INTERVIEW - Caroline Nadeau of the RCMP, Detecting and Keeping K9 Officers Safe from Fentanyl

(RCMP)

The fentanyl crisis is an ongoing issue for Canadians.

Fentanyl impacts Canadians across many groups.

From users, who find themselves dealing with a very different high than they anticipated when they encounter heroin or other drugs laced with the inexpensive, powerful, often lethal drug, to family and community members, first responders, and healthcare professionals.

And, of course, the fentanyl crisis impacts law enforcement officers who are trying to stop the drug from hitting the streets.

In Calgary, police are looking at ways to keep canine officers safe such as distributing the fentanyl antidote, naloxone.

Since officers don’t always know when fentanyl will be present in a crime scene, the antidote is one way to make sure that officers (canine or human) are safe even if they risk exposure.

Calgary firefighters also carry naloxone, and although they haven’t had to use the drug to save an officer, they administer it regularly to Calgarians who have been exposed to the drug.

Although neither Calgary police nor any RCMP canine units have suffered an overdose while working, the same is not true across North America.

Three law enforcement dogs overdosed in Florida late last year, and were saved by applications of Narcan, a brand name version of naloxone.

InfoStream had the chance to communicate with Caroline Nadeau at the RCMP about how the organization is working to keep canine officers safe, even as they accelerate the training program to get more canine units working to keep fentanyl off the streets.

InfoStream (IS): What are the risks associated with fentanyl?

Caroline Nadeau (CN): Fentanyl is a powerful prescription painkiller about 100 times more toxic than morphine.

Unintentional exposure to pure fentanyl – touching or inhaling – can cause serious harm, including death.

Like their human counterparts, dogs are at risk of exposure from fentanyl and other opioids during investigations.

IS: What precautions are in place to reduce the risk to canine and human officers?

CN: Naloxone is a drug that can quickly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. The RCMP has distributed naloxone to all frontline RCMP officers for use on police officers and members of the public in cases of accidental contact with the potentially fatal drug.

RCMP dog handlers have been carrying naloxone (also called Narcan) for over 20 years as a precaution.

Naloxone can be safely administered to dogs in the canine units if accidental contact with fentanyl is suspected. It is as safe and as efficient for dogs as it is for humans.

The RCMP has also developed training and information on fentanyl so RCMP members know about the risks and symptoms from contact with fentanyl, how to minimize the likelihood of contact and how to administer the naloxone, if needed.

Because fentanyl can be fatal on contact or if inhaled, the RCMP needed a technique to train dogs that would minimize the risk of exposure.

We addressed this problem by transforming pure fentanyl into a diluted liquid form which preserves the original scent and prevents the dog from inhaling the substance.

This way, the dog can safely and repetitively be trained to recognize the real scent of fentanyl.

IS: What measures is the RCMP taking to protect canine officers (and their handlers)? This is particularly an issue because canine officers can become intoxicated or overdosed either through absorbing the drug through their pads, or through inhalation.

CN: The RCMP trains its dogs to signal the presence of fentanyl through passive indications.

The dog will indicate the presence and location of fentanyl to the handler by sitting down. This way, the dog does not continue to pursue the odour to the source, further reducing the likelihood of inadvertent contact.

The dog and handler keep each other safe as a team.

IS: What are your hopes for the new training program for fentanyl detection?

CN: We believe the Canadian population is safer because of our new fentanyl dog training. By keeping more fentanyl off the street, we save Canadian lives.

Training is expected to be completed for all RCMP canine units across Canada by mid-July 2017.

About Tiffany Sostar

Tiffany is a published academic, an editor with the Editors Association of Canada, an independent scholar and researcher, and a self-care and narrative coach. She is particularly interested in the intersection of technology and identity - how our tools shape our selves and change our stories, and in how the nature of work is changing as we incorporate more technology into our daily lives.

RESEARCH - Sleep Helps Dogs Learn

A recent study shows there may be a new twist to the old adage of letting sleeping dogs lie – with rest proving helpful to the learning process.

