Dry Side Dispatch • September 18th • Nathan Hall

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Hello everyone. Welcome back to the dry side. Dispatch brought to you by HSI Water. I'm here today with Andy and Tillery. We got the whole gang together, whole crew's all here. Andy just got back from Wyoming, Montana.
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Nice family trip.
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Yep.
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Getting up there and missed the only
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rain we've had here in like three months. I was gone for it.
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It's the biggest rain I've had in the Vineyard since the first of July. No.
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Yeah, it seemed like it was pretty widespread.
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It was kind of hit and miss in some spots you'd go through and it'd be pretty good and not be pretty good in other places. But anyway, we have a really exciting guest today. Yes, we have with us Nathan hall. Who is, what is your title? Are you the director of the Human Animal Interaction Lab at Tech?
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Yeah, so that's somewhat self appointed, but I'm an associate professor is my main title.
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I'm going to call you the director
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Companion Animal Science and then I assign myself as a director of, we call the K9 Olfaction Research and Education Lab.
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Well, it is. Well, you know, looking back at what you've done and reading some of the, some publications you've done is really, really interesting. Which. But give us a brief, give us a, let's start off with, let's just go with a brief overview of what the K factory and what you do with it and we'll start from there.
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Well, some people might need to know what old factory is.
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That's what old people are doing something, isn't it?
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Yeah, old factory.
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Old factory, yeah, it's a big word. But sense of smell. So dog sense of smell. So sniffer dogs, detection dogs, all things related to that. And we have a couple kind of three different missions. One is research. So we do a lot of research to try and improve the performance of detection dogs. So things that relate to your detector dog at the airport trying to stop things from coming through internationally or your detector dog at the TSA line. So we work on how do we improve the training and performance of those dogs as well as what dogs can do and just trying to fundamentally understand what is their sense of smell, how good is it compared to ours? What can they detect, what can't they detect? Can they detect plant pathogens or plant disease and how early in that stage can they do it? So that's kind of our research arm, our education arm is that we do a lot of classes. So if you're a student at Tech in animal science, you can take companion animal behavior and training, you can Take advanced animal training and you can take a dog training practicum. So if you need to go back to school, if you're one of those students, you would come out to our lab and you would work and learn how to train dogs by training dogs. Right. There's. I can teach you so much about animal behavior, but until there's a dog in front of you and you actually learn how to do things, you can't do it. So that's why we have the students come out and work with the dogs there. So that's sort of our education. And then our other is more outreach. So then the dogs that participate in our program, we're kind of like a halfway house for dogs. So they kind of. They either come from Lubbock Animal Services or they're dropouts from federal programs. So dogs that were initially selected to become working dogs for some type of program, but they didn't meet the cut for one reason or another. So some of them, for example, might be afraid of escalators. Terrible in the airport, but for 99.9% of other scenarios it doesn't make a difference. So they come to our program and then the students train the dogs on obedience. They learn how to train them in a variety of things. They participate in our research so that we learn how to improve the performance of the dogs, know who are operational. And then those dogs get adopted out at the end of that semester so that they either go out as pets in the community or we'll then move them off into working homes that would best fit. So like we have dogs that go off for fish and wildlife. We have dogs that go off for narcotics detection, explosives detection.
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Well, dogs that are afraid of escalators can always go to Wyoming. I think there's only one escalator in the entire state.
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Yeah, that'd be a perfect place for them. Fish and wildlife actually end up being really good opportunities for them. Do like anti poaching type of activities.
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Wow.
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You know, those dogs that work in airports are more amazing, I think that people give them credit for because they're. I mean you go different. You know, there's. They got the. Every thinks about. Well they're going to sniff for bombs or they're sniffing for drugs or something like that. But some of their sniffing for fruit.
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Yes, yes, I've seen that at the border too where they're sniffing through all the food, the fruit that comes in and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's amazing.
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USDA and border patrol, they do a lot of. And there are different Airport dogs. So some airport dogs are looking for explosives. And then there are other airport dogs, particularly if you're going through any international terminal. They are primarily looking for fruit and all different kinds of things that people try to smuggle in, one reason or another. That can become the next invasive species that could have catastrophic impact.
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Yes.
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The next new world screw worm.
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Exactly.
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Right.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I always get nervous when I. I've never, I've never brought anything like that back. But like, every time I walk by those dogs, I'm like, man, did somebody put something in my luggage? Because you have to get your luggage, you know, and go through the international terminal and check it and all again, you're just like, it's like, don't look at me. Don't look. Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact.
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Oh, my go.
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So you were talking a little bit before we went on the air. How did you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you went to? Canine olfactory and animal behavior.
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Yeah. So I started off like what most, I guess, young kids do, if you like animals. And then really the only, like visual job or career opportunity is becoming a veterinarian. So for, I'd say all the way up through about my junior year of college, I wanted to be a veterinarian. And at that point I discovered that research was a completely separate option so you can study and learn about animals. And then I learned that animal behavior was an option, which just wasn't. I wasn't exposed to beforehand. I hadn't gone to college, none of us in my family had gone to college. So I didn't really know about any of those kinds of things. So then I got involved in that and I fell in love. I liked the research is always about taking a question that nobody knows the answers to and figuring it out. And it's one of those things that's like, very frustrating at times because it's kind of like getting an engine. Right. And then having to rebuild it, but without any instruction manual. You gotta figure it out yourself. And the only way to do it is by testing things and going, well, that didn't work, right?
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Yes.
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You just gotta have to reconstruct it how it is. And that's. That's kind of what we do.
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The only thing bad about it is like an engine at least doesn't conspire against you.
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Yes.
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It doesn't figure out how to train you at the same time.
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Right, right. So you kind of have to like, do your best to reverse engineer thing. But it means that every day is different, which is great. It's trying to figure out new problems. So I fell in love with that. And then trying to understand animal behavior, I thought, well, if we're going to understand dogs, and we should understand the dog sense of smell, Right? Because everyone talks about, that's what it's called. Their world is around their sense of smell. And there just wasn't a lot of research out there. We know a lot of things about a lot of different animals in a lot of different ways, but almost nothing about our dog's sense of smell. And then what I started to find out is that most of the things that we do know, we're just made up. We're just people.
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Anecdotal type stuff.
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You know, things that you hear about. Like the dog, you know, has 10,000 times better sense of smell than humans. What people also don't say is that, well, for some odors, humans actually have a better sense of smell than dogs. Or that a dog can detect one drop in an Olympic sized swimming pool of something.
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Oh, yes. Yeah.
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But humans can too. And it depends on what the odor is. It's actually a much more complex and colorful situation than what people say. Now, that isn't to say that dogs do not have an amazing smell of smell. They most certainly do. And there's a lot of reasons for it. But it's a much more complicated answer than a singular number would give.
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Right.
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And I like those problems. I like those.
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Yeah. Well. And I think we found out, like, the more we sit here and talk
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to people, the more we realize everything's more complicated.
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Everything is complicated.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Everything's complicated. So where did you grow up? Did you go to school at Tech?
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No, I'm from Florida originally.
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Okay.
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So I went to University of Florida.
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Okay.
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Go Gators.
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Right?
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Yeah. Skaters. We'll see how this year's football.
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Yeah.
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Last couple years, we haven't talked about it.
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We feel your pain. Yeah.
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When I started. Well, because I went during the. I was a student during the Tebow years. Okay. So that was like the expectation.
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Oh, yeah.
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But now Tech is completely swapped. I don't know where the Gators are.
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I'm looking forward to.
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We'll see what happens tonight.
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I can actually go into a season actually bragging without, you know, waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall on our team. Yeah. So what was your first dog growing up?
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First dog. So actually, I think the reason why I fell in love with dogs is because I was denied dogs. Oh, my goodness. 10 or 12 years. So actually, wow. In terms of owning dogs, I owned my first dog the second I went to college.
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So as soon as you get out, you're like, I'm buying a dog.
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Yep.
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Yep. What'd you get?
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I got a. So this is my theory. Whenever this was before, genetic testing of your dogs was really a thing. So I don't know. But we were in Florida and a lot of people were breeding some type of like boxer pointer mixes for dogs. And we just picked her up from the shelter and that's what she looked like. So that was the story I went with, is that she was probably some type of hunting dog origin, some type of. Of combo there, but no idea.
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Was that back when they start. Had they started using them for hunting iguanas at that point in time yet?
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This would have been because we were up in Gainesville, so iguanas weren't a thing there. That would have been much more further down to south.
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Yeah.
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To be honest, I don't really know when the iguanas became the problem back then. Was the pythons still the problem?
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Still a problem.
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But now, now I guess people have just given up to some.
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That's a real deal.
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They actually made some pretty good progress on that.
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I wonder if they have dogs help them find them.
