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dogs in the news:

Meet Eureka County Nevada Sheriff's Office newest addition. Deputy Bruce. Bruce is handled by Sgt Grant Case. Bruce was trained by Jim Malec here at A Courteous Canine. Here is the result of Grant and Bruce's first search, 3 Pounds of marijuana! Great Job!!!

This disturbing story is from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. This is one reason we never endorse the use of invisible fences, tethering or letting your companion free range of the yard unattended.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Pit bulls found hanged in owner's backyard

Friday, July 28, 2006

P-I STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES

LYNNWOOD -- Two pit bulls were found hanged Thursday in a Lynnwood resident's backyard, and police were investigating whether the crime was connected to another animal cruelty case last month, Lynnwood police reported.

The dog owner awoke to hear his dogs barking and yelping about 2 a.m. in the 17900 block of 33rd Place West. He went outside to see his pets, Peanut and Wiggles, hanging, dead, from his fence with ropes tied around their necks, police said.

Police still were investigating a June 28 case in which an injured pit bull was found in an apartment Dumpster in the 19800 block of 50th Avenue West. A passer-by discovered the animal, which was treated at a Lynnwood animal hospital and is now at a foster home, police said.

Anyone with information is urged to call Lynnwood police Detective Elizabeth Post at 425-744-6900.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Marine dog handlers in Iraq mourn death of colleague
Sgt. Adam L. Cann killed in suicide blast in Ramadi

By Monte Morin, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, January 9, 2006

Courtesy of Joseph Manning
Marine Sgt. Adam L. Cann, who was killed in a suicide attack in Ramadi on Thursday, is remembered by fellow Marines as a consummate professional. “I never met a better Marine doing what he did,” one of his fellow dog handlers recalled.

RAMADI, Iraq — Marine Sgt. Adam L. Cann had less than two months to go before he finished his second tour in Iraq, and the 23-year-old military dog handler told friends that he and his trusty German Shepherd, Bruno, would be right back for a third.

“He loved it out here,” said fellow Marine dog handler Cpl. Allen Swartwoudt, 27, of Austin, Texas. “He was looking forward to coming back immediately.”

Cann, a native of Davie, Fla., died Thursday as he was helping to control crowds outside of an Iraqi police recruitment and screening center at the sprawling Ramadi Glass Factory. He was attached to the 2nd Military Police Battalion, 2nd Force Services Support Group, the Marine Corps said.

A disturbance had broken out among hundreds of police volunteers late Thursday morning after warning shots were fired at an approaching vehicle. Cann, Bruno and two other dog handlers and their hounds had just helped to restore order before a suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest, killing Cann, Army Lt. Col. Michael E. McLaughlin, 27 Iraqi police volunteers and two Iraqi army soldiers.

The blast also injured the two other dog handlers and their dogs.

Bruno suffered injuries as well. He will be flown back to the U.S. for treatment and returned to service if he fully recovers.

On Sunday, friends described Cann as a dedicated and knowledgeable dog handler who could never sit for very long inside camp. He was happiest when he and his dog were outside the wire, hard at work, they said.

“He did it for the guy next to him,” said Cpl. Brian Treille, 22, another dog handler from Hardin, Texas. “He was always about being out there with the fellas. He didn’t have to come out here. He could have been a trainer back home.”

While military dog handlers back in the U.S. usually place their dogs in kennels for the evening, handlers in Iraq live with their animals full time. “They’re kind of like house pets — they sleep on your bed, you feed them beef jerky,” Swartwoudt said.

In Cann’s case, his relationship was even closer. He had worked with Bruno for five or six years, including a tour in Afghanistan. “He’d been with Bruno for quite a while,” Treille said.

Military dog handlers in Iraq are a small but close-knit group, and word of Cann’s death left them stunned. Their mission is to assist in crowd control and raids and to sniff out explosives.

Cann’s friends said that up until recently, their tours had been without serious injury or death. This deployment, though, has been different. In addition to Cann’s death, another dog handler was shot by a sniper two months ago. He survived.

“Because there are only a few of us, it seems improbable or unlikely this would happen to any of us,” Swartwoudt said. “It seems like we do our job and go home.”

Treille and Swartwoudt were planning a memorial service for Jan. 14. On a laptop computer, they clicked through photos of Cann and Bruno on missions and playing around.

Cann told them that when he finished with the Marines, he was considered moving back to Florida to open up a restaurant with his brother — a bar and grill.

Up until a few days ago, though, Cann’s retirement from K-9 operations seemed a long way off.

“He loved dog training,” Trielle said. “He took it very seriously. I’ve never met a better Marine doing what he did.”

Physician tests dogs' potential as cancer alert system

By Cheryl Clark
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

May 24, 2005

NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
Ginger waited for her reward for finding the right specimen during a demonstration at the home of Dr. Robert Gordon.