It’s scientific findings dog trainers might want to sleep on, too.

The conclusions are the work of researchers in Hungary who wanted to examine so-called “memory consolidation,” in man’s best friend.

While it is extensively studied in humans, memory consolidation – which is where the brain pulls together information and packages it into memories to be used later – has not previously been looked at in depth in dogs.

The question for researchers was – does sleep affect dogs by allowing them to better learn and retain lessons.

The findings showed dogs sleep was affected by learning and that learning was affected by sleep.

How?

Dogs were taught a new English word for a skill they had mastered with a Hungarian command such as ‘sit’ or ‘lie down.’

Those dogs who took part in the study slept deeper after the lesson opposed to dogs who were in the group not taught new skills.

Ana Kis, with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, tells Scientific American this “suggests that the newly acquired information is re-processed and consolidated during sleep.”

The findings of the study, The Interrelated Effect of Sleep and Learning in Dogs, showed that dogs who rested after training sessions as well as those who stayed awake saw impacts on short and long-term effects and retention.

Those who played after learning, however, did not do as well on retention suggesting “interfering with learning experiences impedes learning consolidation,” the study states.

Researchers also noted that sleep proved to be more beneficial if it exceeded an hour in length and it was advantageous if dogs were given time to shake off their sleep before being retested on lessons.

In humans, that time required to shake off sleep/ wake up before being in a better position to learn is referred to as sleep inertia.

“Don’t pretend you’ve never woken up, walked to the bathroom and tried to brush your teeth with your comb,” Kis says, explaining the concept.

The study is said to be ground-breaking given it offers evidence that dog’s ability to learn from humans might be related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation.

In the study, dogs were given post-learning activities – walking, resting, playing with a Kong or being taught a new lesson.

The results showed dogs who slept (their sleep was monitored by EEG for three hours) and walked were better learners while those who were given play time or asked to learn new lessons did not see any advantage when it came to later acquiring new skills.

“Learning a new command should be followed by an activity that does not interfere with this new memory trace (e.g. sleeping, walking, playing–but not learning other things) in order to achieve the highest subsequent performance in the long run,” Kis told Scientific American.

Of course, the research is of interest to domestic dog owners but even more news-you-can-use for those who put dogs to work in roles doing everything from therapy to policing.

About Nadia Moharib

Nadia is an animal lover who has adopted everything from birds to hamsters, salamanders, rabbits, fish and felines. She has written about all-things-pets for years and was a long-time editor of a pet magazine in a daily newspaper which featured a Q & A column, Ask Whit, penned by her pooch (ghost written, of course.) The serial dog owner lives in Calgary, Alberta and most days can be found at a dog park picking up after her rescue pooch, Scoots.

Canine Jobs: Preserving, Controlling and Protecting Wildlife

Dogs aren’t just entertaining companions, therapy or service animals, they also help protect and conserve wildlife.

In efforts to curtail human and wildlife conflicts, canines are being used to keep mountain goats, sheep and even bears away from areas in parks where they may encounter humans.

(Gracie, nps.gov)

This summer Glacier National Park in Montana implemented “Bark Ranger” a pilot project using Gracie the border collie to train wildlife to stay away from popular areas in the park.

Gracie is also a magnet for park visitors and helps ranger Mark Biel connect with visitors to talk about a range of safety issues.

"No one wants to talk to me, but if they see her they come up and pet her, then I've got you," Biel told National Public Radio.

Waterton National Park, just across the border in Canada from Glacier Park, has been using collies around aggressive deer protecting their fawns since 2009.

Within a few years of launching the program, adverse encounters between deer and people in Waterton fell from 40 each season to just four.

Some canines have a job controlling an animal people consider much more dangerous - bears.

A variety of parks, including Kananaskis Country in Alberta, Canada, use Karelian bear dogs to deter bears from venturing near roads, campgrounds or other areas where they may encounter humans.

Wind River Bear Institute, a well-known non-profit organization in Montana, offers on-site consultation and courses for bear managers, private groups and individuals in bear shepherding, conflict prevention and Karelian bear dog training and handling.