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They do, they do. Out of Auburn were some of the first groups that trained them. And we actually have a program right now that my postdoc is working on is dogs detecting different snakes, trying to understand that not all snakes not just smell the same, but have different levels of odor.
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You know, the old timers always said you can smell rattlesnakes. Have you heard that before? That they had give off some kind of weird odor or whatever.
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I know, I know dogs can because, I mean, there are some diamondbacks, not
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the little bitty rattlers. We have out those Perry rattlers, but
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the big ones, some of them, I mean, there's steak. Snake avoidance training is a pretty big deal.
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Yeah.
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But some of them do. But there's a guy that I watch on YouTube, his name is Eric Forster and he has German wire hair pointers. And one of his. A dog from his kennel is on another YouTube channel and he's the python cowboy.
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Oh my gosh. Oh, I'm sorry. I gotta look this up.
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That's pretty cool. It's pretty. It's pretty cool. I only heard. You have to. You have to know the guy's name, the kennel owner's name, and the kennel owner's dogs, which I do, because I watch him hunt, but he, that was amazing watching those dogs sit there and you know, somebody would shoot a, shoot one, he would dive off, off and chase it, go out there.
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I love going back in, in the history of dogs and like, you know, maybe 200 years ago, like you think, oh, this dog was just like that. Well, no, they were bred, you know. And what's the most unique type of breeding that you think happened back in the day? You know, they had like, you know, they have little, you know, they have short legs. They could get in holes and go. The rat terriers could go do that and then had great big dogs that you know, fought off coyotes. What do you think? Like as far as, like the breeds of dogs? Like as far as like them being good at a specific task? Because you see like Belgian Malawise, you see German shepherds and stuff in the airport a lot and labs.
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Yep.
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So that's a, that's a whole nother one of those.
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I know, I know. Question. Yeah, well, hey, we got a long time to talk, so I thought I throw it out there.
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So dog breeding and breeds in general, there's. So that is one area where there has been some sort of scientific research recently on and it's super interesting because most of the breeds that we know of now today really originated from Victorian era England is when a bunch of people got together and everyone developed their own breed for their own kind of.
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They had their own kennels just like they had their own stables.
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And for thousands of years before that, dogs were just sort of dogs. They've always been a relatively like heterogeneous population of different kinds of mixtures. But then most of the breeds that we would recognize, hundreds of different breeds, were really developed in a very short period of time. And a lot of them were originally quite functional. And I think that's where we start seeing that differentiation between your different kinds of hunting dogs. But then there was sort of another like movement or change that's really happened over the last 50 years and that's been more totally by looks, where people have been very, very driven by the looks of the dogs. Confirmation of specific looks. And that's where like you know, the pugs, the bulldogs, bulldogs went from a very functional breed to a nice way to put it to a less functional, capable kind of animal. Now behaviorally, interestingly enough, most of the differences are and a lot of the differences that we think of don't actually hold up to scientific scrutiny really. So in terms of like the sense of smell. So you'd say what Are the dogs with the best sense of smell. So we tested German shepherds as a prototype sort of working dog. We tested greyhounds as a big old dog bred for work, but nothing to do with their sense of smell. And then pugs, dogs who you would think would have no reason to be able to smell.
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Exactly.
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They barely breathe, sound like beastie.
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So we were looking just for some type of dog that we were like, this dog definitely couldn't do do well, so that we would be able to see some differences. Because in terms of actual detection capabilities by breeds, there was almost no research, nothing written down and studied before then. And to our much surprise, the pugs won out, really. Pugs actually beat the German shepherds in their ability to learn the odor. And then we're like, well, maybe the pugs are just, like, greedier. They're more motivated for the food that we were using at the time. So we taught them on, like, a. Just a visual task, kind of like this, either a tall cup or a short cup. And the idea was, well, if the pugs were greedier, they would just learn everything better, Right? Compared to the German shepherds, It turns out that was not true. The German shepherds and the pugs learned the visual task at exactly the same rate. The only thing that was different is that the pugs learned the olfactory task even faster. Then we thought, well, what if we dilute the odor? Maybe it was because the odor was too strong and the pugs were just too close to it, and that's why they did better. And the pugs even did better at the dilution of the German shepherds. So across everything that we could find.
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Well, maybe it's because there's less distance from their nose and their brain.
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I think it. I mean, it's like a shorter route.
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I've been sitting here trying to think. When you started talking about dogs and smell, what the heck was it that used to be? Back when we were kids, it was like, that was the dog. Oh, it's bloodhound.
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Bloodhound. Bloodhound, yeah. So there's a lot of things out there in terms of the bloodhound and why the bloodhound is so much better. Can I give you any documented evidence as to why that is the case? No, none exists, as far as I'm aware.
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Yeah.
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In terms of the scientific literature, I think a lot of what ends up why some of the breed differences feel so super strong out there is because there are preferences, and we have these beliefs ahead of time. So then we just.
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Confirmation bias.
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Put Them on. Right. So if, if I, if you were just going to start into I want a detection dog, you would think I need a Malinois. I would think I would need a German Shepherd. I would need a.
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And if you've ever had. I understand why now, why people do. If the lab and a Malin wall both have the same old factory capabilities, like owning a Malinois, we kept, we had our daughter had possession one for a while. That dog is like the smartest but the most difficult dog to take care of in a lab. If it's going to do the same job, you would rather have the lab. Unless you're a seal jumping out of a airplane with the Mali wall strapped to your chest.
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So a lot of times those choices are driven by things less than the sense of smell.
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Like
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there's actually. In the 1950s when the idea of detection dogs was really starting to come up, they did some work to figure out what is our dogs even the best species. Oh, turns out pigs.
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Yeah. Because they use them for truffles.
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Exactly.
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So pigs are actually quite exceptional and they were able to detect odors at the greatest depths in comparison to any other animals.
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I believe it.
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But then there's like, there's a passage in, in the report there was like, all right, pigs are the best, but right. You're not going to do some type of like high altitude jump with a pig strapped to you and then pop the pig on the leash and then start going into any type of tactical situation.
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You're not going to necessarily go particularly quick on most domesticated pigs either.
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Exactly.
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It's not, they're not exactly speed demons domestically.
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So dogs have a remarkable relationship with humans that undeniable that most people do not develop with their pigs or at
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least not I do with bacon though.
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And their just ability to move, counter move and navigate environments and trainability, sociability, their ability to actually respond to our cues and our like learn about our social behaviors is really what makes the dogs very, very exceptional in those areas. And then yeah, when it comes to breeds, a lot of them chosen completely functionally and some of them are, if we're going to do a crowd facing scenario, we want a floppy ear friendly looking dog. A lot of times is a choice where people will go. If I will also have a dog that will be doing patrol duties, then I don't want a Labrador for that situation. Something that looks scary, but it's less to do with their sense of smell because as far as we've been able to determine, there's Actually very little breed related differences between that. It seems like dog olfaction was a evolutionary step that occurred before that Victorian breeding process.
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So you could find the same olfactory quality then in a lack of a better term a mutt, something that's like really crossbred. And then when you do that, can you with through DNA testing and stuff have been able to go back and find out any kind of point where that happened or if you, hey, if this dog is 25% of this breed or whatever, it's going to have a better chance?
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Yeah. So that's a great question. So we've put in proposals that have all been denied. I don't have a strong answer for you, but I can tell you because we've worked with a bunch of dogs in our program and we've done detection thresholds or the minimum concentrations of the dogs can detect of different things. And our mixed breeds attribute or fold in just the highest categories as. So they. There's kind of like a nice distribution. Humans actually have a much wider distribution typically between your best and your worst. Human is easily a thousand fold. In our dogs it's closer to about 100 to 200 fold. So they tend to all be a bit more narrow. But your mixed breed dogs kind of fall all between there and then. Unfortunately, because olfaction as life. Olfaction is an important thing for life, we discount it as humans and we don't think it's important. And you don't realize how important it is until did anyone lose their sense of smell and Covid.
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Yeah.
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And then life is different.
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Yeah. Food is like blah Kings can't smell it.
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You don't realize how much it is.
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But people.
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And I have another anecdote of the story of people where she was cooking up some food and everyone came home and was like, what are you doing? Are you trying to kill us?
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Yeah.
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Horrible because they just, just totally lost the ability to smell that the meat has gone bad. So olfaction is such an important sense and we often discount it. But evolutionarily it's spread across our entire genome. So we have genes that are different olfactory receptors. And dogs have about 600 functional ones. Humans have about 350 functional ones. But it's all across your entire genome. It's not just one dedicated area, it's not just one gene. It's so robust that that means that there's going to be a lot of natural variation between people and individuals. But very rarely can you ever connect a single genetic thing to a. I can't smell this. There's only a handful of instances.
