right? Yeah, yeah. You have to teach him how to shooting platform, how to operate the gun, calm and cool and collected, slow fire, single fire, all that stuff. Same thing with the dog. Most of learning is going to be done in a, in a low drive environment so the dog can learn. And then you start escalating and you bring in a myriad of other things so a dog can chain all those different environments and situations and be able to perform at a high, you know, at a high drive level, you still listen.

And these dogs are tied to a person. Yes, for us. And for the most part. I did a lot of military training. Not as much as I used to. I had a big contract with the Marines for a while. I was doing all their, putting all their dogs on the e-caller. And, you know, God bless them.

The way that, not the specialized units, not the SF guys or the Delta guys, because those guys are married to a dog for. Maybe the life of the dog, seven, eight years maybe. But your basic military guy, he might just be working that dog for one or two years. And then dog's going to go to somebody else. I see. And the dog is kenneled at home in their kennel. I mean, in the camp kennel.

So they go home every night. They come to the kennel and pick up their dog, which really isn't that good of a thing. Because the bonding, you're lacking the bonding, you know, with a police dog. and agencies, they take that dog home. And that dog is their dog. The dog learns that that's the guy. That's his master. The dog stays with him all the time,

stays at home in his kennel, all that stuff. So the bonding is a little bit better that way. And I think the handler gets to know that dog intimately, you know. Got it. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing because what we always battle, we talked about earlier, even with a police officer who's trained in canine, is they end up treating that dog like a pet.

And you can't do that. And we have more problems with that. I'm speaking to the choir, people that are probably going to listen to this podcast go, yep, yep, that's true. You know, you can tell a guy over and over again, he's a police dog. He's a tool.

You can love him. You can cry if he gets killed, but you've got to treat him like a dog. And that's not a bad thing. It's just they're not a human. You know, dogs live for the, they live for primarily, food, sex, love, and, you know, satisfying drive.

And you have to look at them in that respect. And if you don't, you know, you got to establish that hierarchy, I guess we talked about earlier. Yeah. And if you don't do that, you have a problem, especially with these dogs. You know, they're up there. You know, you want to get a dog that's got that high drive and has all those traits for police work. but if they're not handled appropriately, you can turn that dog into a nasty dog,

you know, and it's not the dog's fault. It's the way he's been handled. Yeah. I mean, coming up on the leash, biting the handler, biting search team members, these are all the things that happen in dog training. And it's usually a human problem. You know, usually it is.

Some dogs, you know, come out of a letter. They're just two alpha. They grow up, very dominant. And they're not the kind of dog you want, you know, like when you're selecting a dog, especially as a pup, you're looking for the dog. If you were looking at a litter,

you don't want that alpha dog. You maybe want the number two or three dog in the hierarchy because he's going to be easier to manage. Yeah. You know, you don't want the, you know, number eight dog that's got no drive whatsoever and, you know, hides the corner and all that.

But you do want that dog that's got that, that drive and that alpha mentality. But, you know, you'll get some dogs in the litter that they're kicking all the other dog's asses all the time. They're like, They're just relentless. They don't get along with any.

Mama's always correcting that dog to leave the other dogs alone. Probably if you're looking at a Malinwa or a shepherd, probably not the great, the best dog for police work. Really? Well, because you're going to see that same thing happening. Too aggressive. He's going to try to dominate you. Got it. And some of these things, like I said, they happen over time, like you talked about your pit bull thing.

Some police stuff, some canine officers don't handle the dog appropriately. And next thing you know, I've seen God. dogs come out of training and he was a great dog great team a year later i get a call from somebody hey so-and-so this dog just ate him up i go what happened i don't know but then i get out and watch him i'm like okay i can see what's going on here you know you're not you didn't maintain the alpha you didn't in in a fair way you know it doesn't mean about kicking a dog's but it means that the dog has to understand that everything comes through you like i live through you i get water from you You feed me, you keep me alive.

Uh-huh. And you also make him earn everything, especially the dominant dogs, you know, like little things like, uh, and at home, you know, the way he, dogs have to be consistent. You can't treat them one way at home and then go to work and treat them another way because they're not going to, it's got to be very consistent and structured. Uh-huh. The dog will respond accordingly. So it's little things like, you know, you go to put them in a police car, put him on a sit. open a door, car. So you're telling him what to do.

He comes out of the car. You open the door, you make him wait, come to your heel. Because he's not going to want to wait. If you've done car deployments where the guy, the dog is sent out of the car to go and deploy and catch somebody, we do a lot of that. That can cause reactions that you don't want. He might just pop out one time and go bite the wrong person

because there's no structure there anymore. Yeah. Makes sense? Yeah. Yeah. So you really have to, and everything you're doing, you've got to really treat him like, like a dog. Walk me, walk me through, if you can think of a memorable apprehension, walk me through an apprehension process. Well, yeah, God. Something from in the field, you know. Yeah, I mean, I've had some really good capers. Um, but we talk about the fear sent. There was a time, I was a handler and I wasn't a trainer. I was new in a unit. And we had these cops, I think in 77th. Um, they were. ambushed. They were deep in 77,

the residential neighborhood, probably taking a report call or whatever. And while they're getting in their car, a guy pulls up, craigs off a bunch of rounds, blows out the back windows, the cops are okay, but I'd help call. So they set up a two-block perimeter. And of course, this is when we were transitioning over to

utilize these SWAT as our backup. So the policy was if we have that kind of a high threat, we have to use SWAT as our search team members, which is fine, you know, because they're trained at that high degree and they've got the weapons and all that stuff. And, but, but they're also working with us now. So they have to do canine tactics and not SWAT tactics, which is another

conversation. Because this dude shot at these cops. Yeah, he'd try to kill him. He runs off. He runs up and you know within two blocks where he is. Yeah, they had the containment up. They had the airship overhead and we have a lot of resources, which is great. It spoils us because the airship, our airships are the best in the country.

I mean, the way they can operate and communicate and use their Flur system, you know, all that stuff. They're just, they're golden. And even back then, this, you're talking a long time ago this, like 20 years ago. But anyways, the guy bailes out. He's in the containment. And I start doing my, we're starting a systematic search. And what I mean by that is we have like a one block, let's say.

And it's a long block. It's in deep 77th. And we have a team on each side. We have a team here and a team here. I'm searching over here. We've got SWAT personnel with us. And what we want to do is we want to do is we want to, to hop scotch. So one team searches a yard and then pushes. Next team does the same thing and then pushes.

But we don't want to be back to back because of crossfire. Oh, we want to make sure that we're safe. But at the same time, we don't want one team to get too far ahead because you want to keep pushing the guy one way. And these suspects are very savvy. I mean, they'll, you'll, we'll, we used to interview all of our suspects after we would catch them. Really? Yeah, yeah. We, we, we brush them off and treat them really nice because we want to get info. we'd find out all kinds of stuff like where did you run what made you put down why did you move all these things really we put it in our head as far as you know tactically how do these guys like you do like an exit interview yeah almost and you know i used to be mad at some of the handlers they were new and they're treating a suspect like a jerk you know which is fine i mean it's you know maybe he's a wanted suspect or whatever but let's think about let's think ahead here okay ask them you know and they'll tell you and what they try to do is If one team gets too far ahead and they're glancing over the fence and they're watching the airship at the same time. And they know that if that airship orbits at a certain point, he's going to be out of view.

And he'll say that during the interview. And he says, that's when I moved. Then I hit again because they're trying to escape. Some guys will just put down. The old suspects when I came on a unit used to just run and put down. But they got very savvy because they knew Canine was going to search at L.A. So then they started trying to break the perimeter and tried to find holes in the perimeter

like a unit wasn't paying attention on the perimeter. He's looking at, he's doing a peak C. He says, okay, I got time. I'm going to jog over to the next block. Got it. You know, these things would happen. We develop, you know. So these dudes get savvy to how to avoid a dog.

Unbelievable. And how to escape and all that. So we're pushing this guy. We're pushing. So I'm starting over here with, I think the backup guy was, Ray Doyle, good guy, SWAT guy, big guy. And we're pushing this guy.

I get about the third yard and my dog comes out and I'll mind you, and I know it sounds cliche, but I had a great dog. He was like, I mean, even the guy's in the unit, he said, there was times when I got in one shooting and that's another story where the handler actually says, hey, look, my dog's not getting anywhere. He says, bring out your key, bring out Kino. Your dog will do his magic. So anyways, back to this story.

We're pushing, we're pushing. And also my dog's exited. exits the yard and his nose goes up. Now, tactically, you don't really want to do this. I don't teach this. You want to, even if your dog gets odor, you don't want to miss anything, so you keep pushing. Because you don't want to take a chance of bypassing a yard.