The bear dogs are very independent and will bark an alert as soon as they sense a bear in the area.

They almost always work in teams of two dogs and two trainers. The dogs may track individually, but once a bear is located, they work as a team to shepherd it to a safer location.

Wildlife control canine, Piper, has doesn’t work in a park, but rather at the Cherry Capital Airport in Michigan.

He spends his days keeping birds and other wildlife off and away from the runways, and has proven to be very popular with humans - he has over 47,000 followers on Instagram.

But not all dogs working with wildlife have direct contact with them.

Conservation Canines are scent detecting dogs trained to locate wildlife scat over large areas.

The scat samples, which are collected and analyzed, enable researchers to ascertain species abundance, distribution, resource use, and physiological health all in relation to the environmental pressure(s) the species is encountering.

Wow! Wildlife conservation, protection and control - all in a day’s work for some talented canines.

BEHAVIOUR - Have Humans Underestimated Animals' Intelligence?

A border collie named Chaser is causing scientists, dog trainers, and just about everyone really, to rethink just how smart dogs are.

Raised and trained by John Pilley, an emeritus professor of psychology at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Chaser knows the names of over 1,000 objects.

She also has the ability to discriminate verbs, such as fetch frisbee, paw frisbee, or nose frisbee, and to understand the syntax in sentences: “to ball take Frisbee” is different from “to Frisbee take ball.”

Pilley is a firm believer in the power of play in successful training - everything Chase has learned is through play.

His research partner since she was two months old and currently 12 years of age, Chase is first and foremost a member of the Pilley family.

Pilley began his work with the remarkable border collie after his retirement and the energetic octogenarian has written a book - Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words.

The book explores the true potential of animal intelligence and the ways in which any dog lover can achieve similar results.

A major point Pilley focuses on in the book and every interview, is that every dog has significant potential and intelligence, not just Chaser.

“The big thing is that Chaser is not special, and that anybody’s dog is smarter than he or she thinks. I’m hoping people will work with their dogs, of course teaching them words, but also getting to know their dogs. Find out what makes your dog happy, and give your dog opportunities to explore its interests,” Pilley told Scientific American.

Want some visuals? Through a series of videos produced by Hill’s Science Diet and featuring Pilley and his border collie, viewers can get a clear idea of just how to teach a dog 1,000 words.

For Pilley and his pup, it’s all about understanding, play, setting the dog up for success, and the incredible human animal bond.

RESEARCH - Dogs Understand More Human Language Than Previously Thought

Anyone who’s casually mentioned a walk in a conversation and had their dog bound for the door knows that dogs understand human language.

(pexels.com)

One hypothesis has been that dogs respond to the intonation of human language, rather than to specific words.

This is the idea that it’s not what the trainer says, but how the trainer says it. And this focus on intonation is certainly valid – verbal praise is a well-established method of rewarding dogs, and in fact may be more effective than food.

However, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary have confirmed that dogs can process words as well as intonation.

The researchers used fMRI scans to determine that dogs are able to separately process both lexical and intonational information from their trainers’ voice.

The study confirms earlier research at the University of Sussex that suggested dogs and humans have similar specialized brain regions that allow for parallel processing of multiple parts of speech, such as word and tone.

Both dogs and humans process words with the left hemisphere of their brains, and intonation with the right.

These parallels in human and dog brains may be an example of convergent evolution. They may indicate that humans artificially selected dogs over thousands of years based on their responsiveness to human language.

Though Dr. Brian Hare, who studies both dogs and primates at Duke University, told The New York Times that “it’s possible that dogs had independently evolved a similar brain organization.”

The finding that dogs can understand words as well as tone also indicates that parallel processing began to evolve in non-primates even before humans developed language.

Attila Andics, the lead researcher in the Hungarian study, accomplished something new by training the dogs in the study to voluntarily lay motionless in the MRI machine for the seven-minute test. The dogs were unrestrained, and had the ability to leave the test at any point.