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Do you ever see, like, smell olfactory aversion? And I'm going to use this. I'll use an example in humans. Cilantro. Some people love cilantro. Some people hate. Can't stand it at all. So, like, if you have, say it's a papaya that you're trying to teach it to smell or whatever. Right. Like. And one dog may, like, be averse to it.
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Yes. You see that income, definitely. So there's really.
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In the dogs.
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Yeah, so in the dogs. And it depends on what it is. But there. There are two kind of reasons for that. So one of them is the cilantro. One is actually a well mapped. And that one is when I was saying there's only a handful of situations where we have a genetic relationship to a specific perception that is actually one of them. Oh. There is essentially one singular mutation that basically makes it taste like soap.
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Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
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Yep. So that one is actually well documented. There's really only like three of them out there, but. Yeah, that's funny.
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Well, the reason I say that is because, like, I was with my wife's family and like all her and her sister and her brother, they all hate cilantro.
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So that one is a very clear one. But then in terms of, like, aversions. So when we are smelling things, there's two different olfactory pathways. There's. There's three, actually, but the main one is you smell something, there are receptors in there, it gets detected and then you perceive it as a smell. The other one is what we call sort of trigeminal activation, where the same types of chemicals or olfactory odorants can activate your trigeminal nerve, which is one of your sort of cranial nerves. And it's through a different mechanism, but it's that if you've ever smelled something but like, feel it, or like a wintergreen, or like if your tongue.
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You start to salivate when you smell something.
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Yeah. And if you just kind of like feel like a little twinkly kind of thing. So that is the trigeminal system. And all olfactory odorants for some degree will activate that trigeminal system.
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Okay.
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So some much stronger trigeminal activators, but those are the things that if you smell like a vinegary and you're like in your nose, or like if you
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go on the Joe Rogan show and he makes you do the smell. And salt. Have you seen that?
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Exactly. Just like, so very strong trigeminal activator.
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Okay.
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And so dogs, there are definitely certain odors that seem to create that exact same response. And you will see them really. And then their noses will kind of twirl up and then they'll turn away. And typically is with high concentrations.
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So.
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But there are a handful of situations where we have seen that. And yeah, they'll have a clear aversion
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to it because you'll see it. Sometimes I'm like, you know, if it's a Instagram reel or tick tock or whatever and somebody will be like, hand their dog something, they just kind of like, like you say they do it and they turn away immediately. They can't stand it.
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Yep. So some of that could be like olfactory, but then a preference. But a lot of times it's got. It's probably something that's a trigeminal activator. And it. And the point of like spicy wintergreen, those things are basically to like turn away. We learn to like them. Right. We learn. If you like spicy food. We learn, you learn to like it and develop that. But for some, if it's the first exposure to it, that a lot of times that's a spontaneous response.
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Huh.
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It's so. Wow.
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So I, I listen to. Listen to podcasts all the time. So always, I quote, I listen to a podcast and it was talking about how human senses are trained. Like we are trained basically in our culture. And so I know that that is absolutely true because we went to pick up, we adopted our son from China when he was 12. And so he was old enough to have a very set sense of smell. And his food does not smell good to me and my food does not smell good to him. And he's been here 10 years and it has not changed.
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Yep.
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And I think that is fascinating.
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Yeah. So all, all sensory systems are very dependent on learning and olfaction seems to be extremely dependent on learning.
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It's like everything. Everybody's born at neutral and when you hear someone say that smells bad, like that's your learning.
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So a good example of that is a lot of what we think is occurring is just actually purely learned kinds of things. And like if you go to Bath and Body Works or you go to a candle shop and like an experience for me is if you ever sniff the different candles and people go through all the different candles, you ever sniff one, you're like, that smells like sickly sweet or super sweet.
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Yeah.
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And sugar doesn't smell right. Sugar in itself is a non volatile. The only thing you smell when you open up a bag of sugar is contaminants, byproducts of the actual refinement of the sugar. And so then the question is, how does something smell sweet if sweet doesn't actually have smell? And the answer is, because whenever you've had something sweet, there's probably a 90% probability that vanilla has been paired with that. So what you're smelling is vanilla. And then you have immediately associated that with a sweet perception so that it smells sweet. But in reality, if you were to taste it, it doesn't at all. Or if, like, if you open up, like vanilla extract.
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Oh, right. Oh, absolutely.
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Oh, this smells so good. Taste it next time. Just a little bit. Taste it next time and see if it's sweet.
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Right.
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Depending how much you like vodka, it might be pretty good.
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Exactly, exactly. It does. Not at all, because it's not. But it's a learned association that you develop.
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So can you unlearn?
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So you can unlearn. It tends to take time, but it also tends to take, like, a lot of experience and what ends up happening, like going back to the situation with different kinds of foods. So a lot of eastern cultures have a lot of fish heavy diets, which typically produces a lot of amine groups. So that's to us what we would smell as fishy. And a lot of westerners, that's a very unattractive smell and flavor profile. Whereas, you know, like, for me, I'm the same way. You add fish sauce to something, I'd be like, why did you ruin it? Right. And other people are like, oh, it's so good. Exactly.
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Make sure you don't.
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That's what makes sure you don't leave
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the fish sauce out of this recipe. Because it'll, you know.
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Exactly. So. So you can learn to like it. But the problem is, is that if you have an aversion to it, you don't learn to like it. Because if you put fish sauce in it, do I learn? You know, do I get experience? And I'm like, wow, this is really good. I say, no, thank you.
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Right.
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So you don't. You don't get that because you don't
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want to eat it because you're like, no, thanks.
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So it's a lot. We're. We grow grapes and have made wine for 20 years, you know, and so, like, what you're talking about, to me, it sounds a lot like. So we deal with people that are like master sommeliers, right? Like, they set the standard for what this specific wine from this specific region should come to. And so when people are learning, those experts, which there's only like 200 active in the world, they'll get a wine that they say this is the classic, this is the standard. And so they'll send samples out. And what they would do they, before COVID they would have a class and you would all sit in class, they would pour the wine and they would. Well, after Covid they're like, well, we can't meet so we're just going to send you the samples and we'll do it on Zoom. But like a lot of people that think like, you know stuff like 2 Buck, Chuck and Menagerie and Josh are like the standard for wines, we leave their completely concocted wines. I mean they're manipulated so that no matter what the vintage was, the wine tastes the same all the time. Because when somebody buys a ten dollar bottle of wine, they expect it to taste the same. A lot of it's sugar. But it's interesting to where like I'll sit in on classes where, where people will be saying, well you can smell, you know, this is raised around sage and you can smell the sage in the wine. I'm just like, I don't smell that. Like, I don't know, let me taste. You know, but, but so you get the. But the first thing you do online is you smell it. And so, but the main thing they're smelling for the first is for false. False. Like whether it's Brett or BA or different things, you know, something that happened to the wine, it messed it up. And so when you were talking about the breeds of dogs, while I go, I, I got thinking about there's a dog show that comes on after Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade around Christmas or whatever and the guy talks about the dog, you know, and so it does, it's like, it's all about when you set a standard for like the dogs. It's like it's, it's this has to be this size and look this way and like that way and it's like, so they, it's all standardized and they kind of do the same thing with the olfactory senses and wine is that they say this is the standard. No matter what you think, if you think it tastes good or if you don't smell it, we decided this is the standard. So, you know, and a lot of older people can still smell that. What about dogs as they age, did their olfactory senses increase or decrease?
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Yeah, that's a really interesting one because so we've been trying to play around with it a little bit. There is some suggestions that like people, olfaction will decline with age. But it's not just olfaction declines with age. What's really interesting is that it's a very strong marker of neurocognitive decline. So not just I'm getting older.
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I think I've heard that before.
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Parkinson's. Parkinson's. Alzheimer's.
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Yeah.
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And any other type of early neurocognitive decline. One of the first signs of that is a decreased sense of.
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That's interesting. I heard that before.
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And in fact, it's. It's not like a great prediction. But you know, there's a silly kind of test, but it's somewhat predictive of things is that it's called the peanut butter test. Is you take a scoop of peanut butter, close your eyes, and you have someone hold it how far away from your nose until they recognize peanut butter.
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It's kind of like your peripheral vision. Like, tell me when you can see this.
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Exactly, exactly. Exactly. And if the person's like right here and you don't smell peanut butter, there's a decent chance that it might be an indicator of developing neurocognitive.
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That's really interesting because I. So I.
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People are now running for their pantries. Looking at people.
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Yeah, exactly. I. I associate like my things. Memories come back to me based on smells. And sometimes I'm like stuck somewhere smelling something, going where, where? You know what I mean? Like, it's just stuck in the back of my mind.
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So there's a. There's a name for that. It's called Proust memories because. And I think that's like late 1800s was basically the description of. A lot of times you have very vivid memories of olfactory specific stimuli.
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Yes.