"Ginger! Find Fred!" shouted Scripps Clinic gynecologist Robert Gordon as his Chihuahua scampered along a line of seven small cups of urine.

After getting a whiff of each, Ginger plunked down beside No. 5. Gordon waited a few seconds to see if the dog would stay, then yelled "Yes!" in a cheering voice.

Ginger correctly selected the cup from a patient with prostate cancer, dismissing specimens from healthy volunteers.

Gordon reached into a pocket for her reward: a piece of chicken.

Ginger didn't always pick the right cup, but the little dog got it right more than half the time on her first pass. On average, she has sustained that accuracy rate during 250 training sessions, Gordon said.

Under way for more than a year, Gordon's Find "Fred" project – his euphemism for a cancer patient – has evolved into a Scripps-approved clinical trial to see if dogs can be trained to detect early signs of human cancer through odor signatures of the disease.

A former flight surgeon in Vietnam who trained at what is now Scripps Mercy Hospital, Gordon, 64, has spent 35 years as a San Diego gynecologist. Too frequently, he said, cancers are diagnosed too late.

"If dogs' noses can find drugs, bombs, missing persons, leaks, smoke, cadavers and chemicals, why not see if they can find whether certain cancers might give off distinct odors as well?" he said. A dog's nose is a thousand times more sensitive than a human's, perhaps equal to or better in its own area than a lot of imaging and other diagnostic tools, he said.

There's evidence that certain solid tumors of the breast, prostate, lung or bladder may discharge volatile or aerosolized compounds such as formaldehyde, benzene or alkanes or a mix and that these are distinguishable from odors caused by inflammation, bleeding or infection due to other health problems, Gordon said.

NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
Carol Belk Schatz prepared samples to be sniffed by her dog, Josie, a golden retriever-poodle cross seen in the background. Schatz is a dog trainer working with Dr. Gordon.

At least that's the theory, which dates back 16 years to a letter from a London dermatologist in The Lancet, a British medical journal, that told of a 44-year-old woman whose dog was sniffing and biting a lesion on her leg.

The woman went to the dermatologist, who diagnosed her with malignant melanoma, a potentially lethal skin cancer.

Gordon had long wondered whether dogs could serve as an early warning system for prostate and breast cancers. He chose these cancers to study, he said, "because they're such common killers."

His dog trainer, Carol Beck Schatz, wanted to know if her goldendoodle, Josie – a golden retriever-poodle cross – could be trained to smell cancer like Ginger does.

With Ginger, a stray obtained from Petco two years ago, Gordon began experiments in his Del Cerro garage.

He recruited cancer patients and healthy volunteers for his study and got approval from Scripps for a trial with human subjects in 2004. Petco donated $7,000, and Gordon's patients, Schatz and others donated an additional $20,000.

In September, the idea that dogs could sniff cancer got another boost from an article in the British Medical Journal. The authors trained dogs for seven months on urine samples taken from patients with bladder cancer, healthy people and patients with other diseases. On the final test, the six dogs distinguished the groups with 41 percent accuracy.

The British report "provides the first piece of experimental evidence to show that dogs can detect cancer by olfactory means more successfully than would be expected by chance alone," its authors wrote.

NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
Dr. Robert Gordon discussed his work with detection of human cancers.

In San Diego, Gordon's idea gained momentum with 12 dogs of mixed and pure breeds. The dogs' trainers use urine from healthy volunteers and patients whose breast or prostate cancer has been confirmed by biopsy.

"There's still a lot of 'ifs' here," Gordon said, . There are also concerns about whether the researchers' methods are scientifically valid.

"One of the things we're fearful of is that the dogs are just memorizing a particular urine smell" because the team has a limited supply of cancer specimens and is using the same ones repeatedly, he acknowledged.

Another question is whether the dogs are responding to unconscious body movements or muscle tension they perceive in their owners when they get near the correct specimen.

In the early 1900s, a Mr. Van Osten touted the ability of his horse, Clever Hans, to do arithmetic. When asked the sum of 3 and 2, Hans would stamp his foot five times. But questions arose because he couldn't get it right when his owner wasn't in the room.

Could the owners of the dogs – consciously or unconsciously – be sending physical signs through muscle tension or quickened heartbeat as the dogs approachthe correct specimen?

Lawrence Myers, Gordon's collaborator and a professor of veterinary medicine at Auburn University in Alabama, specializes in behavior and sensory function in detector dogs. He said Gordon's work still has to pass a critical test.

"Unless it's done as a double blind study, in which the trainer doesn't know the the correct answer, it doesn't count," Myers said. "Otherwise there's still a very real possibility that there was unintentional cueing. You can demonstrate this fairly readily even among people who think they're being oh so very careful – their body tension, a low sound, anything of that sort."

Some other potential sources of bias were recognized early on. For instance, Gordon realized he was marking the specimens from cancer patients with a different color and more numbers than he marked those from healthy volunteers.