This has not been possible with non-human primates, because according to Dr. Hare, non-human primates will not willingly undergo MRI scans.

Despite the fascinating implications of the study, it does not mean that dogs understand human language in any comprehensive sense.

The study was small, and interpreting fMRI results is notoriously challenging.

Left hemisphere activation could be associated with positive emotions, as it often is in humans, without necessarily also involving lexical processing. Since all of the words used in the study were neutral or positive, and all of the intonations were also neutral or positive, teasing out what the dogs were actually responding to is a challenge.

However, regardless of where the research goes from here, this study has opened up new avenues to explore in both the domestication of dogs and human understanding of the evolution of language.

And, for dog owners and trainers, it confirms what many have suspected for a long time – it matters how you talk to your dog, and it matters what you say.

By Tiffany Sostar

Tiffany is a writer, editor, academic, and animal lover who came late to her appreciation of pets. At 18, a rescue pup named Tasha saved her from a depression and she hasn't looked back. She has worked as the canine behaviour program coordinator for the Calgary Humane Society, and was a dog trainer specializing in working with fearful and reactive dogs for many years. She doesn't have any pets right now, but makes up for it by giving her petsitting clients (and any dogs she comes across on her frequent coffee shop adventures) extra snuggles.

BEHAVIOUR - Building Resilience in Dogs

(Patricia McConnell, photo by Jeff Miller)

People who adapt well when facing trauma and adversity are considered resilient - and resiliency is a hot topic in human psychology right now.

But have you ever wondered about resilience in dogs?

Dogs are also impacted by trauma and stress and there are science-based methods to help them develop resilience.

The ASPCA Professional is offering a webinar - Building Resilience in Dogs - on Thursday September 15th.

The webinar will provide tools to help dogs who are stressed or traumatized, who have lost their families or homes, or been victims of abuse or neglect.

Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist (CAAB), author and radio host, will offer practical and science-based ways to help dogs develop resilience, no matter what they have been through in the past.

Professionals, including behaviourists and trainers, and volunteers who work with dogs will benefit from this 60-minute webinar, which has been approved for continuing education credits by the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers (CCPDT) and International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants (IAABC).

For more information and to register, visit the ASPCA website.

RESEARCH - Dogs Like Food but Prefer Praise

A recent study offers hope for those pet owners who fear their dogs are freeloaders befriending them for food and place to live.

Although kibble is clearly very appetizing, it would appear many dogs don't view their people as de facto food factories according to the study highlighted in the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Journal.

Instead, the findings show most dogs put through extensive testing - and when given the choice - prefer praise from their owners over food.

“We are trying to understand the basis of the dog-human bond and whether it’s mainly about food or about the relationship itself,” Gregory Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist and lead author of the research told the journal.

“Out of the 13 dogs that completed the study, we found that most either preferred praise from their owners over food or they appeared to like both equally. Only two of the dogs were real chow hounds, showing a strong preference for the food.”

The study combined brain-imaging data with behavioural experiments to try to analyze canine reward preferences.

Dogs were trained to correlate three different objects with particular outcomes; A pink toy truck signalled a food reward, a blue toy knight signalled verbal praise from the owner and a hairbrush was added as a control garnering no reward.

The dogs underwent 32 trials to see how they reacted to the objects while in an MRI machine so their neural activity could be recorded.

The results showed all the dogs had a “stronger neural activation for the reward stimuli compared to the stimulus that signalled no reward.”

Four dogs showed a particularly strong activation for the stimulus that signalled praise from their owners while nine showed similar neural activation for both the praise stimulus and food stimulus.

A minority, two dogs, consistently showed more activation when shown the stimulus for food.

Research subject Ozzie

Ozzie, a terrier mix, was the only dog who chose food over his owner’s praise 100 percent of the time.

“Ozzie was a bit of an outlier but Ozzie’s owner understands him and still loves him,” Berns told the journal.

In another experiment, dogs were faced with a Y-shaped maze and had a choice to take the path to a bowl of food or one to their owner who would offer praise.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the dogs stayed in character, so to speak, and demonstrated responses similar to those in the first experiment.