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So olfaction, as I talked about, is evolutionary. Very, very old. It's a very primal sense. Pretty much almost every animal of some sort has an olfactory capability. But also in our brain, it's located to near memory centers and near emotional centers. And it's very highly connected to those like early evolutionary steps in our brains. So is it the same.
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Is it the same in dogs?
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Okay, yeah.
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So it's pretty well conserved across. So a lot of times there's a bit of scientific debate on how like true the prowess memories are across the board. But it does seem that olfaction is a really important thing for memories. And yeah, that's not an uncommon description. And also to be able to remember things by smell, or you smell something, you're like, that's a Smell from my grandmother.
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Oh, my gosh. No, I still. We've been living in our house for 10 years, and I'm not sure how long the people there was one couple that lived in it from 1976 till we bought it, which was like 10, 15 years ago. So we've been living there almost 15 years. And when I walk in the door, I can still smell.
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Yeah, I was about to say that. Especially when you've been gone for a while. Yeah, like, we were just gone for like seven or eight days, and we walked back in the house and like, does our house. House really smell like this? Like, it. It wasn't bad smell. It just like. I don't remember our house was smells. I don't. It wouldn't. It's not an old house, but.
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Yeah, but I mean, ours is still. I mean, we've painted every wall, we've replaced all the flooring, We've remodeled the kitchen, We've remodeled a bathroom. You know what I mean? And so sometimes I just get so shocked when I walk in and I'm like, it still smells like the hornax. That's who lived there before. And every time I open the door, I'm like, welcome to the Horn Axe house.
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So as you're training the. Go through and describe a little bit of the training process of when you're working with them to train it.
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Yeah. So it's positive reinforcement based is the main way that you do it, mostly because what you're trying to create is that positive association with that odor. So you want the dog to be seeking out what that smell is.
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Right.
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So we have. We actually have videos on our YouTube channel.
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Oh, wait, wait, we have a YouTube channel for this?
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Yeah, we do.
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Yeah.
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Okay, hold on.
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So we have. Oh, N.J. hall. One, I think, is J.
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Hall N J, H, A L L.
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If not, I'll find it one.
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But
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so we. One of the things that we've developed our automated systems to present odors to dogs so that you can present a very precise odor in a controlled situation, and then have the dog stick its nose in, detect that odor, and then make a behavioral response, and then it actually will score that for us. That's what we do for a lot of our laboratory work. So we'll have different little ports where the dogs can stick their nose in, and then one of them will have a particular odor they get their nose in, and then we deliver a treat or toy or certain reinforcer for that. So then they're like, oh, I want to seek out that odor. So they Keep moving their nose across the ports until they find the one that has that. And then we build that stronger and stronger until we develop out whatever we want that final response to be. So in some situations, just a stop, stare and stop and stare is perfect where the dog stops and then just stares, focus right at it and then doesn't move. Sometimes people want to sit. Some people, sometimes people want it down. But I really like to stop and stare because if you worked around pointers, but also a lot of dogs, that is a very natural behavior that they're just willing to give you anyway. So if you're going to try and it makes training a lot easier if you're gonna go with instinct rather than against it.
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Yeah.
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So I try to go with it. I was awesome.
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Yeah. I was listening to podcasting. Well over here about this, this and this lady, she has, she has wire. She doesn't have wire, but she has a Hungarian vicious. But she also has a Rhodesian ridgeback. And if she was talking to another dog, training, like, what are you trying to do? She said, well, one thing I'm trying to do. So I'm so that last summer I taught my Rhodesian rage back to fetch and now we're working on him fetching birds. And they're like, why? He's like, just to see if I can do it. We talk about going against, you know, against predisposition.
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Yeah.
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So when you're, when, when you're looking at training the dog to come in and do this, what, what is the, the best time to start with that kind of stuff? Do you like to start with them young or you like to be adult, you know, two years old and be mature and ready to go or how do you.
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So if I was developing out my dog, you know, Brandt have. You can start as early as possible. So olfaction is one of those senses that the second, actually not even the second, if pre birth olfaction is on board working. So if you've been around puppies, right. 14 days is when they open up their eyes. Vision is still all blurry for quite a few period of time after that. And they're bumping into things all the time. Olfaction's in working in utero, so they can already smell. So there's really no such thing as too early in those cases. In fact, some people have tried doing like early odor imprinting, trying to get them very strong onto that odor, even in those puppy areas. And there is some evidence for that. But there you kind of need to know exactly what you're going to do with your dog. So if it was going to be a hunting dog for, for a specific thing, then that would work out. But if you don't know exactly where this dog is going to go and what's going to be the right path for them, then a lot of times you can start training the basics and mechanics early on. As a puppy. We don't do that because as our sort of, our program, we're trying to support the dogs as they come through. So pretty much all of the dogs that get to us are at least a year and if not older by the time they come to our program. Not because it doesn't work earlier, but it just fits our mission better to be supporting dogs that need that support. And that means that that's pretty much always beyond the puppy years.
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You don't have to create train or house break.
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Yeah, well, sometimes you probably have to do that.
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You don't have to deal with puppy brain a little bit. So it helps with solving some of those puppy brains.
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Puppy breath. Puppies are great. Too bad that they don't just stay tiny kittens or tiny puppies. Some days I figure somebody's, I mean, they already breed them to where they're ridiculously small.
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Yes. Yeah. And it comes with a lot of health problems.
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Yes, yes. Yeah. These are like the, what they call
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the, those designer dogs breeding for looks and then.
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Yes.
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And a lot of, and you know, in the working dog community there's usually pretty clear lines between show lines and working lines. So my dog is, I adopted him from, from our program who was a dropout from a program, but he was purchased by the organization and if I'm walking him down the street, people wouldn't recognize him as a black lab. But he's a European style field lab. And seeing a 40 pound, you know, like tight, pockety kind of black dog just doesn't. People are looking for that hundred pound, big face, big head, fat tail, kind of lab. And it's like, no, he's a black lab. He's just a working block lab.
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Yeah. Kind of thing.
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Oh, that's interesting because a lot of
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times, a lot of that breeding is based off of function. Not necessarily.
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Yes.
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Yeah. It's interesting. You look at when you look into hunting dogs, how many you can almost see and it's the standard conversation that most breeders have is like you can watch the decline of the quality of the hunting dog with how popular they are. Like, and a lot of people, a lot of guys that run German Sherwood Pointers right now are really concerned because German sheriff Shorter pointers are like the number two dog now. The second most popular dog now in the US Is it really?
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I don't really.
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It's some. It's somewhere way high up there. And you know, you say they like, you know, you could see it in labs, labs. People started breeding them. You know, you had everybody in their dog breeding labs. And so you wound up getting just a hodgepodge of traits that were attributed to the lab. And now there's some concern on that. And it's interesting to watch that some of the like there's a breed called a Drawtar, which is another hunting dog that they. To breed a Drawtar and have it registered, you have to, it has to go through and like a certain set of genetic tests and then it has to win a certain number of competitions. And it's tied back to Germany and it's called Deutsch, rather German. I'm not familiar with that. And so anyway, it's a very really niche. I mean you have to like deep dive into some weird podcast to find out about it. But that kind of, you know, watching that. The interesting thing about that though is that no matter how designer it is, because of the, the number of size that that scent of that olfactory centers is on the genome of them, you still, it doesn't seem like it would dilute the genetics of the olfactory capability of the dog anyway.
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Most likely not. Or if it is, it would be very specific because. So the way the olfactory receptors work is it's kind of like a binary code. If you would where so you have like say just 10 different channels just to make it simpler. And each olfactory receptor can detect multiple different types of chemicals. It's not like a one to one relationship. So if you have 10, it doesn't mean you have 10 odors. It means that it detects different features. So sometimes number one will light up or get activated and number seven will get activated. But then you could have. So that would be one combination of one and seven means strawberry. But then like three and four could mean banana and then seven and two could mean apple, even though seven occurs with multiple of them. So even with just 10 different olfactory receptors, you have an enormous amount of potential combinations. Now humans have 350. Now dogs have closer to 600. Elephants have around 2,000. But we don't actually know what that means functionally because it's thought that humans could potentially resolve about a trillion different odors. So then the question is as well, what is that even, like, for the dog, if you're going to almost double that capability, what does that functioning look like? And that's just. It's very difficult to measure.
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I don't even know how. Kudos to you for even trying to figure out how to measure something like that, because I. I can't even remember what it was.
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You know, I've seen a lot of stuff on sharks and stuff. Like they can smell the smell blood in the water. Like, how does that work in yo. Is there any, you know, is it analogous to a dog? I mean, like, I guess there's water involved in that.
