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Training Narcotics Dogs

My first encounter with military narcotics dogs was my assignment in Thailand, where I worked under the umbrella of the US Customs Service, performing customs pre-screening of military personnel returning to the United States.  We would use narcotics dogs to check the luggage before the personnel could board the plane.  We provided amnesty boxes in the bathrooms so that personnel would get one final opportunity to rid themselves of the drugs that they hoped to bring back to the States.

Having previously been a working dog handler at my previous station, I enjoyed watching the narcotics dog work.  The more  I watched the handler, the more concerned I was over the dog’s ability to perform.  The handler would hide drugs, and the dog would find the drugs.  Seemed like everything was fine.

To test my theory, I emptied the amnesty boxes and decided to hide those drugs without the handler’s knowledge.  When the handler showed up, I pointed to specific bags that I told him could be suspect.  Hey, I was trying to help the guy.  The handler ran the dog and cleared the entire shipment.  Before the handler left the area, I asked him to watch me as I took drugs from about a dozen different suitcases.  I turned to him and said, “Good job, you have ruined a perfectly good dog.”

I then began to list out his faults:

  1. You are hiding your own drugs. Not only are you imparting your own scent on the drugs, but since you know where the drugs are hidden, you are probably giving unconscious keys to the dog, like raising your voice when the dog gets closer to the drugs.
  2. You are using the same amount of drugs all the time. Dogs get lazy.  In addition to using their noses, they look for shortcuts, like the keys that a handler gives in #1, and they are slowly taught to sniff for the exact amount that they are trained to find.   Or, seek the scent of their handler on the drugs.  I used drug amounts that exceeded the dog’s training threshold.

When I returned to the States, I became a narcotics dog handler and worked for the Air Force and then the US Customs Service.  I knew to use other people to hide my training aids, and I would, on occasion, “borrow” several kilos of drugs to offset the smaller amounts that we trained with.  I even made use of a Border Patrol Agent who would roll joints for my partner and me so that we could add a new scent to the vehicles that we searched in.  We were fortunate in that we worked when the drug flow into the US was high, so our dogs would come into frequent contact with large amounts of drugs.  I once jumped my dog into a 300-kilo pile of marijuana; the scent was so strong that he just stood there and peed.  Note to self: check the nearest vehicle if the dog suddenly pees.

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Employment Searches and Woke Companies

For those who are seeking employment, you won’t have to go far to discover that you just applied to a company that is Woke.  There are two clues that the company is Woke:

  1. In their list of values, they list inclusion. Companies discovered that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was a horrible mistake.  The Woke discovered that hiring the least qualified candidate was bad for business.   So, companies chose to cover up their past mistakes and settle for inclusion.  This way, transgenders would recognize that this company is a comfortable space for them.
  2. If you receive correspondence from the company’s HR Department, the correspondence will clearly show the sender’s gender identity; another sign that the company is Woke and the transgender community is welcome.

So, what is the big deal with working for a Woke company? Woke companies are less worried about their product or services than their identity.  They are more worried about hiring someone who is Woke, rather than someone qualified.

If you are desperate for a job and can live with working with these people, then you should post some Woke ideology on your social media and add some pronouns in your correspondence with the company.  You’ll get extra points if you hint that you’re transgender.

The other option is to keep on searching, and eventually you find a normal company to work for.  After all, you won’t be able to keep up the act of being Woke without becoming Woke, and then you’ll never be able to live with yourself.

Bud Lite showed the world what Wokeness does to the business model.  If you are a donor to any of the major charities, you might Google “Is ___ ____ woke?”  If the results come back that the charity has been called Woke, and they are brushing it off as bullying, they are probably Woke.  You can explore more by their posted values.  If they list inclusion, they are probably Woke.

Why does it matter?  If that is your question, then you have been sleeping for the past decade.  The Woke seek the counsel of men (or insert your preferred pronoun) and not of God (He/Him).

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Donations

Donating to a charitable organization is a feel-good thing.  So, when did it stop feeling good?  To reward donors, they sell your information to other charitable organizations.  You start having to deal with new junk mail coming to your home. Donating to a political organization is even worse.  They want to hear from you, so they send you surveys to complete; the problem is that they won’t accept your survey unless you donate again.  The bottom line is that they only care about getting money from you.