Got it, got it. He might, he might okedoke you or fool you or whatever. It's just not good. But my dog was just telling me he's got odor. I mean, he's like a fishing line. I mean, he's got so much change of behavior that I'm, I'm using the caller to call him back. I'm applying pressure on the collar, the e-caller right here,

because he's got so much drive to just want to blow past these yards. So I look at Doyle, I go, look, he's got something down the street. I'm going to go with it. Airship, follow me. So we pass about five or six, seven yards, and he's just sucked in, goes into the yard, dives into a bush, and he's on this guy, just taking care of business. Yeah.

And guns out, laying over there. And Doyle's on top of the guy, all excited about taking him into custody, and I'm yelling it. And I says, hey, I go, come on back. I got to call my dog off because I do what's called verbal outs. I'm a very big proponent of that. And we can get into that later. It's safer. It's tactically, even more safer.

A lot of guys will do what's called choke off or hard outs, but then you're, you know, I don't like that. So, but I can't call him off until Doyle gets off him. So you literally grab them, and then I call, you know, back to my side. take him into custody. But Doyle goes afterwards and says, that was awesome. Your dog got that guy eight yards away. The fear scent that I'm talking about. Yeah.

At that time, Keno probably already had 100 apprehensions, you know, at that point. Yeah. He was well seasoned. He just knew that smell. Oh, yeah. I mean, he was just, you could tell. I mean, and a lot of K9 guys will tell you that. They just know.

You're searching a yard. And all of a sudden, you get about four or five yards in it. And the adrenaline kicks into you and the whole hunt thing's happening. and you can see your dog alerting. We're on the line track. Or sometimes we'll say, hey, we'll get a whole of the other unit on the back side of the search. And I'll say, hey, my dog's picking up a lot of odor. I think he's on your side.

So you're getting close. So then we start things like that. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind. And now, I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app.

All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now, we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway, and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Bonelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light, and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your buddies or family members.

Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF gear, and the Me Eaters store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered is easy. Just head over to the First Light contest page at Firstlight.com. fill out the entry form in your inn. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries.

One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day. But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. What prevents the guy from shooting the dog?

Well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you know, that's another whole story. You know, what prevents a guy from shooting? You know, I think you have like two or three different kinds of suspects, okay? One of them you have a suspect doesn't give a shit. He doesn't care if he dies, suicide by cop. It's hard to work that kind of guy because, you know, you can do the best tactics in the world and he's just going to take you out. Got it.

We've had cops get killed because of that. Then you have the other guy that wants to survive, you know, but he'll hurt you if he can. Yeah. So if you drop your tactics and he gives you an opportunity, he's going to hurt you. But if you overwhelm him with good tactics, you know, I used to, I teach this and I got it from a sergeant many, many years ago. He was a great sergeant. Jack Orr passed away a little couple years ago. It's a great sergeant.

And he had a thing he called the tactical clock. And when you have everything at even at 12, the suspect is always ahead because he has to be, he can be. he can be proactive he can shoot you without any cause or whatever cop can't do that he's behind the clock because he has to be reactive he's got to wait and see what happens yeah you just can't go out killing people yeah it's not like a military operation you know where they're and that's not the story but you know what I mean yeah there's laws and rules and policy and you have to adhere to that so it puts you behind the power curve so the only thing you can do is to have tactics that are overwhelming so the suspect's going to say, hey, I might take that guy out, but his backup's

going to kill me. Yeah. You know, the rear guards are going to get me. Yeah. Whatever, because the way that we work, and we do everything off lead, which is great, because when a dog works off lead, and he's not restricted with a long line like a lot of departments do, and they're great dogs, don't get me wrong, and I work with them all the time. But I've been asked to actually do merry classes with guys that do long line tactics. And I go, well, you know, I don't do that. I don't teach that. Everything you do is off lead.

When a dog works off lead, that dog offers you reaction time because he's way out ahead of you. Go. You know, he's within range to sea, but reaction time is everything. You know, with a long line, you're restricted 20, 30 feet. And the dog's always on the line. And the land's getting tangled up on stuff and it's getting wiped out. And plus the dog can't work right either. When a dog is working offline, um, especially,

you when he gets good at it, the magic really starts happening because they're usually totally using the dog's natural instinct to hunt with no restrictions. And he also knows through time that dad's going to direct me into odor. It's up to me to expose my dog to odor. It's up to the dog to listen and trust me that if you follow my direction, I'm going to leave you to the promised land. When you get that connection, the dog performs really well. I mean, any guy will tell you A seasoned dog is like gold. I mean, because it takes so long, um, to get to that point. It's just a lot of training and meticulous training.

Like the more experience he has, the more valuable. I mean, it's like you're like, you're like one. You know, you can read your dog. You know exactly what he's telling you. And, and you can trust them. So like, let's say, uh, you know, there's a bunch of bushes over there. And my dog will come in. A trained dog will usually hit the corners all by himself because sin has a tendency to

bleed off into the perimeter of the yard. Okay. So you want to, you want to get that perimeter first and then detail the rest of it. So it's a, it's a, it's a science and it's an art. You want to allow that dog to hunt and self-discover as much as you can, but you also want to do it systematically so he doesn't miss anything. Okay. Because sometimes, you know, a dog may not get deep enough.

Disciple handlers will make mistakes and they'll miss somebody because you didn't get your dog on odor. You can't blame him on him because, let's say you're doing a, a warehouse, and you're not getting them deep enough into the rooms. Yeah. And scent plays a, you know, scent is not, scent can be very finite sometimes depending on the environment and not, they might have to get his nose right on the edge of that door. And then boom, you know, he alerts.

Got it, got it. Change of behavior, starts barking at the door. Okay, guys behind that door. So you, so, so you direct the dog's pace. Yes. Yeah. You don't want to over direct him, but you also want him to hunt, but he has to listen. And that's a whole training thing.

You know, there's, you know, this e-caller helps a lot. This e-caller is magic because I can reach out and communicate with my dog, 20, 30, 40, 40, 40 yards away. How are you communicating to the dog? With commands and stuff? Like, if you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog? I want you to go in that room more. Oh, good point.

But like, let's say, tactically, let's say if I'm entering a warehouse, that maybe has an L shape to it. Big warehouse. And you want to let you do your announcement. Which is what? It could be a lot of things, but with us, it might be like, you know, this is LAPD canine. K-9 search. We know you're in there.

If you don't want to get hurt and bit, come out and surrender yourself. You've got one minute to surrender. God. Come out with your hands up, follow the light, follow my voice, whatever. And you mentioned the dog. And you mentioned getting bit. Yes. You tell them all that.

In fact, now it's really anal. I mean, back in a day. they, you know, now we have to record it. The units on the perimeter, like in an outside perimeter, they have a pre-recording in Spanish and in English. Got it. Then it's got to be timestamped. And all those rules have to be followed so that, you know,

you make sure like the guy, I never heard an announcement, that kind of thing. Yeah. You need to do your due diligence. Yeah. And that all takes time. So, but we battled that because now that we have to do all that, when somebody requests a canine,

airship's overhead while we're en route, they get all that done. It's already done. Yeah. So when we show up, boom, boots on the ground. Yeah. So because at first we're getting there, it's like, okay, we're 20 minutes into this thing. We haven't even kicked off yet. And time is of the essence in a search.

It's not like a barricade where a guy's in a building. You know, when it, you may have a containment in a block, but that suspect has freedom of movement. Yeah. And that'll get you every time. He has freedom to move, fortify his position, relax, you know, maybe get into a friendly house or even a, or even a non-friendly house, which they try to get in. to you. So you want to start putting pressure on them as soon as you can. Got it. So I lost track. What was I talking about?

Well, no, I was asking about when you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog? Like, no, no, no, go check that room more. Right. Don't worry about that room. Like, how do you communicate? And we'll do that. Sometimes we have to do that because there's scent problems. We might recognize something through experience that odor is going to play funny. Like, we might want to turn all the air conditioning off. Oh, yeah. Because it's going to suck up odor and do weird things. You know, scent does weird, like a lot of guys will be hiding in a false ceiling like this. Oh, they do? Yeah, sometimes in buildings.

And what will happen is the, the scent picture down here could be totally different than up there. Yeah. So my dog may hit at the corner over there barking up a storm, crawling up the wall. Okay, guys, guys up there somewhere. But guess what? He's over here on the other side. Because scent is coming down there for some reason. I got you.

So all you can do is use the dog as a tool. Okay, I know I got odor. And then it turns into, okay, I'm going to put my dog up. We've got to hand search it now because the dog done as much as he can. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. So we get a lot of capers like that.