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In that scenario, yeah. Actually, that's an interesting question because. So odor moves through air, and air is also considered a fluid. We don't think of it as a fluid because it's air, but actually air is a fluid, like water. In fact, mo a lot of research that understands fluid dynamics or how odors move and how animals navigate is actually done with aquatic animals because it's a lot easier to control water fluid. But it actually works fundamentally the same. Oh, and one of the things that a lot of times we get confused about with dog sense of smell, where if you're running a dog and you're like, man, my dog, like, turned its head and went directly to where the thing was 500 yards away, my dog must have an absolutely amazing sense of smell to be able to detect it from that distance. But what's driving that is wind. So it's about movement of the fluid that a lot of times in real world scenarios, that is most important.
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So that, oh, my goodness, the actual
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concentration of an odor hundreds of yards away might actually be just as strong right at the source because the air is driving it directly in that way.
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So this explains why. So I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts, okay, and they use dogs very frequently. And then there's some people who are like, you know, my dogs, you know, I know it was out there, you know, or. Or they just didn't catch it. Or. And then the next time they went out, they did. That explains a lot of it. Like, like, maybe it's completely still day and there's no breeze at all.
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So under those kind of operational conditions, it can vary so much. So we were doing search and rescue testing. We were doing a study on how dogs find humans in the search and rescue, like, lost environment. And we're doing that out in New Mexico just outside of Albuquerque, and we were doing, like, full field trials outdoors. Usually the dogs were hitting people from 400 yards away. But the problem was is that you would start in the morning at like five mile an hour winds and by the end of the afternoon you're running 25 mile an hour winds. It's a completely different test.
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Yeah.
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And so if you're like trying to track how the dog is performing while you're doing manipulations, while you're doing those, your wind conditions are changing, changing direction.
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Well, what about relative humidity? Like the heaviness.
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Exactly. So humidity is also another important aspect for it. A little less studied, but so more moisture seems to. Well, it keeps the olfactory receptors and olfactory epithelium a bit more wet. So it seems to help there. But it also tends to make things stick more and not really release as tramport. And then dry are particularly really bad conditions because if you have something. So volatiles are things that want to leave their liquid or solid state and then come into the air. Is that if you have a really hot dry day, those odors can cook off. Yeah. And then there's not really much going on there. So there's still a lot of research to be be done in there. But yes, a lot. The environment has a lot of impact. Wind is going to be your primary driver. So going from zero wind to lots of wind would look completely different. And those distances. So I do not measure a dog's detection capability by the distance at which they find something because that's driven more by the wind speed and direction than actual detection capability.
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Wow.
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Yeah, the environment. You know, I was. I've got men of hunting buddy in mind. We go hunt quail quite a bit. And there's my quail for the day. They make fun of me because I say I take better life.
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We don't make fun of. We're laughing with you, not at you.
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That's a liar.
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We like that you love quail.
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But anyway, and so we'd get, you know, we'd get out in the morning and you know, it'd be a typical late December January day in here. And it's relatively dry. Well, it's really dry as I'll get out usually and get out there and we're getting ready to turn the dogs out. And he's like, well, how's it gonna go today? Like gonna be terrible. I said I'm kicking up dust instead of. And sure enough, it's pretty much how it goes on it. You can almost tell how good or how bad it's going to be based upon just how dry it is. And one of the things with that I've in talking about hunting and things like that with dogs, does the amount of time, like if it's, if it is dry and like out here it's dry and dusty, will that impact over time? That. Will that, like, for lack of a better term, dull their sense of smell a little bit as they get that, you know, there's so much dust and everything, you know, it bugs me, but it bugged the dog.
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Yeah. So I think under like a particularly bad day, then it'll probably bug them in a similar way. They would bug us. One of the fun things about olfaction is a lot of times when we think of sensory systems, once they're broken, they're done for. But olfaction is actually one of the few that is really robust and tends to regenerate itself and tends to maintain itself really well. So under a lot of cases, if you have some type of simple loss like too much dust or in the environment, then they'll probably completely regain total function related to that. Whereas if it was, you know, lose something, get something in your eye and then that could be quite problematic. Yeah, usually the nose doesn't have those problems unless it's something that is happening at a more like central level.
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I was more like on a short term basis, like, you know, you get out and you're running your dog and he's running through grass that's right at his nose and he's running through that and just getting just dust in it and it's just like, you know, you're starting to sneeze. Yeah.
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So those will have similar. Yeah, that'll have an impact. You know, if there's other like noxious odors that can be toxic would also have immediate problems. And then the other things that we've been looking at is while the environment has a lot of impacts, it also impacts just on the dog's willingness to work and how like much they want to work. So a lot of times the really bad performance on hot days, particularly if it's a hot, humid day, you might say, oh, from an odor perspective, this is great. We've got humidity. Odor is going to be kind of is going to be happy to be released. It's hot. So odor and volatile is going to be moving. But your dog takes a couple steps out and is like, yeah, I'm not doing it. And they need acclimation training. In the same way that, you know, if you were a football team and you're going to go to go down to Florida and play in the swamp, you go down there a few Days early and start some acclimation training. Because if you pack up your dog and move from, you know, Lubbock and go down to Houston to do something, your dog's gonna say, what happened to this world?
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Or, like, going from Houston to Denver.
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Yeah.
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Where the altitudes.
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So they need that same type of acclimation, type of training to those environmental factors as athletes would.
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I know guys that go and they'll take dogs up and hunt early season, like September, October, grouse and Hungary and partridge and stuff like that in the Dakotas. And they're like, you know, we got there, we get out early, because once it hits about 70 degrees, we're shutting down, you know, and that's. And that's a big, you know, overheating the dog is a big deal. It's a big bad deal. Yeah, it's a horrible bad deal.
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Yeah. So heat injury is definitely one of the most concerning and most prevalent injuries that a lot of working dogs would get. And there's a lot of cooling techniques out there for that. But definitely having water availability and cooling as rapidly as possible in the field is the most important thing that you can do if that ever happens. But definitely watching out for overheating signs. Some of them, if you're in direct sunlight, they don't work great. But a lot of their microchips that you can get, just like regular microchips and a scanner, but some of them will actually have temperature sensors in them. So that if you were like, in that kind of environment and you're like, I just need to know what my dog's temp is. And obviously you could have a thermometer
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and that would be fun.
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Hold the dog up. But you could just like, scan. Just like, if you're like, when you go to the vat to do a scan for a microchip and then pop up what the internal temperature under there is. Now, the other caveat to it is that if they are trained athletic, athlete dogs.
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Yeah.
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Temperatures that would make a veterinarian say this dog is in heat stroke. Some dogs operate just fine at those temperatures for working dogs. So some working dogs will go way above those regular temperatures, and that would be normal working. Now, what then differentiates into those heat stress, heat injury conditions? You can use temperature, but in reality, we know it's actually another one of those much more complicated scenarios that there isn't a straightforward kind of thing. But if you see any behavioral effects, then that is the immediate. Concerning Mark.
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Yeah.
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So what would those look like?
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So same as if you got out in the sun, you typically would get a little dizzy. You would see some type of. So if you ever see like the back legs crossing or you see them starting to move in a weird way or they seem a little like off gate or a little tipsy, those are immediate signs to think that heat injury is occurring.
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Wow.
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So a lot of. Again, it's 95% of the time is going to have to be prevention because once you're already at that point, your only steps are immediate cooling and then trying to transport to veterinary care. So you would want to observe things before then, or you would definitely want to offer water force breaks to try and avoid that scenario setting in and hard, fast rules of. We're not going to be operating in these extreme environments to avoid them. So avoidance again is mostly the important thing. But keeping ice water and some type of ways to quickly cool is also a good safety measure.
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Once they get. That's one of the things, that's another
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reason for people to keep it, keep provide water for the animals.
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Well, I'll tell you what, once it gets it though, I mean, it's. You're talking about cooling it down and then get it to the vet. I mean, because it's not one of those things. He's like, oh, well, he'll, he'll go, I'll take him home, put Americans. He'll be fine. I mean, you get a little bit of that and it goes, it's one of those things a little bit goes a long ways and not in a good way.
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And if they do it before then, they tend to be much more likely for it to be recurrent in the future.
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Yeah.
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Have y', all, here's my, my question I always ask, have y' all incorporated any type of AI into your, your program? And if not, is there a place for it in the future?
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Yeah, great question. So we actually have a project right now that does involve some AI in terms of trying to improve the welfare of monitoring of working dogs or dogs in general that might be in kennel environments. So dogs at shelters, dogs and working kennels, you put them away and there's just not a lot of people watching and seeing if there are things that are going on. Are they engaging in behaviors that we call like stereotypic behaviors or highly repetitive behaviors like spinning in a circle over and over and over again, jumping repetitively, or engaging in behaviors that are indicating that they need something more to help satisfy their needs? That's not really happening. And AI capabilities in terms of visual categories is getting better.
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Yeah.
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And you can Actually train specific models to be able to focus and get direct assessments of that. So that you could essentially have a tool that is monitoring the dog.
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So it wouldn't be a collar, it'd be a camera on it.