I really hate to have this attitude, but with the assistance of AI, it has become worse.  I think the only solution is to start charging postage on companies that send out over 100 emails per day.  With a postage charge, maybe an organization might give up on you faster.

I am most ticked off about those “I was thinking about you” emails.  You know the ones, “I was just getting on my private jet and thought that I needed to contact you.”  You know the ones who know nothing about you and want to act as your best friend.  I don’t have any personal friends who own a private jet.  If you have a private jet, you are probably not going to get anything from me but envy.

The trick with spam mail is to have an email program that not only allows you to block individual senders but also gives you the ability to write rules for emails.  Junk mail senders are constantly changing the name of who is sending the email, but they always keep the same domain.  As such, you can write a rule that sends all your emails from a specific domain to your junk mail folder or to the trash.

The longer they don’t hear from you, the more their AI begins to send bullying emails.  If you don’t respond in 2 hours, you are going to get kicked out of the Party.  Well, good; will you then stop mailing me?  These organizations don’t realize that they are just pushing donors away.  Until I can donate anonymously, I’m never donating again.  Why am I so sensitive to this?  I get around 100 emails a day pestering me.  Don’t these AIs have something better to do?

Around Christmas, when you start getting donation requests that include a CD and a handful of blank Christmas Cards, you are only showing me that the money that we send you is going back into donation requests.  Is anything left for the cause?

The good news is that our political parties are more alike than we realize.  They only want our vote and our money.  Maybe with that, they can find some other commonality in Congress.

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AI Plague

If you view YouTube at all, you see that the site is plagued by false news reports that are generated by AI.  The problem with AI is the people who program the software.  AI made it easy to research documents, but AI is not without bias.  AI is slowly changing the way we think about things and is capable of changing our “real” history to a false one.  Every time I see a data center being built, I worry about how our knowledge will change for the worse.  How will they invade our lives?  How will they move us to a false reality?  How much will my spam increase?  How much data space will be given to hackers?

Best Friends recently had a conference geared towards using AI to get pets adopted from shelters.  That seems like a noble notion.  During my career, I was constantly fighting volunteer groups who wanted me to provide a false narrative of the animals in my care.  I demanded the integrity of my organization.  I wasn’t well-liked.  I worry about how shelters filled to the brim with Pitbull dogs will use AI to represent the dogs as another breed.  I saw that the new software will even write up the animal’s description for shelter staff.  How valuable is integrity to this AI software? It is only as good as its programmers.

Is the intent of the software to move animals out of the shelter, or is it intended to place animals into the right homes?  With computers, input equals output.  Good input equals good output.  If the input doesn’t include the families that will be adopting these animals, then we will see a rush to adopt animals and then later a rush to abandon them (again).

Let’s face it, the No Kill Movement is a statistical movement.  Everyone wants to be a no-kill shelter, and all they have to do is adopt 90% of their animals.  Even if by hook or by crook.  Is AI a crook?  It is everywhere I see it being used. I get around 100 emails daily that are generated by AI.  Fortunately, I have a fairly good spam filter.   If you have ever used a dating app, you have experienced disappointment.  Don’t get caught up in the fad of this type of placement; do your homework.  If the pet that you are looking at had a previous owner, ask the shelter staff to pass along your phone number to them so that you can inquire as to the time that they spent with the dog.

The problem with the No Kill Movement is that a shelter’s statistics is more important than a good adoption.  The best way to solve this problem is to leave a review on Google Maps about your adoption experience a few months after your adoption.  A few bad reviews might cause a shelter to more accurately describe their animals in the future.

I hope that AI will be used as a positive means to place pets into loving homes.  But the past use of AI should make everyone skeptical.  Of course, any shelter that has lied about their animals in the past will become better liars with AI.

I think AI is best used for sifting through data.  If an animal shelter has a large database, AI would be useful when lost animals are found without identification.  AI could search the shelter’s database to see if the animal had at any time previously visited the shelter.  Most animal shelter databases do not make use of AI.  Shelter employees are forced to conduct manual queries of their data in hopes of finding a hit.  Of course, that would mean that shelter employees would have to go into greater detail when describing the animals on intake.  For example, the animal’s left paw is black.  We don’t usually list a specific descriptor for the left paw.

Our attempts at trying to create a complete software package led to the death of PetWhere.  We attempted to do too much.  And at that time, shelters were asking us to make it simpler.  If we had listened to the animal shelters, PetWhere might still be alive today, but half of the animals in the shelter would have a breed designation of “mixed;” making the software useless.

