Male Speaker: Driver exit the vehicle.
Male Speaker: Last warning
Male Speaker: Send him.
Ted: The things that make them great working dogs
and make them great at what they can do.
Make them terrible pets.
I can't...
count the number of times I've been bit.
Ted: The full scenario is
we have a suited decoy
and
you're wrestling with somebody
you hit the popper and the dog engages.
We’ll say go
and you’ve got to get out from under him.
So yeah, who wants to go first?
All right, ready?
Go ahead and bring him in.
My name is Ted Summers
from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Here at TorchLight,
we train
and prepare dogs
and canine handlers
for going into work in law enforcement.
Whenever you're ready
feed him a grip.
We're exclusively focused on dogs that
tend to be a little
extra
than your average pet.
Good job V.
Yeah, ankle.
Yeah.
We breed
Belgian Malinois,
they
get patrol guards better,
they're easier to handle.
They typically have a lot more...
endurance
They're extremely fast and powerful.
They average between 60 and 75 pounds.
This is Joker.
Joker is a Finnish dog
waiting to go to his department,
sole purpose narcotics.
Big Malinois
super nice dog, super affable.
This is Onyx.
Onyx belongs to a sheriff's office about an hour from here.
And we're just kind of finishing up some training for them
on him, we should be done in a couple of weeks.
And some of these dogs,
genetically are,
I hate to use the term aggressive,
but they're,
they have to have some of that
say "Hi," buddy.
We breed them and raise them.
So...
from the time they're puppies,
I make them jump on things I make them go through things.
I teach them about handler involvement
and how
they should interact with people,
how they shouldn't interact with people.
So...
the training can take anywhere from...
10 to 20-ish weeks,
before we pass them off to the handler,
and it's always difficult to see them leave.
That's...
definitely the hardest.
One of the things we teach the dogs to do
is searching vehicles for explosives or narcotics,
which is what we've got
a lot of these old cars for
where we also use these vehicles
for conditioning the dogs
for felony stops,
getting through the windows, and all that kind of stuff
and the dogs have to be able to
go to a car
without
an officer having to
expose themselves
from cover and concealment,
which is the ultimate goal.
Male Speaker: Driver exit the vehicle.
Male Speaker: Last warning
Male Speaker: Send him.
Ted: This building here,
is also one of our main buildings where we teach.
It's a huge 15,000 square foot building.
With tons of hiding spaces inside
it's nice and dark.
So it's a great place to teach
inexperienced training dogs and handlers
how to clear structure correctly
and how to clear
a structure with the dog.
Ted: We do
basically three phases of work.
One is detection. So it's teaching dogs to find things.
Two is tracking people
that have run off,
that are lost.
Male Speaker: Go, go, go, go, go!
Ted: And then we go through the other process
of teaching the dog to bite.
I jokingly say that I teach dogs
to find stuff and bite people.
[Laughs]
Dogs in law enforcement
are used as a detection tool.
Whether it's locating contraband,
explosives, locating people,
the government spent a bazillion dollars
on trying to make a machine that does it
and they still can't beat the dog's nose.
They can smell things we can’t
and they can hear things we can’t.
So...
inside these boxes
is actual
narcotic odors.
I can't count the number of times
I've been bit,
I've got several scars
all over my
arms,
I've got a
bad one on my leg,
I was bit,
pretty severely
required a bunch of stitches.
They bite people for living that's what they do.
So sometimes it happens.
and yeah, it hurts.
It's not fun.
I'm a decoy,
my first
passion
in this thing is
decoying, which is the guy that gets bit.
Ted: So Alesha,
she is my fiancé,
she kind of keeps the whole show together.
Working
and then being an actual relationship with somebody
can be very trying at times,
although I wouldn't change anything though.
Alesha: I'm kind of all about the gore.
I want that moment of,
of getting to bandage him back together.
Ted: Of course, we have to have dogs that are aggressive.
I often say
that these dogs have been bred for, you know, about 100 years.
We've created dogs
genetically that have the propensity
for high levels of violence,
which is needed when you're apprehending somebody that
intends to do harm to somebody.
Alesha: Everything about this job,
it's gratifying.
We are a part of
protecting our communities.
And that’s it, that's very important to me.
We get to play with dogs for a living,
and it's an amazing life.
Like I literally cannot imagine doing
anything else.
Ted: We'll get a text from a handler
at three o'clock in the morning
dog just found this or
had a track had an apprehension.
It gives
everybody involved here,
a sense of,
a huge sense of pride when
they go and they
perform the job flawlessly.
[Laughs]
I'm exceptionally
proud
of our teams.