We're here for the famous Boneyard where we hide scented
items for the dogs that compete in America's Top Dog
I'm Mike Goosby. I'm a Sergeant and Cheif Trainer of Los Angeles
Police Department Metropolitan Division of K9's. I'm standing
here in front of the famous Boneyard with Ofc. Edgar and his
K9 Vader
Tug of war! Tug of war! Vader! Good boy! Good boy! Hup! Hup!
I'm gonna give you guys a quick lesson on how these dogs
work inside the scent detection room and how they find the
narcotics or the guns or the human scent thats being hid from
them. So the way it starts off basically is you start off with
a box drill. You have your blank boxes and you have your hot
boxes, ususally a treat or a toy. In this case, this is
Vader's favorite toy. So we take Vader's toy, we put it in the
box, and then Edgar takes Vader, and he works him along the blank
boxes and when Vader comes to the hot box so to speak and he
he alerts to the hot box then we start learning that Vader
associates the scent with that box. So Edgar do us a favor
You go ahead and start waling Vader across the boxes for
us please.
So you see a direct change in Vader's behavior and how
interested he is in this box because he associates that box
with his toy. So we're gonna go ahead and let Vader out the box
his toy. Alright now, we know that Vader knows how to work the
boxes and knows how to work scent. So what we're gonna do
now is we're gonna teach him how to associate that toy with a
certain odor, a target odor so to speak. So I'm gonna grab a
bag of ammunition here. So Vader's been trained on
detecting gunfire, gunfire residue, ammunition, guns so you
take the resdue of the spent shell casings and we're now
gonna associate these and tie them together. So now the target
odor is in there with Vader's toy and this takes a little time
But we're gonna fast forward for you. So now Vader works the
the boxes and now he's hitting on the target odor as well as
his toy.
As you see, he is really associating this odor with his
toy. So now we will still put the target odor in the box.
Vader's toy is no longer in the boxes. Edgars gonna now go ahead
and work Vader on the boxes again, and Vader should hit on
the target odor now, instead of his toy being there.
When he alerts to the target odor and we know he's right, we
pay him with his toy so now he's self associating his toy with
this target odor. So now that the dog has been kind of what we
call in the K9 community imprinted on the scent of
gunpowder or smokeless powder or black powder, we will now start
advancing Vader's training. We'll take these boxes, we'll
put them in to corners of a room now, so now he's moving to a
new environment. But he still has something he's very
familiar with, being these scent boxes. We now work the room in a
systematic detailed manner until Vader hits on the box. Once he
hits on the box, we again reward him with his toy. And pretty
soon we start moving the boxes out of the room but putting the
scent item in the room
And now Vader is associating the scent to scent source. And that
scent source is gonna give him his toy. And now we have a
trained detection dog that we can deploy in the field.