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It'd be a camera so you don't have to worry about the dog having a collar or something being recharged or other kinds of things. Or it could be in pair with one of those. But you would have a system that would be tracking and saying, you know, oh, my dog's not sleeping really well right now.
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Well, similar to having a camera at home where you find out what your dog's doing while you're gone.
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Exactly. So it would actually be categorizing and telling you that. So that if you have 30 dogs, you know, you know, even if you had a half dog, you couldn't go check in. You would get reports and it would flag like, oh, this dog might need attention, or this dog might need something just like that.
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Right.
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And then. So that. Right now, that's probably the main one. And then the other is. We did some projects with. We're putting together a proposal. You can tell me how silly this is actually, to see if it's a ridiculous one.
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We had this conversation last week. Go ahead.
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Okay. So we did dog detection of powdery mildew.
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So
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I don't think that's silly.
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I think that's.
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That's brilliant.
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Listen. Pythium and rhizoctonian peanuts.
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Well, so the.
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Yeah, that would be really.
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That would be the best.
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That would be good.
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Western Pythium and Rhizoctonia in peanuts.
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Okay.
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Because it's underground, you can't see it and you can't pull the whole field up to see if there's.
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If it's.
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If you get lucky, you pull it up, you know.
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Okay.
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You pull the wrong spot.
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We can connect you with the people that really want to get you some funny.
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We know the people that would control the purse strings that would do it.
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We couldn't necessarily.
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No, we wouldn't do it. But I mean, that would be really.
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That was, that was my part when, when she said, when you're talking about plant basket. That was the. Because I used to be a peanut consultant. And nothing's more nerve wracking than going out in the peanut field, looking at it, thinking everything is good and then going out there when they're digging it because you can't see it all. And if you can find it, that would be something.
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And peanuts, they're only like that. Far underneath the ground. I mean, they're not.
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You'd have to train a pug for that.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But yeah, no, that, that definitely put us in contact and we can, we can start developing something out for that because we're working on buried odors right now, mostly for applications for cadaver and landmines. So, yeah, unfortunately, because of recent conflicts, landmines and will probably be for a long time because there's still, I mean, there's still humanitarian demining occurring in Africa right now. Just old line landmine fields are just completely taken away and dogs and rats actually are playing important roles.
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I was going to ask you about rats, you know, because they kind of seem kind of smart. You know, I don't know about their
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olfactory senses or so going back to. We don't have great markers, but in terms of, remember those numbers of. Numbers of olfactory receptors. Humans, 350 dogs, around 600. Rats are around 1200. So rats actually have a really good sense of smell. And they. In Tanzania, they've trained African pouched rats, which are basically big rats and they put them on little leashes and then they run them up and down the lanes for potential landmine detection. So rats very well could be useful and rat a very strong. They're used a lot in the basic scientific literature to understand Olaf.
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Yeah.
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Oh.
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But anyway, going back to the AI with powdery mildew. So we. So dogs are actually really good at detecting powdery mildew on, on leaves. And they were actually doing pretty well to the point that they were detecting it at the point where we had a microscope looking at the leaves.
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Really, you couldn't see it, a human couldn't see it, but you didn't really see it.
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Like you had to like take the leaves and like really like rotate it and then we put it under a 10x microscope to be able to see it. And the dogs were doing really well. I think it was like around 75% at that level and then 90 plus percent at the other levels. But one of the. For the most part, and it depends on who you talk to.
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Right.
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Because depending on who you talk to, AI is going to solve all of the problems.
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Exactly.
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In the.
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In the next tomorrow or the next day.
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Yeah.
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But what our approach has been with the dogs is that the dogs, you know, have, have hundreds of thousands of years as dogs of, of evolution for capabilities of doing these things. So that the best approach is to pair technology with the dogs rather than trying to replace.
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It's like that movie up, you know, where they Put the deal on the dog and they could talk.
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Yeah, exactly that one.
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Like food, get me food master.
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So yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. So our AI approaches are to pair sensors and technologies with the dog. So we actually. So for all the powdery mildew. So for that study, basically we had different infected, non infected plants. We would take leaves, we would quantify, we would take images of the leaves, we would then put them in the olfactometer so the dog could just smell them and it would be in a way that you couldn't bias the dog. We would get the measurements of that. But then we also trained a model to visually inspect those leaves for us. And the model, what's interesting here is that the dogs and the model on the highly infected ones and then the clear ones largely agreed. And in the middle there is some discrepancy where the model would catch things that the dogs missed, but then the dogs would catch things that the models missed because the model is looking at a visual inspection of the leaf and the dog is looking at a chemical
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inspection of the leaf.
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So then by pairing essentially two different kinds of sensors that you might actually get better and accurate and in real time. So that's just as simple as you could have a dog who could scan things very, very quickly, running up and down and identify that something over here is infected. And then an iPhone could take a picture and then give you a potential infection level and quantify that.
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That's incredible.
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Really, it's just up to your imagination, honestly. It's just like, what can you imagine? Like and, and just start trying to do it. What, when you start a dog off, I'm gonna go back just a little bit and on. If you had to pick like one scent to train a dog, like what is the number the most used scent to start training a dog?
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That's actually a great question. So in the community there's a new scent that's being used a lot for that. It has different labels. One of them is UDC Universal Detector Calibrant or noda Neutral odor thing. And where that sort of came from is it had been used as instruments as like a calibration type of chemical. It's one called a neat chemical. So most of the things that you smell like banana is made up of like 200, 300 different chemicals. It's that complex ratio that makes it. So this is just one pure chemical. But the nice thing about it is that it, it doesn't occur in nature. It's one bromo octane, so it's brominated. So that it wouldn't actually regularly occur in nature. And it gives off a. To me, it's kind of like a chemically like, smell. The dogs are sensitive to it. We have their detection thresholds for it. It's easy to dilute. So you can use like regular mineral oil you'd buy from Walmart and just kind of like do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and mix different amounts of it. So you can train, like, high concentrations and low concentrations. But the nice thing about it is you can train and build your search behavior. You can train and build the detection that you want that train. Focus, alert. And then you're not impacting what, the dog's potential career opportunities.
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Yeah, because if you just go buy two bunches of bananas and use them for four days, that's, that's not. But you have to have some type of standard that all dogs are compared against.
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So that's the idea is that the industry might be moving to using that as a standard so that you can compare dogs across some standard and then. But it wouldn't impact their ability to go operational in different environments. Because if you use a vanilla and then someone has a vanilla perfume that comes to the airport.
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Right.
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That's the standard that all the dogs are training.
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They're always scared when they drop by me with them dogs.
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Yeah, that could be problematic. So that's why the idea of using UDC as the calibrate is becoming more popular.
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Okay, that's interesting. That makes sense. Yeah.
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Well, if anybody's ever gotten stopped at the airport for carrying something they weren't carrying, well, you just have somebody, an expert witness here at your trial.
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Yeah, yeah.
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In defense that the dog might have got it wrong. That is so interesting that so much of it is based on just anecdotal stories.
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It's building. I'd say over the last, like 20ish years, there's a lot has built out. But because everything that we knew before was anecdotal before then it's. It takes, you know, an ounce of misinformation versus yeah. Yes. You know, it just continues and perpetuates. But most definitely, over the last, like 20ish years, a lot more information has come out and we're in a much better position. But also the industry is really recognizing the scientific, you know, value of it. That doesn't mean that all of them are there. Like, there's in just like every industry. Right. There are people who are. Who will come out and say, my, you know, this dog can do this. And will sell a bill of goods to people. It's no different than any industry, I'm sure. Yes. So that's like a. Not a unique thing. Yeah, but that's.
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The people that actually monetize your research. Such and such said this, you know, like.
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Yeah, exactly. So that. So it is one of those things where I also have to say, like, you know, buyer beware. And if it seems like magic, it probably. Right.
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If it's. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
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I know that they're saying now that humans have more than five senses. Senses. Do you think it's true that dogs like the six.
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You like your sixth sense yet?
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No, but they're saying, like they're. I mean, I don't know that hundreds is the right word, but a lot
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more like they know when earthquakes are coming and stuff.
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I don't know. I don't know what they are. But I. I've just. I read a short little thing on
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ayahuasca and wrote an article.
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Well, they were talking about how. Where the. The. I mean, it was the Greeks, I think, that identified the five senses, you know, and it just really hasn't been studied, like, since then. And so they're looking at different ways that humans have senses of. I don't know. I don't know that much about it. So I wonder if.
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Is anxiety a sense?
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It may be. Exactly.
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So there is like different sensory capabilities across the animal kingdom in different ways. So probably with the most well known one would actually be a magnetic sense. So I think there's some argument as to whether humans can or not. But we definitely know that birds do and pigeons do very, very strongly. So. Homing pigeons. Yeah, A lot of their navigation.