“Most dogs alternated between food and owner, but dogs with the strongest neural response to praise chose to go to their owners 80 to 90 percent of the time,” Berns told the journal.

“It shows the importance of social reward and praise to dogs. It may be analogous to how we humans feel when someone praises us.”

The findings are in stark contrast to famous studies done by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s which showed dogs can be trained to associate a particular stimulus with food and will salivate in the mere presence of the stimulus in anticipation of the treat.

While the so-called Pavlovian response is certainly compelling, Berns says there is increasing evidence dogs might be motivated by more than kibbles.

“One theory about dogs is that they are primarily Pavlovian machines: They just want food and their owners are simply the means to get it,” he says.

“Another, more current, view of their behaviour is that dogs value human contact in and of itself.”

The Berns’ lab is currently exploring the ability of dogs, which are “hypersocial with humans,” to process and understand human language.

“Their integration into human ecology makes dogs a unique model for studying cross-species social bonding,” Berns explains.

By Nadia Moharib

Nadia is an animal lover who has adopted everything from birds to hamsters, salamanders, rabbits, fish and felines. She has written about all-things-pets for years and was a long-time editor of a pet magazine in a daily newspaper which featured a Q & A column, Ask Whit, penned by her pooch (ghost written, of course.) The serial dog owner lives in Calgary, Alberta and most days can be found at a dog park picking up after her rescue pooch, Scoots.

Pet and Prisoner Programs Thriving

Metal bars cannot separate the complex bond between humans and animals.

Pet therapy – be it cuddling kittens, petting pooches or working with horses – has become a thriving industry and is eliciting a positive response as it works its way through the therapy regimes in North American prison systems.

The Metropolitan Correction Center in Lower Manhattan, NY is on the verge of launching its own ‘pooch pilot program’, created by Kimberly Collica-Cox, an associate professor at Pace University’s Criminal Justice Department.

The 14-week pilot project is slated to launch January 2017 and is designed for incarcerated women with children. Two dogs will be used to reunite prison moms with their children in six-hour reunion sessions at the correctional center.

Cost for the program is budgeted at $250,000 over the two-year pilot period.

“The women are in need of programming,” said Collica-Cox. “There's a real need for having dogs. They really have this interest in having animals come into the facility.”

Due to their overwhelmingly positive reception, pet-prisoner initiative programs have become staple programs in some institutions.

The Prison Pet Partnership (PPP) at the Washington Corrections Center for Women – a maximum security facility - connects  unwanted dogs with inmates for three-month cycles. The belief is that the prisoners will relate to the unwanted animal and be given purpose by providing love and nurturance to an animal otherwise unloved.

Through the relationship she builds with her assigned dog, it is believed the inmate will garner both life and job skills and gain a sense of self-worth or confidence boost to see beyond her present circumstances.

(Washington State Corrections Center for Women)

The women also work with training service dogs.

It started under the leadership of Sister Pauline Quinn in 1991, with the idea that these prisoners could assist in training these dogs to work with persons with disabilities.

Once an inmate is assigned a dog, that canine then becomes her full-time responsibility. Senior program participant inmates teach tricks of the trade to program newcomers.

The inmate gains skills. The dog becomes trained for service.

Since its inception, the program has been viewed a ‘huge success’ and hundreds of dogs have gone through the program and been placed into the community as service, seizure and therapy dogs. It has been referred to as a ‘model’ for other pet-prisoner initiatives.

Most states continue to offer some type of dog training and/or adoption programs in prisons.

Even from the inside, dog remains (wo)man’s best friend.

By Lindsay Seewalt

Lindsay is an experienced journalist and mother of three whose heart and home is always open to a four-legged friend. With her Corgi, Angie, as household editor-in-chief, Lindsay gives back to the animal planet through the written word on anything and all ado about pets. She is passionate about topics regarding animal welfare and responsible pet ownership, which she aims to instill in both her readers and children to be compassionate animal lovers who are conscious and considerate that furry friends around the globe deserve a voice.