But a good dog will pinpoint isolate odor and you have to give him time. You'll see him, you know, a new dog might take longer because he's working out that self-discovery thing that we talked about. But a good season dog, he'll bounce back and forth and boom, he's right under the corner of that door or that dipsy dumpster. or we found a lot of guys in trash cans. We've gotten some major shootings in trash cans. Guys like the hide in trash cans. They love trash, at least in L.A. Or crawl spaces.

Yeah, they love crawl spaces. You know, the Rays Foundation. Yeah. And it's hard because it's a hard scent picture. But when your dog finds his first crawl space find, he'll never leave a crawl space like that again. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, he'll be, he'll be checking every crawl space forever.

It's like something happens with that scent picture. Yeah. Because that's what dogs learn by. They learn by pictures and in chaining events, right? So the more pictures you show them in a positive way, it's like a snapshot and that's how he learns. So they learn like some architecture. I mean, they learn like building structure.

Sure. Yeah. They learn, uh, like for an example and other dogs did it. My dog, once you got real season, if you can picture a drone over a perimeter. Yeah. And you see these big, wide open yards, you know, five, six, seven of them in a block. My dog would go in, automatically at the corners, bisect all of himself. I'd go in, double check, come out, do the next yard.

But my dog would do this. He would do the same yard. And let's say the dog, here's a fence. And there's a shed on the other yard. Yeah. And the guy's hiding in the shed. So we'd come over here and he'd alert, even though the shed's 20 feet away in the next yard, but he can't get to it. Yeah.

Because the fence. He'd be frustrated and without me saying a word, he'd run out and be waiting at the gate. Really? Because he knows I can get to him from the gate. That's how smart they get. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Because you allow them to learn to be a predator, you know, their natural state, which is what they, you know, where they were. Yeah.

Like a wolf or whatever. So, um, yeah. They learn structure. They learn structure. They learn association and they chain those things together and they just become a better animal. Are they on hand? signals yes there's a good point I do there's some units that don't I teach them to follow the hand signals that's a big it's a really good question I teach them to

follow hand signals and the light so light the light in the dark environment like you teach them to like they'll go where you shine a light yes and I like the light there's guys that have experiment with and I have two with the laser but the problem with the laser is dogs don't see very well at night they don't see very like you and I, they need lateral movement. Okay. Like most predatory animals do. Um, they need the back and forth.

I mean, if a guy's hiding in a dark spot in a bush, and I've seen this happen and, uh, really dark, the dog will go in and I can see him. I can see the shadow dog go in and start doing this. We can't see him. He's trying to, he's almost like bumping into him until he bumps him. Then he goes, oh shit, there he is. Oh, really? So, but he smells him, but he doesn't.

He smells him and the odor is right there and he's excited, but he's working it out. Yeah. And it's funny to watch it. I've done, we've done stuff in muzzle, like, you know, where we actually hit decoys. And we do a lot of muzzle searching for a lot of reasons, getting a dog ready for the street and all that. And that's another whole topic we could talk, which is probably something important to talk about. But yeah, we direct them with the light. We give them what's called a search command.

Remember, we've chained all these events. We've done the announcement. That becomes a marker. It's time to search, especially for a new dog. So that consistency thing, okay, it's time to search. Put them on a down. through the announcement back off from the entry level because the door is always a kill zone you don't want to just blast him from there we got guys that are shot there you know got to be worried of that because the suspect's waiting so if you have that big warehouse with that L shape let's say you send a dog in and we let him have his head we just let him kind of get some odor but at the same time before we let him go deep we want to get our backside done first we want to clear an area that is safe okay so we we structurally we we We tell them, sometimes with the caller, but most dogs will do it if they're trained properly.

You call them back here, Revere, hand signal to the right, hand signal to the left, detail, the backside, okay, we got somewhere to go to now, and that's a safe area if something happens, right? Yeah. And then we start allowing a dog to search. And then we try to, we try to as much possible keep the dog in view, you know, because sometimes a guy can hide in a spot where the scent is very minute. You won't get that hard alert. You'll get a little bit of a change of behavior.

And then that's where you've got to recognize like that head might go up. But if you don't stick with it and you move beyond it, you might miss the bad guy. Got it. Because, and the dog could be a really good dog, but sometimes that scent is very subtle. And you've got to be able to see that as a handler. You know, when I'm doing certifications or new dogs, um, that's part of the problem getting that handler to be able to read his dog. Like I'll have another trainer with me and we're doing a search and we're looking and the dog is

alerting. He's showing a solid change of behavior and then the handler just calls a dog and leaves it. Got it. And then halfway through the search, I'll go, okay, stop. Put your dog in it down. Yeah. And hunting birds, there's this thing like, yeah. Everybody's like, he's, the dog's getting birdie.

Right. And the guy that knows, the first guy that knows the dog's getting birdies who owns the guy that owns the dog. You can see it. Yeah. A new guy will miss it though. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. And then I'll let him and I don't want to go on and on with a search and knowing that he just bypassed that guy 20 minutes ago because then it becomes detrimental to the dog. And I go, look, I go, just to make sure I've got my other trainer here and we both saw the alert. Yeah. Okay. Sometimes when I'm hiding somebody, I'll tell him to go hide and not even tell me where he's at.

It keeps, it keeps me honest. Got it. So that when I'm evaluating somebody, I can say. I had no idea where he was at, but I saw your dog alert and you missed it. I got you boned up. So you can't do that. So get your dog back over there. And then he goes, oh, yeah, how did I miss that?

Well, you missed it. And you don't want to miss a guy in the street. That's a big deal for a unit, especially with LA. You know, you miss a guy. And it's one thing to miss him when you can't get your dog there. Like a fortified structure, you can't get in. It's all locked up. And you'll tell the command post, hey, we searched everything except for that.

You want us to bust in or not. He says, no, we can't bust in. Okay, well, it's not clear. Two hours later, the guy's found in there because we didn't get them in there. So can I miss him? No, can I didn't miss them? We, we, you didn't allow us to search. Yeah.

But it's another thing when you have searching area and you call it clear. And then suspect comes out. Yeah. And I've got some stories on that. That looks bad. Yeah. Do you, there's got to be things that you can train a dog do and things the dog just has to come out of the box.

ready to do. You talk about biting. Right. Is is is can you train a dog to bite or does it got to be that that dog wants to bite? That's a great question. Like wants to bite from birth. Yeah. That's a great question because some dogs do they they have a propensity to come out and their first apprehension they have the no problem biting a real bad guy. That's not normal and sometimes when you have a dog that is that quick, maybe edgy, it brings about other problems because he's almost too much going that way. Got it. Your normal dog is going to need training.

When they come out, when you test these dogs, they're usually from Europe, and they're competitive dogs in KVP, ring sport, shits and work. And it's a really big deal over there. They make a lot of money doing it. Not as popular as it used to be, but it's still a big deal. You can look it up on the website and look at some of the trials and all that that they do. You'll see the dog hit into the guy in the bite suit, the call-offs, the recalls, the escorts, the obedience, the agility, all that stuff. And they compete with these dogs and they get different scores.

And some of these guys, some of the vendors or even some of the big trainers out there, after they get a couple high-scoring dogs, they'll sell their dogs to Americans. And sometimes they're titled and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're green. What I mean by that is they're brought to a certain level. They know how to bite. They're prey-oriented. You know, they love the prey toy like this right here, whether it's a jude or something to play with.

They've done maybe a little bit of search work. Who knows? You don't know. And they're young, though. They're very young. So they need to be brought along. And that's another story. And after 9-11, things really changed because the dog world exploded.

I mean, it exploded with the apprehension, the bomb. dog detection. I mean, the military, you know, they were getting hundreds and hundreds of dogs. Got it. And the whole thing just went crazy. Um, so the need for dogs was pretty high. And that's when some of the younger dogs started coming out. And they're good dogs. I mean, you could take a younger dog. In fact, that's pretty much the younger dog sometimes has a lot of benefits because he's not locked into the equipment. And what I mean by equipment is the bite suit, the sleeve, the undergarment sleeve and all that stuff that is used in training and competition. But how do you get it too?

Right. So that's the whole thing. When you're working a dog and you get some of the basic training, you're teaching a dog how to hunt. But at the same time, you want to start introducing things. You know, when I'm teaching a dog, everything I'm doing is for the end result, which is tactics and catching a bad guy. So you take some of those disciplines that are learned in ring sport and KVP and Shitson and you use them, you use some of those disciplines that make sense for you, but you trash some of the other ones that don't make sense.