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This was it. Monday night. There was 500 million birds migrated down the east coast. So it was such a big migration. It showed up on radar.
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Yeah. So there's actually. I was in one of the. There's a bird cast that uses the Doppler signals to identify really large migratory patterns so that you can kind of predict. So like if you were a poultry farmer and you wanted to know that there might be a bunch of wild birds, then the bird cast system could actually potentially identify that. There's a big bird group coming through at this time, but magnetic sense is one of them. So being able to identify. So just like a compass. So being able to identify north versus south.
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Yeah.
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And there's some kind of. Would seem like weird studies that was done in Europe quite a few years ago where you just strap magnets on top of their heads, the birds get very confused. So a little magnet in that area is not completely elucidated yet exactly. Exactly how it works. There's been some work on it, but we definitely know that they are, like, magnetically sensitive. They're also sensitive to the polarization of light, so they can detect. So, like, when you put on polarized sunglasses, that's actually how they can see.
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And they can.
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So they can see the orientation and where the sun is, even on a cloudy day. And that's why birds are incredibly good at navigation, is they know what north and south is, and they know the position of the sun. So they are expert navigators.
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Okay, okay.
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There's some evidence that dog. There's only. I'm only aware of one paper, but dogs tend to align them soil selves north to south when they poop.
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Interesting.
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I never thought my dog aligns himself any direction he's running.
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Yeah, or some of them go around in circles.
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That's it.
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So they go around in circles, but then their final position, more often than not, aligns themselves with the north, south axis.
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Okay, I'm gonna have to start watching that.
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Get your compass. And the next time it poops.
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And is it different in northern hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere?
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It's backwards. The dog runs in a backwards circle.
376
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So this might be interesting based on, like, what we're just now talking about. So I'm looking at this, how many more senses we have. And this paragraph is, in fact. Your brain constructs everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel using more than just the sense data of your body's receptors. Light waves, for example, don't simply enter your eyes and travel to your brain as electrical signals, and then you see them. Your brain actually predicts what you might see before you see it based on past experience, the state of your body, and your current situation. It combines its predictions with the incoming sensing data from your retinas to construct your visual experience of the world around you. Similarly, when you place your fingers on your wrist to feel your pulse, you're actually feeling a construction Based on your brain's predictions and actual sense data. You don't experience sensations with your sense organs. You actually experience them with your brain. So they're saying there's about 23 to 26 is what they're saying.
377
01:10:38.000 --> 01:11:07.000
Now, I don't know about the numbers specifically, but in general, that. That conceptualization is completely true. So. And there's a lot of, like, really weird things that happen in perception that you don't know about. So for example, all of us have a blind spot right now in your eyes, which is where the light hits the retina. You wouldn't even know, but your brain fills in what those gaps are and there's like fun little tests because your brain will actually follow the patterns of whatever is in the background and will literally fill it into the visual.
378
01:11:07.000 --> 01:11:16.000
We went through that in pilot training because like especially at night. And so like if you're, if you're trying to see something, like a lot of times you don't look right at it. You look just a little bit off of it.
379
01:11:16.000 --> 01:11:17.000
Yes.
380
01:11:16.000 --> 01:11:17.000
Just so you can see it.
381
01:11:17.000 --> 01:11:34.000
Yeah. Because otherwise. And our eyes are actually really good about shifting left and right and going up and down a lot to try and prevent that. But yeah, if you are on a focused look in a specific direction, there's quite possible something in your blind spot you don't actually know about. And if your brain is just seeing all black.
382
01:11:34.000 --> 01:11:35.000
Yeah.
383
01:11:34.000 --> 01:11:38.000
It's going to tell you 100 it is all black.
384
01:11:38.000 --> 01:11:47.000
How do like, like with service dogs that like, like for people with epilepsy that have service, they can predict, you know, they can predict when you're. When a person have an epileptic seizure.
385
01:11:47.000 --> 01:11:52.000
That freaks me. That and blood sugar. Like how in the world.
386
01:11:52.000 --> 01:12:17.000
So blood sugar. There does actually seem to be some chemicals that do that are. Co. Correlate with that with epilepsy. We don't really know. There seems to be some evidence that there might be some but likely problem with epilepsy is epilepsy is not. Epilepsy is not epilepsy. There's so much variation between that. So while one might produce a particular like a pre ichtic or pretty seizure type of odor change, another one may not.
387
01:12:17.000 --> 01:12:18.000
Yeah.
388
01:12:18.000 --> 01:12:30.000
So a lot of those dogs are actually trained behaviorally how to respond to a seizure. And then sometimes those dogs will learn to predict it because it might depend on the specific kind of seizure.
389
01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:48.000
Well, it may be because they are so. Because I feel like dogs are so sensitive to our emotions and how we, you know, I mean I've seen that a lot. My son has a rescue. She's pitbull with something else and oh my goodness, like you can know exactly how he feels as soon as you see her.
390
01:12:48.000 --> 01:12:56.000
Yeah, my dog, if I was ever upset before, she would just go into a separate room. So she knew how you felt. But she was like get a control man, you know?
391
01:12:56.000 --> 01:12:58.000
Yes, yes.
392
01:12:58.000 --> 01:13:22.000
The funny thing is my dog, when I leave, I leave every morning and like 99 of the mornings my dog Goes with me and that one. And he always will grab a bone and he will because he wants for carrying around his mouth. And. And I thought if I go to the door and I say, no, Cooper, you're staying here today, he will spit that bone out. Look at me. And then go get in his kennel just like he is at a powder.
393
01:13:22.000 --> 01:13:23.000
But he's just learned.
394
01:13:23.000 --> 01:13:28.000
He just learned it. Like he goes with me, he's gonna go have fun. And if not, it's just like, fine, I hate you.
395
01:13:28.000 --> 01:13:31.000
I won't have any fun at all. This is the worst day of my life.
396
01:13:31.000 --> 01:13:57.000
It's the worst day ever. Emotions do have smells and emotions have smells. When you have different emotional states, there are different smells and it's not so. There is some evidence that dogs are sensitive to them. But it's also again one of those things that humans are too. So if I were to. If you were to watch a scary movie. Halloween's coming up. You watch a scary Halloween movie and you were to tape some like little pads underneath you.
397
01:13:57.000 --> 01:13:58.000
Yes.
398
01:13:58.000 --> 01:14:13.000
Versus if you were running on a treadmill, versus if you were doing other types of jumping jacks. Versus watching a happy movie and then give it to someone else. They can actually smell. Which one was the one that came from the fear specific?
399
01:14:13.000 --> 01:14:16.000
Wow, I had no idea.
400
01:14:16.000 --> 01:14:22.000
So animals can do that too. But that's actually something that you can do and you probably weren't aware of it.
401
01:14:22.000 --> 01:14:23.000
Right.
402
01:14:23.000 --> 01:14:35.000
And parents can identify their children by their sense of smell. People can identify their spouses by sense of smell. But yeah, emotions and emotional content because it has such a large biological body change.
403
01:14:35.000 --> 01:14:42.000
So what you did, what you're saying is that when next to my wife tells me I stink because I've been out working all day, I just say I'm just making sure you can recognize me.
404
01:14:42.000 --> 01:14:45.000
Yes. At least you recognize me specifically.
405
01:14:45.000 --> 01:15:12.000
So we're running low on time and I want to make sure I get to the thing. Okay. Looking on Yalls website, you've got several things going right now. What's going on out there. And you know there you have several calls for people. Hey, you know, if you got a, you know, the one I saw was a one year old cat. A cat project that they're doing out there. But what else, what's going on at the lab that people don't know about that you want people to know.
406
01:15:12.000 --> 01:15:19.000
So probably the most important thing is that we're pretty much always adopting out dogs. So if you need a dog looking for a dog, we have all different
407
01:15:19.000 --> 01:15:23.000
kinds And I would imagine it's probably a well behaved dog. It's a well mannered dog.
408
01:15:23.000 --> 01:16:00.000
So it'll be a dog that will go through all of the student training. So I guess it somewhat depends on your student, student quality, but they would have learned all of their basics, sit down, stay, go to bed and cooperative care training basically help trim nails, go to the vet, things like that. So we have dogs pretty much always available through that. So if you're interested in a dog, definitely contact to us. Most of our dogs are already trained on either explosives, powdery mildew
409
01:16:00.000 --> 01:16:07.000
if you are an agronomist and you would like to have a partner that you can just send out to train for powdery mildew.
410
01:16:07.000 --> 01:16:58.000
Yeah, yeah. So we usually would have dogs that have some of that kind of pre training going on. So that's, that's an important one. And then we'll also typically host like two times a year adoption events down at the livestock arena, Animal science. And then in terms of the actual, we've got students in training. And then in terms of research, right now we've got a few projects going on. Some of them are looking at how do we maintain dog search behavior in environments where there are very few targets. So one thing that comes across is in the same way that if you were like working in a scenario where I'm saying like, all right, identify when an explosive comes through and for the last like 10 years, nothing's ever come through, how hard are you gonna keep working?