However, an optional description field could list a black paw or list the various breeds that we can identify in an animal.  The earlier databases were preferred by lazy staff who just wanted to list the breed as “mixed.”  As with many shelters today, wanting to eliminate Pitbull as an animal descriptor.  AI would help staff identify an animal without using the word “Pitbull.”  AI could also be used to take the photos of Pitbulls and make them look less Pitbull on the shelter’s website.

I think AI’s best use in shelters would be to take an animal’s intake photo and compare the photo to animals who have previously been in the shelter.  I can recall incidents in which owners attempted to misidentify an animal on reclaim to avoid a higher impound fee. But, that only works if you haven’t doctored the animal’s photo to something less than a Pitbull.

Or a better use of AI is the ability to take a picture of an animal and report back the various breeds it may belong to.  You could fine-tune that with DNA testing.  When I first started in the animal welfare business, we could take a universal breed book and decyhper 99% of the animals.  You can’t do that anymore.  Breeders have gone nuts in interbreeding dogs.  The idiot breeders bred Pitbulls.  As a result, most shelters have a population of 70% or higher of Pitbulls and Pitbull mixes.  The only real solution to shelter overcrowding is to eliminate Pitbull breeding.

AI is brilliant in its ability to deceive as well as its ability to sift through disconnected data.  Just as the no-kill movement is a good desire, if it can be done honestly.

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Pets in Public

I’ve been out of the animal welfare business for some time, but my ears perk when I see a story about animals.  Several people were injured when bringing their dogs into a Florida Walmart.  I know you get tired of hearing me say that pet owners are the weak link in pet ownership.  Taking your dogs into a grocery store is beyond stupid.  Don’t get excited, I think allowing small children to run loose in stores is also stupid.

We’ve all seen incidents in which we see pets and children running amok in public.  The problem is that if you attempt to bring correction, you only get hostilities in return.   We all know someone who shouldn’t have had children or pets.  The problem with these people is that not only do they learn slowly, they forget fast.  It’ll probably be a few days, and these people will be bringing their pets back in again.  And as in the past, they will be looking the other way when their children or pets start pulling items off the shelves or fouling the aisles.

I know, some of you are saying that these were probably service animals needed by their owners.  Look, the ADA created a scam that is widely abused.  You can go online and buy vests claiming your dog is a service animal.  Knowing how far we tend to take things, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about a person getting bitten by a rattlesnake that is in public as a service animal.  From my experience as an animal control officer, I would say that 90% of the service animals out there are fake.  Of course, my estimate might be on the low side.

This is one area where we are too tolerant of others.

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Broken Cisterns

“Contentment makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.” Benjamin Franklin

“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”  Jeremiah 2:13

Many have turned their backs on God.  We allow material things to make ourselves feel complete.  God offers a contentment that goes beyond human understanding; He shows us contentment wherever we are in this material world. His living water flows through us, we feel complete…. Rich.

On the other hand, how long do our material things satisfy us?  We are always looking for something more, and as we gather more, the more incomplete we will feel because we are pouring them into a broken cistern.

The Prophet Jeremiah is telling us not to be slaves to our broken cisterns, but to find the living water that God promised us.

-Taken from a Brett Meador sermon on Oct. 18, 2020.

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Drug Box

I was sitting in my office when one of our veterinary technicians approached me to say that the drug cabinet was unlocked.  Controlled substances must be kept in a locked box in a locked room.  Our veterinarian must have left the cabinet unlocked when she went on vacation—a simple, stupid mistake.

I considered my options and decided that the easiest thing to do was to resecure the cabinet.  Our veterinarian is the only one who has keys to the cabinet, and she would be upset if I touched her drugs.  So, I broke out my lock picks and resecured the cabinet.

When the veterinarian returned to work, I explained what happened.  She apparently was not a very good listener.  I guess that she picked up on drug box and lock picks.  Later that day, three detectives came to talk to me.  We had a good laugh.  Later, I heard that the State Board of Pharmacy issued her a warning letter.  She had contacted the Board about me as well, and that backfired.

Some of your smartest people on staff can make simple mistakes.  Make sure that you are open and honest in all of your dealings, and you’ll be fine.  Most importantly, document everything that you do.  The fact that you document is evidence that your intentions are honest.