Another concern is whether the scent of the chicken rewards, which Gordon and others handle before they move the specimens for the next run, could be influencing the dogs' selections. Recently, Gordon changed that routine and now uses a metal grip to move the cups.

Of course, a troublesome question remains whether cancer at its various stages conveys the same odor. UCSD urologist Dr. Joseph Schmidt noted that the dogs can detect prostate cancer. The issue is whether they can distinguish the fast-growing, harmful types from the more slowly developing kinds.

Gordon and others are doing gas chromatography tests on the urine samples to identify what the dogs might be sniffing.

"This is all a work in progress," Gordon said.

But he thinks the idea of using dogs has validity. "Some people are trying to develop electronic noses – machines that can sniff and make diagnoses. But no one has improved upon the dog's ability to smell."

The following story is very sad, but graphically illustrates the need for a well trained companion. We advise all potential clients to compare the cost of a well trained companion to the cost of litigation resulting from inappropriate behavior.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Woman awarded $45,000 in cat death

Damages for dog mauling may be feline record

Monday, May 9, 2005

By JESSICA BLANCHARD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

A Seattle woman whose cat was mauled to death by a neighbor's dog was awarded more than $45,000 last week in her wrongful-death lawsuit against the dog's owner, her attorney announced yesterday.

It is likely the largest damage award in the nation relating to the death of a cat, said her attorney, noted animal-law expert Adam Karp.

In the lawsuit, filed in Seattle District Court in November, Paula Roemer alleged that her beloved 12-year-old black-and-white shorthair cat, Yofi, was attacked and killed in her back yard in February 2004 by a black chow chow belonging to her neighbor.

She was so traumatized that she began having sleep disturbances and panic attacks, sank into depression and began smoking heavily, she wrote in a sworn declaration.

"We went to great pains to demonstrate how close she was to Yofi," said Karp, founder of the Washington State Bar Association's Animal Law Section and an adjunct professor of animal law at Seattle University and the University of Washington.

As a result, her compensation for the pet ties the record-high jury award of $30,000 in a California veterinary malpractice suit, Bluestone v. Bergstrom, for a pet's "unique" value, Karp said.

Judge Barbara Linde also awarded $15,000 for Roemer's emotional distress.

Including cremation and counseling costs, the total award came to $45,480.

Given that Roemer had to prove she was emotionally attached to the cat and had suffered tremendously as a result of its death, the amount of the award "doesn't strike me as that unreasonable," said torts expert Louis Wolcher, a law professor at the University of Washington.

Traditionally the law treated pets as personal property, like a car or oven.

But in recent years, the legal community has debated whether animals should have independent status or be considered something more than property.

And while common pets -- as opposed to show animals -- have not had a high economic value, their sentimental value can be very high, Wolcher said.

Now when damages are awarded for a pet's destruction, "you keep the legal fiction that it's property, but you begin to treat it other than something like just a toaster oven," he said.

The death of Roemer's cat was particularly upsetting because she had rescued it during a trip to Israel about 12 years ago, when she found the kitten abandoned and dying on the streets of Yaffo, court documents say.

"I promised Yofi, out loud, every single day of her life, she would be happy and never again hungry, thirsty, and miserable," Roemer wrote. "My heart is tremendously heavy with sorrow and guilt that I could not protect her from this fate."

The night of the attack, Roemer returned from walking her own dog to find the neighbor's chow chow in her backyard garden, biting and shaking her cat. The dog dropped Yofi and attempted to attack another cat of Roemer's, but she was able to throw the cat into the house, according to her sworn declaration.

She herded the dog out of her yard and searched frantically for Yofi. When she found the cat, it was so mangled that she almost couldn't identify it, she wrote in court documents.

Roemer charged that her neighbor had allowed his dogs to run loose repeatedly and had not built a fence as promised. The neighbor lost the suit by default, without defending against it, court records show. And Karp said the man pleaded guilty to negligent control of an animal, a misdemeanor, in connection with the dog's attack. The neighbor could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Karp said the $45,480 award is significant partly because it's the first to indicate that feline companions are as valuable as canines. Americans' tendency to value dogs more than cats "is just completely insane," he said.

"For people who live alone -- they're retired, they're elderly -- this is their family," he said. When their loved one is lost, "the impact is severe."

The fact that the judgment in Roemer's case came from a judge rather than a jury was significant, said Wolcher, the professor.

"Jurors can be expected to be swayed by emotional factors," he said. "But you like to think that judges are more sober."

Whether the judgment will affect future cases is uncertain, Wolcher said. But it will certainly spark interest in the legal community, he said.

And if nothing else, "people are going to make sure they lock up their dogs."

P-I reporter Jessica Blanchard can be reached at 206-448-8322 or jessicablanchard@seattlepi.com