[Music]
not all heroes wear capes
some of them wear collars
[Music]
and to these brave hounds no task is too
rough
here are five canine superheroes here to
save the day
a certified avalanche dog like tally can
do the work
of about 30 rescuers in the same amount
of time
their sense of smell is 10 times greater
than ours and if someone's buried in the
snow or not even buried but just lost in
the woods
the dog can smell their scent coming up
through the snow pack
and tell me where to start digging to
find that person
we are the first responders and a lot of
times if things go
well into our training we can facilitate
that rescue without putting anybody else
in harm's way
and be done quickly and efficiently and
all go home safely
we gotta find somebody i know you want
to find somebody okay
let's go search
my name's hunter mortensen i'm an
avalanche technician here at
breckenridge ski resort with my
ski patrol partner tally and we've been
working here for eight years together
we're really fortunate here at
breckenridge we have six avalanche
rescue dogs on staff
today tally's hearing with her
co-workers and friends is
boudreaux the golden retriever and a up
another
mountain purebred mutt the years of the
big saint bernard and swiss mountain
dog with the barrel under their neck
those dogs are built for the mountains
they're sturdy they're hardy they can do
it but what we're finding is
they don't travel well in the snow and
they're not as fast moving across the
snow and
avalanche rescue is all a matter of time
so we're
looking these days for dogs that are a
little bit on the smaller side a little
more nimble and a little more quick
so the training we start him six to nine
months old
and a lot of it is just basic obedience
and then we start building from the
obedience
into actual hide-and-go-seek type games
and then we build up from there into
big snow caves where we'll bury a person
almost six feet deep
if we have enough snow and then the dog
will start searching and having to find
where that scent's coming up
to play the game and all they're really
looking for is that person who they
think has their toy
oh that sounds good girl
it's about two full years of training to
take your last
certification test for an avalanche
rescue dog and handler
so i'm certified to work with tally
ready my whole last eight years of my
career
have been spent with her every day all
day
when we have to do our thing we're
really dependent on each other
and i couldn't do what i do without her
and so it's an amazing
partnership and i'm really honored and
proud to be a part of
this program and work with a dog like
her
blakely has the most difficult job at
cincinnati zoo he has to play with
babies
all the time
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he's never shown any aggression or
snapped if he gets
upset kind of like any mom would he just
leaves the room
you are so cute my name is don strasser
and we're at the cincinnati zoo and
botanical gardens
blakely is a five-year-old australian
shepherd we got him from a rescue
and i use him in a nursery as a nanny or
a companion dog
this is about you and you're taking a
nap blakely's here
for the main purpose of teaching the
babies the correct animal cues as they
grow up so
when they are introduced back to their
own kind they know what appropriate
behavior is
he teaches them how to play how to
interact i can tell them no don't bite
me but
i'm not an animal and i don't give the
same cues
that he can so we make a great team
[Music]
smile for the camera
blakely has worked with cheetahs ocelots
a token battered foxes a warthog
wallabies to name a few he's working
with four
baby cheetahs right now it's been a long
seven weeks for him with these little
cheetah cubs
and he's i think tired because he's on
alert for 24 hours a day if they start
making too much noise he'll come and get
us like something's not right
something's not right he's kind of like
a second set of eyes for us too
a lot of times they still recognize each
other like dale the talk and he raised
when they see each other
he'll they'll still run up up front and
grunt at him and he'll kind of
jump up on the wall and it's kind of
like hey how you doing
thank you yeah well i i like to think i
have an office but i'm pretty sure it's
his
[Music]
world war ii saw lots of heroes winston
churchill de gaulle commander eisenhower
but one you probably don't recognize is
smokey
a yorkshire terrier and the tiniest war
hero of all
time
i feel smokey and i were destined to be
together
that's bill nguyen a corporal at the
time and smokey's owner
he bought smokey for 6.44 cents
during his time serving in the pacific
theater
i think that if she fallen in anyone
else's hands
she would never have been what she was
and she was
remarkable
smokey followed bill through 150 air
raids
12 combat missions and once even led
bill to safety during a japanese bombing
well we'd look around we got eight of
our buddies
all wounded around where smokey and i
were if smokey hadn't taken me there i
would have been standing with the other
guys
smokey also accompanied nurses on their
rounds at a u.s army hospital in new
guinea
smokey gets credited for being the first