Okay. And one of them would be to get him off equipment. So you do a lot of, you get that dog interested in, or you get him to accept the muzzle very quickly. And there's different kinds of muzzles, but you want that dog to be able to be neutral in the muzzle. some of the problems just to talk about training I'll put muzzles on some dogs that have had aggression training in muzzle which is fine but they're not neutral in muzzle so when that muzzle goes on he gets

aggressive and that's not what you want you want him to be gunfire neutral you want him to be muzzle neutral you don't want rounds going off and the dog's looking for someone to nab or bite now he's not safe you want him to be able to just accept the gunfire and move on do his work. Same thing with the muzzle. So the muzzle allows you to, when you're playing cat and mouse,

when you're playing, you know, hide and seat with the dog and you're setting up training scenarios, when that dog learns how to hunt in the muzzle, not only just hit in the muzzle, because when a dog is really good in the muzzle, you'll send him on a straight hit and he'll hurt you. I mean, I've had guys without protection, broken ribs. From the dog hit, and even though he can't bite.

Yeah, you just, like, like rockets. You're trained right. And I train them really good in muzzle. I have a certain technique. And my dogs, you know, they'll, they'll put some hurt on you. So sometimes we'll wear a vest. Sometimes over a big jacket, we'll wear it like a ski vest or something

or a skiing vest because they'll hurt you. Plus it depends on the skill of the decoy, too, obviously. But yeah, that's one thing you want to do. Another thing would be to do what's called a lot of civil fines. And when I say civil, it means no equipment. So when I'm hiding people right away, I try to take all the equipment off him. He's hiding in that cabinet. We got him stuck in there.

And, you know, he's sweating up a storm. He's in his tight. But you want to mimic the real environments. Like, for example, you might start, this leads into something else. You might start a dog on a really simple odor, like a really small closet with a door. Because you know the scent's going to be true. And the dog knows how to apprehend. He knows how to catch, you know, take bites and all that.

But you want to introduce him into odor. So we'll put a guy in a suit behind that door and we'll let him cook up. That means he's, a lot of scent is developing inside that small room. Yeah. And we crack the door and make it super easy. So we may do the announcement 20 yards away or at the beginning of the room. And then depending on the dog and what I think he might need, you know, LAPD, come out of your hands up. and then the decoy will do a peekiboo.

He'll open up and he'll paint a picture. He'll start screaming at the dog and the dog's barking. He's all excited. Then he shuts the door and leaves it cracked. We send a dog in. So now we want to teach him to be able to bark at the scent. So he'll go in frustrated going, okay, where do you go? And he's thinking some dogs will pick up on it really quick.

They'll go and they'll start working it. And all of a sudden you'll see his nose go up and he goes to that. that corner and then he starts scratching and he gets frustrated. And it's important for the handler to shut up because you want that alert to be between him and the odor. It's called making a dog be obedient to odor. And you'll see the mistakes sometimes. The handler will be back through going, what you got, buddy?

Dog looks around. He goes, okay, you just marked it. So in other words, instead of the dog's self-discovering, you've told the dog to alert. God. And then what happens is the dog will end up falsing. he'll go to a door, check it out, look back at you, you'll think the guy's in there and you'll go, what you got, the dog starts barking, open the door, nobody's there.

Yeah. Because you marked it and it's not about you. It's about what happens right there that odor. Makes sense? Yeah. Little things like that will happen. And, you know, when I go do a lot of problem solving, I'll see it right away. The dog will be, you know, at the scent and he's looking back.

I go, you've been talking to your dog a lot, haven't you? Yeah. I go, you got to shut up. I go, in fact, get out of the room. Go hide and let your dog do his thing. I don't want him to even see you. And then we fix it. So that, because you don't want that dog falsing.

I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind. And now, I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms in the IHeart Radio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season,

you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now, we're running the ultimate spring turkey. giveaway and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Benelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light, and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt in the Texas Hill country for you and two of your buddies or family members.

Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF gear, and the Me Eaters store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered is easy. Just head over to the First Light contest page at Firstlight.com. Fill out the entry form and you're in. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack.

But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2000, 26. So you got all day that day. But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble, gobble. I'm going to get back to a question I'm trying to. So the bite.

Yeah, like, yeah. I mean, a dog might go up and find something, but how do you ever get to where you know the dogs and it come up and bite, but also not bite the guy in the face? Sure. Well, you know, almost all the bites are going to. going to be on the extremities. That's just what a dog's going to do?

Well, that's what he's going to be offered to during decoy work. Okay. You know, one of the, one of my favorite bites is the insider on bite. I like that one. There's also a thing called bite marking. Way, way back in a day, we used to do a lot of what's called pulling on the bite. And I call it more of like a prey bite. And it's not a good bite.

It's not a bite that's going to take down a suspect. You want a dog that's going to be digging in. And you mark the, you mark that with a good decoy work. That means the dog bites and he pushes. Okay. That's just, that's just a detail. And you prefer to,

he's biting on the inside of the house. I like it because the decoy can really work the dog. He can feel it. A good decoy will tell you what he needs. A good decoy and I, my training groups, I actually hire a decoy and it's, it's kind of a,

the handlers are kind of spoiled because back in the day, we did our own decoying. Now I hire people to do it and it's hard work, but they're good. And it makes that dog, you know, I can fix problems a lot with a good skilled decoy.

Guys that, you know, do bring sport, KVP and all that. Pay him some money, they come in, they help. But when that dog's biting, let's say, for example, a dog has a propensity to pull. So when you take that inside arm bite and the dog comes in and he's pulling,

you ignore the behavior. You don't give him a mark on it. And then you wait the dog out. And then pretty soon, he's not getting any kind of reward. He's just kind of pulling. All of a sudden he does this. Bites. Oh, you do a mark. And then the dog does again.

And pretty soon that rep- You do a reaction. Yeah, you'll do it. You'll turn away, go to submission. And he likes that. And he likes that because you're showing that you're kicking his ass. Oh, that's all. Okay.

The dog picks up on it. Oh, I get a reaction here. Because what he was trained to do was some, we call him bite dummies. You're not doing anything for the dog. You're just a bite dummy. The dog will bite. He's pulling and he's pulling and the handler's going or the decoys going, ah, he's marking all bad behavior.

So the dog learns to pull. The problem with the pull bite, if you have a real apprehension, the dog might pull and rip off clothes and start shaking on it. Got it. It's like a piece of prey. That goes into another whole story. So you want that bite to be firm and pushing. So you can, like, you encourage the dog to bite how you want it by the decoy overreacting when it's doing the right thing. It's very subtle too.

You don't need to scream and it's just little things. Like you're looking at that dog, you're feeling the confidence. The decoy will tell you. Okay. Don't call them yet. don't call him let me watch him he rebites and pretty soon he's pushing oh yeah and pretty soon he's pushing and digging in and the bites really strong and then you obviously keep your control and all my all my outs are verbal outs which is another thing you know a lot of guys do choke-offs do you ever get a dog that's got too much

like he's too good at biting and it winds up being not safe to use the dog well he's only not safe if he's biting the wrong thing oh you mean because he's so powerful yeah That's a good point. I'll leave it nameless. There was a department I worked with, I still work with them. I have a contract with them. And one of their old handlers had a dog. And he was the son of his other dog from a really good breeding line.

And it was a shepherd. And not a lot of shepherds out there anymore. There are. There's some great shepherds, but everybody's using the mouths and the duchies. You know, I ran a great shepherd, whatever. But this dog was a powerful dog. And he had a couple of apprehensions where he bit him. wasn't long on a bite and broke the guy's arm.

Okay. And that can be a problem. Like the dog's bite broke the dude's on? Yeah, it wasn't like he was on him long. This guy, this dog, I mean, you would take a bite on him through the bite suit and it would hurt. I mean, you have to wear neoprene undergarments and the bite suit. Yeah. Otherwise, you're feeling some good pain.

You know, I remember working dogs back in the day. We had some pretty lousy bite suits. The department wasn't, um, keeping up on our equipment. And I'd go home sometimes. I didn't even know it. Take my t-shirt off, getting ready to go to bed, and I can't get my shirt off. And I got blood, dried up blood on my uniform t-shirt stuck. He didn't go through the suit, but the pressure made me bleed.

Yeah. My arm's all black and blue. It hurts. You know, because they bite hard, even with a bite suit. You, uh, you, when we talk before you explain something to me that I'd like you tell people about, when you go to buy dogs, and you're in the police work and you're and you're shopping for dogs from the same sources

that the military is shopping for dogs. You're saying the military wants dogs that don't bark, but you guys want dogs that do. Police want dogs that do bark. And that's more of a thing that that's just like the dog's tendency and not necessarily a thing that you train into a dog. Like the dog will hunt silent, you know?