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Career Obstacles

Twice in my career, I was hired to take over the animal control program for jurisdictions that had previously been contracted out to the local humane society.  In both of those cases, the humane societies had a very high euthanasia rate.  They saw that having a high kill rate was not conducive to being recognized as a humane organization.  They also knew that so much of the available funding and grants were dedicated to no-kill organizations.  They dropped the anchor that was holding them back from funding sources: running a public animal shelter.

I was constantly surprised that these organizations would then resort to lambasting the shelter while the shelter fought with overpopulation.  Eventually, we were able to bring the euthanasia numbers down to a very respectable number.  Some of the board members of one humane society, seeing our high save rate, would call me and complain that I was saving too many animals that should have been killed.  We live in a fickle world.

The other organization got upset that they no longer had preference for the highly adoptable animals and sought animals outside the area.  This is a common practice in animal welfare; organizations will cry out about high euthanasia rates at their local shelter while bringing animals from outside their area.  Instead of wanting to save the animals in their community, they just want access to the highly adoptable animals that they can sell (adopt).  Yep, I did say “sell” because many humane societies act no differently than a pet store selling animals.  You really can’t blame them. With the high rate of Pitbulls entering our shelters, it becomes increasingly difficult to find adopters.

Once in my career, I was hired to reduce the euthanasia rate of a shelter, only to find that the obstacles to adoption were from the shelter’s staff.   It is difficult to operate an animal shelter when staff oppose allowing people to come into their facility.  It was bad enough for the staff to have to allow pet owners to come into the shelter looking for their lost pets, but it was too much to accept allowing volunteers in.  They wanted to do what they do without being watched.

The purpose of this blog is to show those who enter the field of animal welfare that obstacles await you, but the reward is great.

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Why do you seek the living among the dead?

In John 24: 1 – 12, they went to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for burial and found it empty.  Two angels appeared to them and asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

Jesus gave His life for us, but He didn’t remain dead.  He arose!  Proving that He was God.  But He didn’t stop there, He gave each of his followers the Holy Spirit that He might be within them.

Easter is a reminder that God isn’t dead, but alive.  To the many who seek dead gods, know that those who have accepted Jesus keeps a living God within them.  Accept Jesus and find a new life.  Without Jesus, all things are dead.  He is arisen!

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Audible Scam

The other day, I had a charge appear on my credit card from Audible for $47.70.   I monitor my credit card activity closely and knew that this was a fraudulent charge.  But, before I could do anything, I had to wait for the charge to clear my bank.  During my wait, Audible charged me the same fee again.  After three days of waiting, I contacted the bank and was advised that they would cancel my card and investigate the charges.  I was hoping for the simple route to block charges from Audible and forget about it.  I discovered that wasn’t an option.

I contacted Audible and discovered that I have an account with them, but I am not a member.  Since Audible is an Amazon Company, Amazon shared my information.  Although I had an account with Audible, I was not a member and didn’t have any purchases with them.  A call taker admitted that my credit card was associated with another account, but she was very protective of that account and refused to provide any information.  She generously offered to help me if I could provide the first name of the fraudster.  I asked her if she really thought that I might know the person fraudulently using my credit card.  I explained to her that most victims of online fraud don’t know the perpetrator.   She was neither willing to reverse the charge nor stop any future charges against my card.  She was no help; she seemed more intent on keeping the criminal safe.  Something we are seeing more and more in today’s society.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Why are companies in bed with the criminals?  Granted, they are not willful participants, but they provide no protection for those who are experiencing fraud.  The impression that I got from Audible was that I’m a forgetful grandparent and gave my card number to a grandchild to commit fraud against me.  I’ll have to admit that my memory is failing, but we are not there yet.  It is no wonder that scammers are so successful because companies like Audible do nothing to help the victims of crime.

If Audible wanted to help, they would immediately say, “Yes, we see that your credit card is associated with another account.  If you don’t authorize that, we will reverse the charges and stop any further charges on that card.”  But, instead, they say, “Yes, we see that your card is associated with another account, but there is nothing that we are willing to do about that.”  PERIOD!

Even when I am no longer able to read, I will never pay for anything on Audible.  I’m only posting this as a record that I can refer to Audible in the future.

So, why am I calling this an Audible Scam?  Once I notified Audible that they were allowing my credit card to be used freely on their website.  They refused to do anything about it.  Once notified of the fraud, they failed to take action, causing them to become participants in the fraud.