therapy dog on record
back in bill's hometown of cleveland
smokey became
famous doing tricks on tv shows she
could walk on a drum
she could ride a scooter smokey died a
celebrity in 1957
but she wasn't forgotten she has
memorials in
ohio pennsylvania australia hawaii
tennessee but her biggest legacy popular
belief is that smokey's the reason that
yorkies are such a popular pet
so thank smokey the world war ii dog for
all those cute little yorkies
in the peak of summer in italy when the
beaches and lakes are full of swimmers
the lifeguards keeping everyone safe
bring in some much-needed assistance
[Music]
aqua since then furuto has found that
dogs make
ideal lifeguard partners they remain
calm under pressure
and instinctively choose the safest path
through the water currents
back to shore once in the water they're
able to keep
[Music]
to keep up with these numbers the school
has over 350 certified rescue dogs
and each year takes in new recruits
[Music]
after about 18 months of training they
learn how to jump from speeding boats
and helicopters safely
among other rescue techniques
italy is the only country in the world
that recognizes these certified canines
as actual lifeguards
but the value of this is catching on so
the school is starting to expand abroad
humanoid
we as humans have always used dogs to
help us
get what we want and what we need
we make amazing teams because we've
evolved
together and they make a massive
difference
in conservation by finding things that
we couldn't possibly find
to give us information to help save
species
our dogs use their sense of smell to
find everything from endangered species
to invasive species and wildlife crime
which is something we're really proud of
[Music]
come on guys let's go for a walk
i'm megan parker i'm research director
and co-founder of working dogs for
conservation
easy wait
we're an organization that binds
dogs from rescue situations shelters or
career change dogs
we train them as detection dogs for
conservation projects
around the world right now we're on the
way from the kennel
to the armory to pick up two new
elephant tusks
and a leopard skin and a pangolin
to train on we're treating the dogs on
new samples
that might be finding scats of
endangered species
doing a population estimate finding live
animals that are endangered
that are very rare helping fight
wildlife crime in africa by
having dogs find ivory and rhino and
bushmeat
and guns and ammunition that are used
for poaching
this dog searching for gunpowder
they can detect microscopic larvae and
water
they can detect one species of fish in a
moving stream that needs to be removed
from the ecosystem before it harms more
animals or plants
you could imagine like well we could
build a computer that would
sense odors or a sense particles of
some object in the environment except we
can't build anything that fine
like dogs are actually the best
technology
and the best able to detect something
and then tell their handler what they
[Music]
know
i started out as a kid training dogs
when i was 10.
and i just kept that interest i
became a biologist and i got my phd
studying african wild dogs
this has been like a theme i guess for
me in my life
i do have dogs myself i actually live
with three dogs
two of them are working dogs one is
retiring
he's on the couch i'm guessing oh
they're both on the couch
um
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this morning we started tuli on an
endangered bat that she'll be working on
it's really simple at first when she
smells the bat
she sits and gets her toy
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it's going to work
yes good girl
and then we moved to really complicated
scenarios where the dogs learn to
find the scent of an endangered animal
in a very hard to find place
most of our dogs come from shelters or
from a situation where somebody can't
keep a dog like this
we look at anywhere from one to two
thousand dogs
before we find a dog that meets our
standards
and can make it to the field as a
working dog for conservation
we're gonna run utah on the kickfox scat
is there anything particular you want to
work on
he's solid yeah he knows these dogs
have really high energy they want to
play with a toy and without a job their
energy gets misdirected into like
tearing up your couch or killing the cat
or jumping through a window
or chasing whatever so these dogs are
really hard to have as
pets but when they have a job and have a
great home
it's an awesome
hi combination oh my gosh i know we
haven't worked together since cameron
says a lot of the dogs that i've
personally trained i thought it would be
really hard at first to have them live
in another continent but
the care and the bonds that they have
formed with their scouts and how hard
they work and the kind of work that they
do
when i see them they are working it's an
awesome life for them
our work is important it pairs
these two things i care a lot about
which is taking dogs that are on
death row and then they get to amplify
all this conservation that we care about
that we want to do
the dogs are making the world a better
place they really are making wildlife
safer
in places where they work
you