It's easy to make the dog silent. It's easy to make it silent. I mean, most dogs will come in silent. You know, you've got to teach him to bark like at odor and all that. Oh, you do? Okay. Yeah, you do. I mean, some dogs will pick it up pretty naturally, but some dogs are really quiet.

We had a dog that came out of training from another vendor, and he's a good friend of mine. And they had a tendency of not getting that dog, those dogs to bark on odor. And we had some discussions by go, hey, look, because once that dog is allowed to find somebody in that closet or that cupboard, and show him some indication, but no bark, and then he gets paid with a bite. You've taught him to be quiet. Yeah. And you've done that over and over again. It's hard to fix.

And that's problematic for you guys because of the legal issues, the dog's got to bark. Yeah, it's just, it's something positive that you can say and, and helps you as a handler. Like, I mean, for example, too, he, he may not even be able to get to source to this, to where the guy actually is. Like, let's say the guy's up in that ceiling. The dog is trained to get as close to sores as possible and bark. So you'll have a dog that can't get close, but he's as close as he can. He'll crawl up that wall and start barking. That's a pretty good indication to have.

And he also, it steadies the dog. What I mean by that is the dog is given a behavior to do. And when you first teach him to bark at odor, you go with one or two barks bite. Okay. Next one, one, two, three, four barks bite. And then you want to vary it. you know, the variable to intermittent. And what that means is you're going to lock in the behavior.

Sometimes I want you barking 20 times at that door. Sometimes I want you barking twice. Okay. Because if you don't do that, if you don't, you know, you use pattern to train a dog, but you have to know when to deviate from the pattern to make the behavior solid. Yeah. What I mean by that is it might be bark, bark, bark, oh, no bite, I'm going to leave. Okay.

Because I always get bite on the third bark. So you want to build up the tolerance, you know, the time. the length and all that. So the dog stays at that odor because it might come up in a real search where, you know, you want to make sure the guy's there. Like you're calling out SWAT. You got all these resources. You really want to make sure that guy's going to be there.

So there's not a reason. There's not like a legal reason. I thought the dog would need to bark. No. And like, as a way to like announce itself to the suspect so the suspect couldn't like come at you legally. Sure. Sure.

And sometimes you can bring them back and have the dog bark up. You know, but if your dog barked, you know, but if your dog bark at a door, we're going to de-escalate. We're going to call him back in a real search. Uh-huh. And we're going to order the guy out. Got it. And we're going to do it several times.

In fact, with LA, I'm not sure about some of the other departments, but even the departments I work with, if a guy is in a shed and a dog is solid, he's barking, and he just shot, you know, let's say he just shot a cop or murdered somebody. Um, time's on your side. You know, you don't need to make an entrance into there. Call your dog back, surround it, treat it like a barricade. Then you have all these other tools you can bring in. You can 40 millimeter gas it, whatever.

But there's no, there's no rush to go in. And that would be my training. Yeah. Because you're going to hit on that. It's like, you know, there's been a lot of lawsuits out there where guys, you know, they cowboy their way in and then they, they actually, um, kind of make a shooting happen, you know, because. And that's, that goes into like, why use a canine, you know, I can just get a into this a little bit back in a day when um canines on l.A. were still kind of new and there was a

we were having an issue with our use of forest division and they were teaching a lot of how to chase a suspect how to chase how to pie a corner how to wait be safe all that stuff and I watched it and the sergeant was doing it was a great guy very good instructor but I'm coming from another world you know I'm coming from canine so I'm not teaching how to chase a guy I want to teach how to contain. So you're not going to catch people if you're chasing them. Unless you can, unless you're an athlete, you can run the guy down within the first 20, 30 yards. He's gone.

If you're doing it safely. Because when you're chasing an armed suspect or potentially, that guy cuts a corner, you're not going to cut the corner. You're going to buy that corner slow and make sure he's not going to ambush you. Or you're going to get shot maybe. So if you're teaching, if you're chasing him properly, he's going to gain ground on you all the time because he doesn't have to worry about anything. Yeah. So why not back off and contain the guy?

So we would teach like, hey, if you can't run this guy down quick and, you know, your average patrol cop, you're in the car, it's cold, it's, you're calm, you've been just had code seven, you just had something to eat, you've been relaxed. And now this guy, this athletic suspect, boom, is running and you're coming out with 40 pounds of gear on you, you get hurt, you're going to get sick, you're going to rip your hamstring, whatever. it happens all the time. So contain this guy. So the city of LA, the way the cops are trained is to contain. And it's phenomenal. People across the country can't even believe sometimes are a find ratio. Like contain them and let them settle in.

Yeah. And deescalate. And the way I sold to the apartment, I go, hey, look, you want to get your use of force capers down, your use of force incidences where it's an investigation. If you're going to chase somebody to run them down, there's going to be use of force. You know, you're going to tackle the guy. It could be a fight. Everybody gets hurt, suspect gets hurt, boom.

If you want to de-escalate that, contain this guy. Plus, it's safer, right? You give that chance, that suspect, a chance to de-escalate. And you're going to catch them. So what I'm getting at, when I was on a unit, we had about a 50%, 40-50% find ratio on containment. Not too bad. And I was talking to one of the, Algren, one of the chief trainer on LAPD now,

and they supposedly have like a 70 to 75% find ratio. That means every time a perimeter is set, that's the odds are catching somebody. And it's not because of the canine. It's because of the perimeter units are locking these guys in. Got it. Like when you see a pursuit on TV and you've got, you know, the old thing used to be, and still you'll see it on TV, you got primary suspect traveling at a high rate of speed, and you got seven cars behind them.

Yeah. That's stupid. Because your seventh car is not doing anything. So you're going through this neighborhood with a big daisy chain chasing that guy. What our guys will do in other departments. Like the final chase scene in blues brother. It's like, you know, there's a, remember that thing called the Animal Planet? There was Attenborough, whatever, doing an iteration. Yeah.

And he was doing it. They had some great footage, maybe a drone. I don't know what they had. But it was, they were filming the, those African hunting dogs. Okay. There were a certain breed out there and they work in big packs, not like wolves. They're like 30 of them. Okay.

And they had them chasing a deer and it was just like I train or we train. They had about three or four of them chasing this deer and then they had the group splitting off. Got it. So they had a rolling containment. So by the time they surrounded this thing, the deer ended up going into the water, but they had them corralled. Yeah. Because the deer had nowhere to go. Now they would have been all right here.

He's got open space. left and right. I understand. But that's a natural thing that they developed, you know, without, you know, just beautiful, right? So instead of seven cop cars chasing the guys spread out. Yeah, well, an airship, a good airship in us, well, we can tell when a guy is going, like the airship will say, okay, you know, his B advise, he's slowing down. I think he's looking for a place to bail because he's in a friendly area now. He's like in his own territory, unless he's like doing some, like, let's say a south end guy in 77th, is, he's, he's, capering in West LA by Beverly Hills he's gonna he's gonna bail quick because he's out of his

territory right he's got to get out of the car quick because he knows there's going to be a containment so he's not going to go very long but when you get in a pursuit in 77th he's going to stay in that car because he's going to go to an area that he knows and maybe get into a friendly so there's a big whole different mindset but um without being said the airship will say okay he's slowing down units be aware that start setting up the containment now any units to the left and right. So we'll have like the primary unit, secondary unit, maybe a third unit, everybody else is out here.

So when that guy bails, we've already got units here and here. So we lock him in. Yeah. He's not going anywhere. Yeah. And then your dog comes in and does the detail. Yeah, the fine ratio just goes up because these guys are thinking containment and not chasing. Yeah.

It's a whole different mindset. And I tried. And, you know, like there's some of the apartments I work with like in Texas and great guys, they got some good dogs. I got, in fact, one of the guys in Texas, you, Chris Mori, runs a, for Harris County, they run 20 dogs. And he's frustrated because he knows all these tactics and he's getting into the off-leash thing like I teach him, taught him. But they just don't have the resources like that. And they do a lot of tracking.

They just, they don't have that many airships because you need all that stuff. And I feel bad for some of the smaller agencies because you can really lock these guys down with a good airship. But they're using a lot of drones now. Drones are coming in real handy. These big drones, you know, like the size of this couch. Yeah. You know, these guys are operating them and it's beautiful what they can do with them. So where do most of the, so you're saying that like you're still involved in dogs and dog training.

Yeah. Most of these dogs are coming out of Europe. Yeah. Yeah. Most of them are. What is, why is that? Why is the, why is the center of this kind of apprehension dog coming out of Europe? It just always has.

