A K9 Cop Saved Game Warden's Life!

Now these dogs that you're training, Phoebe was very interesting listening to how effective using Belgian Malmoise that we're using? Yeah primarily our main dogs are Belgian Mal. Those are powerful dogs Mal. They are amazing. They're so smart. You look in their eyes and they're like hey man. You can see it right? They're like hey man how you doing? They're not like looking at a poodle. No they're not like looking at our labs. They're like right through you. They're like right through you. Looking at you with that sweet little face. Yeah, no those dogs. Yeah. The thing that's cool about these dogs and I can't talk enough about it man because no matter where you sit everybody loves a good dog story. And you know some people say well dual purpose you got to bite guys. What's with that? Is it really aggressive? And when you look at it it's a lifesaver for everybody. It's a lifesaver for us. It's a lifesaver for the suspect too because it usually involves a potential gunfight that the dog basically you know alleviated because she or he was there. So we got our canine program in agency going kind of full speed around 2008-ish. We have three levels of canine. We have like the companion right along canine that kind of does everything with you. She's never going to bite anybody and that's Apollo. That's like my lab right? And then we have the detection level dog and most of those are Labradors like Marshall like Apollo because labs have such amazing noses. They really can hold on scent. You know they can train to detect many scents and we certify them in different things. And then there's the Phoebes you know the Belgian Mals or the Shepherds and really it's become mostly Mals now in our agency. Why Mals or the Shepherds? They just do better in the heat. You know the Shepherds are longer haired and we're in 100 degree weather. We're on long hikes you know we're unsupported and those dogs might have to sit quietly after hiking eight miles and sit in a prone quietly while we're watching and observing and stalking and on suspects to make an apprehension and arrest safely and hopefully avoid a gunfight. And we've also found with the Mals like I said they just hold up better on average and there's certainly exceptions to that. But when we got our dual purpose program back on track these are dogs that will bite when they need to on command but they have great noses. So they'll still detect wonderfully you know finding evidence, finding tainted weed, whatever the case may be a firearm, a baragold bladder, all of that. But they'll also you know like Phoebe was nicknamed the Fur Missile because when it was time for her to go to work and some guy was going to pull a weapon on us she was all business. And the cool thing about a dog like her and Mike Ritlin and I got into this on his show especially and he was blown away. He said I've never heard of a dog in a domestic law enforcement team that's had like she had 116 apprehension bites in her career and she had 116. No joke joke. So there's 116 cartel guys out there telling stories about this dog. Yeah they're saying no more pero. I've been bit too many times. But the cool thing about that was the standpoint of life she saved and she also arrested another 8 to 900 that she didn't have to bite in her career. That's a lot. How many of you guys arrested? When I retired we were over a thousand. Wow. In five and a half years. Yeah and we and again it's. All these are all grow ups. All grow ups. Yeah these are all grow ups are related to grow ups. So the. These are all guys that are armed. All guys that have knives or guns you know. You're not getting bit unless you know you're a deadly force threat on some level or a significant threat. So yeah it's been a lot of guys. So that number that you're talking about 10,000 that really is conservative. I think very much so. Yeah. That is so insane because if you fly over like Humboldt or any any of these areas like particularly Metasino Northern California. The density of the forest and the public land out there. There's a lot of land. There's a lot of land and a lot of you know potential we're not seeing. So and that's still still thriving. So when you you know when you when you look at Phoebe as a canine and you go well let's see she was in the field doing these type operations for about seven or eight years. And yeah that's great from a record standpoint and numbers and the life she saved but it gives you like a like a snapshot of the issue. How many of you guys did we not catch that we're out there armed right that we weren't involved in. You know we weren't involved. So and the dogs have just saved lives man. They have saved Phoebe. I go into this in the new book especially in 2012 but right before our team started Phoebe saved my life Brian's life and all these other operators in Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley right where I grew up because she engaged a guy that was pulling a Russian automatic pistol on me and I was the support for the for Brian. I was basically as canine handler or support guy and Brian had to deal with this other growers partner that had a big Taurus judge revolver on his hip and he was pulling it. So he goes for that guy and says John just take my dog and Phoebe's on the bite and he's biting this guy in the calf and you know this guy's nose down and we don't know he's got this weapon and I start to see it coming out and I get on him and I do what I need to do with some physical control and some strikes and whatnot to get the gun out of his hand. But had she not been on that guy on a bite show that guns turned on me at five feet. I'm engaged all the rathlimon behind me. I'm you know I'm in a gunfight again. We've been in too many of those already. How many gunfights you've been in? Our team's been in six and I've been on the ground for four out of the six that our guys have been involved in and they've all been around this particular problem. We had a lot less once the team got formalized and so we started using dogs but we still had two during the window of the team being operational that we couldn't avoid and dogs played a big part in that as I go into in the new stories. It is so crazy. I'm going to be a little bit of a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. I'm going to be a bitch. 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