I mean, there's some breeders out here. and they've done some breeding. In fact, one of the companies I work is Spectrum Canine. They bred a duchy that we got for San Pablo. And they bred that dog. And that dog is just tearing it up. Great dog. But they know how to breathe.

They know how to bring the dog up properly. Because it's a whole process. What countries in Europe are big into this? You know, you got hungry, Turkey, Slovakia, France, Holland, and Germany. Germany used to be bigger because a lot of the dogs out of there were coming where they were shepherds. Okay. But some of the more desired breeds that seems to have really gone toward the mouths and the Dutch shepherds.

Got it. What's one of these dogs worth coming out of preliminary training? When I came on a job, we were picking up dogs for three, 3, 3,500. Now you're talking about 13,000, maybe 15 grand. And that's for a dog, which is basic. training basic training yeah and some want more if they include some kind of training with it but yeah they're expensive and then you also you know you want to work like i used to work with a vendor von lick kennels out of indiana kennelick leder rent it and they get they were getting hundreds

of dogs a year hundreds it's facilities in indiana we go there i take my guys i'd get a hotel stay there for like three or four days test dogs um another one elder is keithers keiths In Riverside, they get a lot of good dogs too. But, you know, like my trainer told me once, he says, where do you find a good dog? You find a good dog where a good dog is. I mean, you have to keep your eyes on them. But the problem is you want a vendor you can trust so you don't waste your time. You also want a guarantee because you could have three months into the dog and things start happening medically or whatever.

So you want that guarantee that, you know. But something that I learned kind of the hard way, when I was working, as a head trainer in LA, you, I don't know, get a little complacent, maybe a little sloppy because you have all this time. And I had a tendency sometime, not always, but, and a dog's not perfect, but I can make him work. Okay. And then I paid the price for that because, you know, maybe I can make him work,

but he's got to go to that handler and he's got to continue to make them work. Got it. And I learned that, you know, just through. You learn to focus on perfect dogs. Exactly. I learned to be greedy. And I learned I learned to fly out to Indiana or go to Riverside or wherever I'm going and spend two days training and go, well, you don't have anything for me.

I'm leaving. But sometimes when you do that, the guy will go, well, wait a minute. I got one dog you didn't see. I saved him for special forces. But if you really want to see him, I'll show him. He'll bring him out and I'll go, you wasted three of my days, wrap them up. Of course I want him. You know, you were hiding them for.

somebody else because a vendor will sell you what you'll buy. Got it. There's not anything against vendors. You know, they, they'll help you to a certain point, but their job is to sell dogs. Yeah. You know, so you don't want to waste your time. Like, if you look, if you think about bird hunters, do you think that like, would your recommendation to people training bird dogs or duck dogs, whatever, would your recommendation

be that same thing? Like, don't waste time on imperfection. 100%. In fact, uh, huh, there was, um, you know, um, there was, um, you know, um, You know, during the after 9-11, that got really big into the SSD dogs and some of the dogs that were looking for bombs. And they used that same method that the bird dogs do. You know, I did some training with the Marines on it,

and they were at Camp Pendleton. I was down there training with them doing a patrol dog class, but they brought in some of their SSD dogs. And, yeah, they were, I learned a lot on that because we weren't really into that. And they would contract these dogs out to certain, organizations that made a lot of money they were charging departments like caught 40 grand for a dog you know for the training and everything but they were good dogs they were taught to hand signal

go straight out get older turn around face do left and right um some of these guys in the marines were actually using um communication devices strapped to their callers so they could talk to them through that got it and uh yeah they were fighting bombs and all that because that would they were They were dogs that were taught to find ground, ground explosives. Yeah. So that's all they did. Got it. They did a good job.

What's your take on these services that, uh, you know, these people now, you get these people buying these like high in, like kind of like executive dogs, you know? Right. It's supposed to be like these, these like, souped up dogs meant to protect you and your family. Do you buy that? Yeah. Well, here's the problem with that. You can, anybody can.

purchase a dog that's going to take care of business. But at the same time, that dog might get you in real trouble, right? I mean, for real dog, a dog that's really going to take somebody down, you better, you better, you better go as much, you better go through as much training as that dog went through to handle that dog. Okay. And really know the, it's like having a weapon, right? I mean, you know, you're, you just want to hand somebody a gun.

You teach them out of shoot. And you also want to teach them about liability, risk management because you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. Yeah. And my thing. Someone walking around with some like some dog that means business when he attacks a person. Or this, he might look really good in the equipment and the bite suit and the muzzle, but will he really bite somebody?

Because that's what we do. That's the problem of police work. You know, because besides the muzzle work and the civil fines that I talked about, we do undergarments. We do prosthetics, you know, which is like the fake arms. You know, we teach a dog to bite different services so that we throw a myriad of things at them so that generalization occurs. That means that whatever that guy offers you, you're going to bite it. You're not going to freak out over it or release it or have some kind of problem with it.

I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind and now got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you I'm fired up.

Well, anyway, right now we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway, and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Bonelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light, and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. one lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt

in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your buddies or family members. Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF Gear, and the Me Eaters store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered is easy.

Just head over to the First Light contest page at Firstlight.com. fill out the entry form and you're in. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2020. So you got all day that day.

But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble, gobble. You know what's funny about that, man, is when you set up electronic predator. callers. Right. It's so interesting to watch when a coyote comes in where I've seen cats come in, when they hit that thing, how quickly they know that that doesn't feel like what it was supposed to feel like.

Right. I mean, they, they like back, they, they hate it. But I bet you have some dogs that bustled right through it. No, not usually. I've seen, really, like, with coyotes, once they make contact with, that they know it's like a little decoy right that's interesting they know that that's not what they were at like just the feel of it the bite feel the way it feels on their paws the way it feels on their body they like hit it they're out the door that's that's a that's a good example yeah yeah

like they're like that ain't what i thought it was right and we've we've had that you know we've had that in fact uh yeah my my dog and i was a brand new handler and he was in a where we were supposed to bite. And he went in there and it was a fine, it was still fine and bark, but it escalated to a situation where the guy needed to get bit. He got aggressive.

And he went in and he nammed him and then he backed off. And I'm a new handler and I'm like, I'm thinking, and my dog's hard. He's doing all the stuff that we did, right? And my trainer, Donio O'Neill, I come out and go, my dog's broken. What happened?

And I was one of those guys, I got to be the best. That's just me. I mean, I put in tons of training and anything I do, I want to be really good at it. So I'm like, I want the best dog and this is pissing me off. And lo and behold, he says, don't worry about it. Just like I would tell a new handler now, we'll fix it. Not a big deal. So we did a whole lot of stuff.

Muzzle. We didn't have an undergarments back then or prosthetics. But we did a lot of things to civil him up and to get him that way. Yeah. And the next apprehension that was required of him, he did a great job. He went for it. And after that, after that, because he was such a strong biter, and he had this natural reflex of biting and shaking.

Uh-huh. And so I had to have really good control over him because he was doing a lot of damage. And there's a thing called the 13th floor, you know, if I should even be getting into this, but where the guy is submitted to a hospital. It's a jail ward, but it's a hospital. Good. And a lot of his bites were turning into that. And the sergeant's looking at me like, what are you doing?

Are you like leaving him on a bite forever? I go, no, I'm not. I mean, he's coming right off. So they actually assigned a seasoned handler with me to keep an eye on me. I'm brand new, you know, and I'm like, because this dog's doing too much damage. Yeah. So, and I'm like, he's a great dog, but he's like, I'm calling him right off. like boom a couple seconds and then he saw an apprehension and uh sal looks at me he says you got

better control anybody in a unit he says your dog's popping right off he just bites hard yeah so i had to realize that and and you know do things accordingly i mean i have to maintain really good control over them it was an interesting point you raised a minute ago when i was talking about these guys people i've got various buddies of mine talk about these dudes that like make these uh defense dogs. It's an interesting point you make that if you're selling someone a dog that's supposed to protect their family, how do you ever really know? That's right.

You've only had them be in training until you take them out to attack someone. 100%. You could have that thing sitting around for five years thinking it's some big bad attack dog, but that dog has never attacked anybody. Right. And that's my whole thing. You know, that brings me an issue. It's like an interesting idea.

That brings me in this. You don't know, dude. Yeah, here's what's relatable to that. There was a time when the guys in the SWAT unit, we weren't getting along very well with SWAT. There was a lot of egos going on. Now, when I left, we're golden. We like love each other.

We work together with them. But there was like a competition thing, you know, canine is getting all these bodies. They're doing all this stuff. And that's a SWAT caper. That's not a canine caper. And this kind of silly stuff. So we had to get through that.

But as they developed, for some reason, they started doing some work with Delta and some of these other, you know, high speed units. Because, you know, LAPD SWAT's great. They're like one of the best in the country. But they're doing all this advanced stuff all the time. And Delta, their teams are married with a canine guy. Like LASO, Los Angeles County Sheriff's, their canines are part of SWAT. Okay. LAPD, SWAT and K9 are different, different entities.

So we don't work together per se like that. We do train together. We do work together, but we're not married up like that. It's not like in the military. Yeah, not military or like LASO, when they get a SWAT call, canines there all the time. I see. With us, it's going to be a special event. Yep. So yeah, with that being said, um, after they did this training with Delta, they says, oh, we want a SWAT dog. This kind of goes into what you're saying.

Oh, what's a SWAT dog? All of our dogs are SWAT dogs. Our dogs are always there for you, you know. And we'll always pick a certain dog that might be better for a certain incident, right? I mean, if I need a bigger, more powerful dog at this certain location. But I'm not understanding what you're saying. Who was saying they wanted a SWAT dog? Our SWAT unit. Your SWAT unit wanted a SWAT.

Our SWAT. I wanted a specific SWAT dog assigned a SWAT. That they picked up off from the Delta guys. Yes. Okay. And I'm thinking, and I knew it was coming. And I thought, well, I go, the only, I go, they wanted to go in training and all that. I said, well, the reason that our dog.

dogs or SWAT dogs is because they've been out in the street for a year and most of them had about 40, 50 apprehensions already. Now, for you to have a SWAT dog that's going to prove you right and not fail you when everything's on the line, how are you going to make that happen? You've got to be a handler for a while. So you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Our dogs are going to take care of business. We're going to train with you.

We're going to do it. But they wanted that SWAT dog thing and it kind of goes in line with he's not proven. You know, I can do all the training in the world. Here's your SWAT dog. It looks great out in the field, muzzle work, bite work, whatever. But is you really going to take care of business? This is the thing that this is the thing I find with friends of mine that have hunting dogs. Is you got, there's like the hunting dogs that it's just all training. It's like putting pen raised birds out and little meadows and the dog knows he's going to find something in 10 seconds, right? It's like, that's all that dog ever lived.

And then you got dogs that have been hunting for real. Yep. And whenever I hear about all my field trial this and field try that, I just like, I don't, I don't care. Right. I don't care. 100%. Like the dog that's been out doing the real deal stuff in the real world, that's interesting.

Right. Well, you know, we had the same thing. I mean, there's like a lot of canine trials all over the place. Not all over, but, you know, they, and our guys didn't really compare. compete very much in them. Sometimes they would. And they may not even do very well in them, but they're competing against Dodd has maybe had one bite and they're five years in the job. And now you're competing with this guy that's had like 30, 40 in the year or 50 or more, whatever. You know, I had 121 bodies one year. That's a lot of, that's a lot of searching.

Wow. In our heyday. And back in the day, 40% of them got bit. That would, is standard in the industry. Now that will get you fired. You know, now the bait ratio is looked at. So you had a year you caught 120 people in 40 bytes. Yeah. Yeah. What like this kind of final, finalish question here.

What does the dog getting out of this? Do I mean like, like what drives that dog to want to catch a person? Well, it starts from this little toy here. that's a piece of prey object. I'm just it. It's just a toy. Just a con with a rope and I use a lot of it. And, you know, this is what we train.

Okay. I mean, it's not only it, but it's the natural instinct, the predatory. And most dogs have it. Even your little poochy dogs, they have some kind of prey in them, you know, but some of them obviously have a lot more genetically predisposed for all that. Yeah. You know, that's like the detection dog, they do everything for this. This is their reward system, which would be a tennis ball or a Kong, a Jew toy, whatever it might be, but the dog's hooked on this.

And, you know, when he bites a man, it's just a bigger version of this. Really? You know. It's not like he's like, because, yeah, he's got no concept of justice. No, not at all. I mean, although there is something to say about protection of the handler and all that. Oh, you think, okay, that's a factor. I think there is some of that.

And I'm not so sure how much with every police dog, but for a home dog, let's say, you're going to see some of that. Like I saw it in my mouth. Like we talked about, I can't, he's not totally the most trustable dog. He's got a lot of guardiness in him and he's very guardy to the family. I see. And once I get somebody to know him, he's totally cool. But I found out the hard way that I got to watch him.

So one of your apprehension dogs could develop a professional, like, or develop a personal relationship where they are in some part motivated. Protecting their handler. It's a really good question because the way that I preach to guys, and this is, you can tell them all day long, it says, you know, for the most part, this is a working dog and he's not a pet. And the worst thing you can do, really, I think,

is to treat him totally like a pet. First of all, you want to contain that drive, the dog stays in the kennel when it's working. And of course, you want to bring him out and socialize him and all that. But when he becomes too much of a family dog, there's been a lot of times when that's bite him, but because a dog will perceive something, you know, maybe a neighbor will come over and do something or move or make some kind of furtive movement.

And next thing you know, he gets grabbed by this police dog and the lawsuit happens. Yeah. And I've got stories about that. So you've got to be careful about that stuff, you know. I mean, it's safer just to treat him what he is. He's a police dog. He goes in the kennel. He goes to work.

Days off, bring him out, run him around, have fun with him. play with them, do some toy work with him, whatever. But he's, his job is to catch bad guys. Yeah. And some dogs, you want to. That dog, you don't, the dog's not angry when it goes at somebody. Oh, that's a good point. So when you are training a dog to bite in the beginning as a puppy, they're biting out

of fun. You start off, you know, maybe with a jute toy, you know, dogs like, you know, so big, you know, three months old. You got them on a little jute toy. He's having fun. playing with him and he's biting and and that's how you want to bring a dog up you don't want to do what's called like the old sentry dogs where they teach a dog to bite out of aggression and sometimes even out of defense and fear when a bite when a dog is biting out of defense and fear he's but he's

unreliable okay because he's not biting out of fun the aggression will come later you know you want to build aggression to where he's biting out of fight but that's later on that makes sense yeah So you do that too soon, and the dog can be, can be very unstable. Got it. But a dog that's aggressive as a youngster and biting out of fear and anger, you're not going to do it. It's a toy. He's coming at you, biting them. You have them on a leash.

You let him run around the toy in his mouth. You grab it again. You play tug. You work on the bite. You work on the grip. You get all those things. Then you develop into a bigger tug. And as a dog gets older and he has his adult teeth, then you bring in the sleeve.

And then you graduate from the sleeve to the bite suit. And you bring them along that. way you know so by the time he's nine months old he's he's he's like on his way you know he saw he's got a nice bite he's biting for the right reason you know he's not biting out of you know I want to just kill everybody yeah yeah it's a fun thing tug-a-war and all that stuff yeah that makes sense so have you uh did you ever lose a dog do you ever have a dog got shot in the line of duty um I've been around it yeah you know um that that uh quick story I was a new handler I wasn't in the street yet I was still

in training and we had a dog the rottie i was talking about john hall and he was a seasoned handler he'd been in a lot of shootings a lot of what very violent time back then we had a uh it was a traffic stop by two motor cops he pulled two Hispanics over and he's going to give him a ticket but he had no idea they just robbed a bank oh or a store they robbed a store so they're thinking shit. You know, they came out of the car, shots fired, pursue them, help call, and they bail out into a perimeter in West L.A., which is a really high-end area of L.A., and canines call. So we're all the whole units en route. We're, you know, back then we didn't use SWAT. It was everything was patrol. The unit was a lot newer than it, you know, is now. John Hall shows up with his dog, and I think

it was another canine. I was on the other side of the block. searching. And while we're about halfway in, maybe an hour into it, I hear the shots fired go off and the help call comes out and I can hear the shooting going on. And what happened was he went in there and there was a sergeant, a canine sergeant, Mark Mooring, was on his search team as his backup within a couple of patrol cops. The dog entered the garage and then he was ambushed right away. The dog is on the bite. He's already shot in the neck. The dog is. But he's still taking care of business. And now John's having a gunfight with the second suspect. And he gets hit in the hand.

Transitions to his other hand and ends up taking down the suspect. And then Mark Boring shot one of them too. And then Liberty was still on the bite, finally released and just bled out right there. Oh, good. So she died. And that dog was really sad because he raised that dog from a pup. It was one of the dogs he raised from a good breeder. He trained all, you know, did all the training.

We've had dogs stabbed. We had a dog, a really nice dog, apprehend somebody in a bunch of inside of a building, and the guy pulled out a knife and stabbed him. Killed it? Killed him. There was another one. We ended up actually changing policy on this one. Sal Abadaka had a dog in Newton Division, and very sad too.

He had a really good dog. Marco, this dog was a nice dog. A lot of apprehensions, been in gunfights with him. and they had a guy under the crawl space. And then he was wanted for like a burglar or something, like a low-grade felon. He wouldn't come out. And this is when we changed our tactics, you know.

So he sent his dog under the house. Well, the guy was ready for it. And he wrapped himself with an army jacket. He took the bite. He had a screwdriver. And he shanked him behind his head several times. And Sal heard the whining. Dog came off the bite.

He came out. And then he's in his arms like, you know, lay in there. It was kind of neat because the airship, they would never do this today. The airship, now this is a, you know, a rough area of Newton Division, residential area. I think it was like a gauge and it was a 50th in some street, Broadway or something. The airship landed in the middle of the street, picked the dog up and flew him to the vet in West LA. Oh, really? Pretty badass.

Did that dog move? No, he died. Oh, really? Yeah, we all showed up at the vet and Sal's in tears, you know, Tows is a hardcore guy, and he's crying. But they get close to the guys get close to the dogs, man. Yeah, I cried like a baby when my dog passed away at home. He got bloat.

And, uh, had my two boys with me. And I'm like, Jesus, I'm losing my shit. Huh. So, yeah. I know. So what's your business now, man? So I do, um, I do a lot of, you know, I started my business in, like, in 2010. And basically, we were getting,

even before I started my business, we would get called to help other agencies do training. It would be on duty stuff. It was just kind of mundane tactics and stuff like that. But then I noticed as I was training, I couldn't do, when I started my business, I wanted to offer advanced tactical training.

That was kind of my thing. But I soon found out that I couldn't because I started in 2010 because most departments weren't doing anything what we were doing. They weren't doing off lead work. They weren't using the, caller like I use it the collar was more used like a punishment device and not a way to

communicate which and you probably heard that from other guys right in the bird world you know not using the caller properly causing all kinds of issues there's a lot of that going on so I developed the knee collar course a five-day course for units to get the dogs to work off lead and do it the right way give them directions from a collar yeah and just I got to the point where I developed the class over a period of time through some trials and tribulations that I got a really solid class now that I can take 10 guys and get them pretty much going as long as they're certified in the street.

So that's primarily what I do, but I also have contracts with a few agencies that I do their maintenance training. Okay. And, uh, but I'm slowing down. You know, I'm pushing 69 now and my wife wants me to not be gone so much. Yeah.

You don't deal in dogs. You don't buy and sell dogs. I have, I don't do that. I have done some patrol classes, but I'm pretty excited. expensive so it's really not you know for for my time they can probably do a better job going to a vendor got it in getting their patrol done in a group of guys yeah you know what's the name of your how do you work just under dog roller a tactical canine tactical can't tactical can tactical can't tactical canine and yeah it's going good it's been a great it's been a great career great job and I love what I'm doing so and you and just to be clear you keep a couple pet dogs around and I keep a couple of pet dogs around yeah they're pain in the butt but yeah trying to do a little more traveling now and

all that stuff but and i got i brought two other guys on that are going to be doing a lot more work so i can feel feel more stuff guys that i trust yeah that are going to do the same thing i do you ever think about raising a bird dog uh no but i've worked with them um it's pretty interesting yeah i'd be interested to see if like i'd be interested to see if you you know if you worked with the bird dog what the result would be yeah I think a lot of the concepts are probably, and I've worked with them with the Marines. I learned a lot how they worked them. In fact, I, oh, doing the bomb dogs.

Doing the bomb dogs. And we talked a lot about that. Like, here's a quick story. When I first saw them working in Pendleton, then I did some work in Camp Lejeune. But they were doing, what they were doing is we're teaching a dog to go out and do the left and right hand scene those commands, dog turned around sit, cast them left and right, about 150, 100 meters out. And they were using a reward system.

And the reward system, Tritronics used to make, before it became Garmin, they used to make a bird launcher. Or, yeah, what it would do is it would, it would be, you could hide it, put the bird in there in a cage, remotely press it, it, bird, bird comes out. You know, bird bird, bird. Yeah, bird launcher. And for, I guess, the bird dog guys were using it. Well, they took that same concept, and they would put a toy in there. Okay.

All right. So the bomb motor is over here. that's hidden over here. So the dog were alert, passive alert, because there's a bomb, they were just sit there and wait, and then boom, pay them. Toy goes up in the area, you get paid. So that's the marker and all that.

I'm watching them do this. I go, well, you know, do you have any other method of paying? I said, is that, is that the marker? You guys call it paying, like giving him payment. You're paying them, yeah. Pay the dog, pay the dog, you know, especially in detection, pay him. He's on odor, throw the ball on top of his head.

Yeah. So he gets the marker. So he goes, oh, yeah. yeah, yeah, it works great. I go, well, I see a problem. I said, your dogs are alerting on the bird launcher because of the picture, right? Uh-huh. Oh, no, no.

I go, let's do an experiment. I go, put that bird launcher 30 yards over here or 20 yards away from the bomb, the source, which is what you want to find. And every one of those fuckers, they went in and they fringed and they got the bomb odor, but they left it. and finaled on the bird launcher. Is that right? Because they know.

Yeah. So I said, you know, you've got to, you've got to vary everything, right? Now, one way to counter it, which they actually do now is if you had like 10 bird launchers and have the bomb motor here so that they can't just find one, they, the primary scent is going to be the, the bomb motor. And there's a lot of, a lot of things that guys do where they, they mess things up like that. Yeah. They don't realize that they use one thing to bridge something, but then it costs them in another way.

You know what I mean? Oh, for sure, yeah. And part of your work is coming in and troubleshoot. Yeah, you can troubleshoot that stuff. Exactly. Sometimes handlers don't even know. I mean, simple little things like marking behavior. I mean, you know, you'll get, I see a dog doing a guy doing obedience with a dog.

And every time he puts him on a sit, he sits and he jumps up in his face. And I said, well, you don't want him on a solid down, right? You don't want that to happen. but what he does is what he does is i watched him working him the dog would sit and then every time he sits he pays him with a toy to jump up and well that's when he's doing so stop get rid of that ball too much ballwork too that's another thing so you can identify things like that they don't even know i even told guys when i was working a dog um just to drop your ego i says look i got a problem with this dog what am i doing to cause this and it says you know Doug

you're doing X, Y, and Z. Really? I didn't even realize it, you know? So you just got to drop the ego and figure out that, you know, you're doing something innately that you're not even paying attention to that is causing a bad, a bad reward for the dog or a bad marker. Yeah. So sometimes it's good for people that evaluate you, you know.

Like we're doing e-collar work and we have this out here. And, you know, you'll see dogs really quick. It's like in a dark environment and they'll pick up on it. and they'll get maybe not even get hit with the stimulation but when you call them off the bite they're going to the guy holding the collar really yeah so then you got to hide it or everybody has a God, they just tune into weird, not weird stuff. They're just perceptive, man. You paint that picture and you got to be careful what picture you're painting. You always got to be aware of that, you know, and a new handler has a hard time because, you know, I mean, I've trained thousands and thousands of dogs.

And that's why they hire me because I can see those things right away. Uh-huh. And, but it wasn't always that way, you know, it just took a lot of experience. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Well, Doug Roller, thanks for coming on the show, man. A pleasure.

Thank you for having me. And thank you all the people I know out there. Well, I bet you're going to get some emails, people wondering. I'm going to ask you a bunch of dog questions, man. Well, it's been a pleasure. It's been pleasure meeting you, and especially a shout out to the Task Force Heroes. Yeah. That's how we met.

Shane Yates, yeah. In the House Force Heroes, Shane Yates. Well, Task Force Heroes, Shane Yates. Shane Yates is a great job. You know, my buddy, J.D., that got me to go. God bless you. That's coming on, man. All right.

Thank you. Ohoie, Turkey Hunters. Turkey Week is on now at the Meat Eat store. To help you get ready this spring, we've rounded up some of our favorite gear for chasing goblers from Miriams out west to hard goblin Easterns. We've got brand new meat eater logo wear and seasonings, turkey calls from Phelps, Camel from First Light, decoys from DSD, packs and accessories from FHF gear, and a whole lot more. Select products are up to 20% off. From the field to the kitchen, everything you need this spring is

all in one place. We've also teamed up with First Light to create the ultimate spring turkey giveaway worth over $13,000. From now until Sunday, you get double entries for every $25 spent. That's 20 entries for every $25 spent at themeatere Store.com. Check it out now through April 5th at store.com.com. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human