411
01:16:58.000 --> 01:17:02.000
MAYTAG REPAIRMAN of DOGS yeah,
412
01:17:02.000 --> 01:17:43.000
so it's actually really dependent on how you train to address those particular situations and environments. So then we're also working on ways to develop out tools that will release odors in those environments at specific times to help with that, to enhance the ability to maintain performance. And also how do we optimize the way that we train them to make them more robust in those scenarios. We just wrapped up all of the powdery mildew stuff, but hopefully we'll be adding some stuff in there. And then so many cats.
413
01:17:43.000 --> 01:17:47.000
But now I'm just trying to remember, I. Did you have work on cats too?
414
01:17:47.000 --> 01:17:51.000
So we're developing out the cat program. We have a cat training class right now.
415
01:17:51.000 --> 01:17:55.000
I did, I didn't think there's an oxymoron I've ever heard.
416
01:17:55.000 --> 01:18:26.000
Well, you know what's interesting is that this was the joke. Not, not many weeks ago we were in Colorado seeing our kids and we said, well, you know, are they gonna come to dinner? And they said, no. The cat psychologist is they're taking their cats to the psychologist or. I was like, you know, you did a bad job parenting when your kids. Animals have cat therapy, but they, like, have these two cats that have lived together for 10 years, and they've gotten along, and now they're fighting. And it's a animal behavioralist. It's helping them figure out what to do. Yes.
417
01:18:26.000 --> 01:18:40.000
We have an animal behavior clinic, actually, that is a free option that a student run, but that's an option for people who need different types of. If you've got an issue, something like that, and just want to be able to call and have a manny.
418
01:18:40.000 --> 01:18:41.000
What's his name?
419
01:18:41.000 --> 01:18:42.000
The dog whisperer.
420
01:18:42.000 --> 01:18:46.000
Yeah, he's like, if you have an aggressive dog or something like that, there's
421
01:18:46.000 --> 01:18:47.000
so many of them out there now.
422
01:18:47.000 --> 01:18:48.000
Yes.
423
01:18:47.000 --> 01:18:48.000
Yeah.
424
01:18:48.000 --> 01:18:49.000
But he was the OG Man.
425
01:18:49.000 --> 01:19:00.000
Yeah. I think it's interesting, and I. This. I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, but have you seen the videos where they have, like, 30 people in a room and they'll send one dog in at a time in the adoption process and they let the dog pick the person?
426
01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:01.000
Yeah.
427
01:19:01.000 --> 01:19:03.000
So I'm saying that's the best way to do it.
428
01:19:03.000 --> 01:19:10.000
I'm confused. What do you think about that? Because I've seen those two, and I thought. I wondered if they were AI. Yeah.
429
01:19:10.000 --> 01:19:28.000
Yeah. So, like, I. I think it is a wonderfully beautiful idea if I could get a room of 30 people that want to adopt my dogs. That would be amazing. Like, tell me, where is this room? I will send dogs that way. Yeah, that's more of my problem.
430
01:19:28.000 --> 01:19:31.000
Yeah. We do have a. We have a pretty big issue in Lubbock, too.
431
01:19:31.000 --> 01:19:34.000
Do y' all house them? Do you house them in kennels on the campus?
432
01:19:34.000 --> 01:19:36.000
Yeah. So we have.
433
01:19:36.000 --> 01:19:38.000
You're at the. At the farm at Thataloo.
434
01:19:38.000 --> 01:19:39.000
Yeah.
435
01:19:39.000 --> 01:19:42.000
Okay. So you have student assistance or whatever, people.
436
01:19:42.000 --> 01:19:47.000
We have a big team. We've got in total. Typically, we run about 15 to 20 people.
437
01:19:47.000 --> 01:19:48.000
Okay, so it's a rotation.
438
01:19:48.000 --> 01:20:06.000
Yeah. Our dogs are always going out for playgroups and yards and. And walks and. Yeah, all of that going on. And then that's why we always are looking for. Typically when we go for, like, Lubbock Animal Services, we'll ask for the reverse chronological or chronological. Longest length of stats.
439
01:20:06.000 --> 01:20:07.000
Yeah.
440
01:20:07.000 --> 01:20:23.000
We typically start dogs who have been waiting there for the longest period of time, and then we do an evaluation for their ability for training proficiency, and then we'll pull those dogs so that we're helping dogs who don't seem to be getting a good shot.
441
01:20:23.000 --> 01:20:30.000
And you need to get flow going through your process to test more dogs. You get stuck. They probably tell you how you can only have 30 dogs or 20 dogs or whatever.
442
01:20:30.000 --> 01:20:38.000
I don't even have that many. But, yeah, we're typically. We're always adopting out pretty much. Yeah, as much as we. As much as we can, so.
443
01:20:38.000 --> 01:20:47.000
Well, I will tell you if you. If anybody's listening to this that has a kid that's interested in. In animals and thinks he wants to be a vet, there's more things to do than just.
444
01:20:47.000 --> 01:21:09.000
Yeah, that's. I think that's one thing that I was really interested is that. That. And I think that's something I've seen with my kids living in Denver is people are very different about their animals. It's happening here more. But there, I mean, it is like veterinarians come to you is a thing. Oh, no. All my kids, when they've had they. They ball. When they have corporate jobs. Mostly you have pet insurance.
445
01:21:09.000 --> 01:21:10.000
Yes.
446
01:21:10.000 --> 01:21:25.000
But the vets come to your house and so the animals and you know, and I mean, everybody's just like, it's a big deal to invest and take care of their animals here. We just are kind of like that, too. Oh, this is a fun thing to have for. This is boring.
447
01:21:25.000 --> 01:22:39.000
Well, I mean, wait. I always tell people, y' all grew up on a farm, and I was probably in my. I was probably 20 before I realized that pets didn't just. They weren't just not disposable, but they just didn't go away all the time. I mean, we lost dogs to cows, we lost dogs them to cars. We lost them to God only knows what. I mean, it was kind of like having barn cats. You go from having one barn cat and all of a sudden you have 50. And right now I understand why. People used to think that spontaneous generation was a thing. You go, how'd that one become 50? But, you know, and so the way that everybody's changed and how they look at their animals and where you see them now, you know, and there are towns that are great about Lubbock is dumbbell good. Not great about it, about pets, because there's not a lot of patio space because there's a lot of times of the year when it's not suitable patio weather and our architecture doesn't lend itself well to it. But some places that have got a high performance of patios, you'll go out there and, you know, dogs welcome on the patio, and you bring your Dog and sit there and, you know, if you can go through something that teaches you how to make your dog a good citizen, that's. You know, I always tell people, I said, you know, I wasn't shooting to train a good bird dog. And I probably won't because I don't know enough about it. I just wanted my dog to be a good citizen that hunted with me.
448
01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:40.000
Yeah.
449
01:22:40.000 --> 01:22:53.000
You know, and that's the biggest thing is, you know, hey, teach your dog not to jump. You know, teach your dog to. To behave, to walk on heel. Well, it's like he's supposed to sit when he's supposed to, you know, listen to you so he doesn't run out into traffic, that kind of thing.
450
01:22:53.000 --> 01:23:45.000
Well, and they're more enjoyable too. Okay, so funny, funny dog stories is a good way to end this. So we had a dog that the Andy and Lauren and their kid, they moved and so they couldn't take Lucy. And so we took Lucy. She was a yellow lab. She was a lard. I mean, she was so. She was so fat. And so she moved out to the country with us. And she. She was just the funniest dog. I mean, she ran around everywhere, but she never got skinny. She showed up one day and she had like a. Not on her side. And the doctor said, oh, it's just a dislodged piece of fat where probably maybe a car bumped her or something. I mean, she was just like. She had this, you know, this whole fat around her to protect her. But she would eat fireworks.
451
01:23:45.000 --> 01:23:46.000
Fireworks.
452
01:23:46.000 --> 01:23:47.000
She would eat fireworks.
453
01:23:47.000 --> 01:23:48.000
Never heard of that before.
454
01:23:48.000 --> 01:24:23.000
Yeah. So when we would do like, you know, fourth of July stuff where the kids would have poppers or whatever, she'd. We. You'd throw them out in the yard. She would run over there and she'd get it, put it in her mouth and it would pop and she would just like shiver in ecstasy and her. All her fat would just roll ripples. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. I know. We had another dog we had to like, put in the house and, you know, had some major anxiety, but. Oh, not Lucy. Like, finally we had to lock her like in the well house because she would want to go and get the big fireworks. You're gonna get hurt.
455
01:24:23.000 --> 01:24:26.000
Maybe she was an explosives dogs and taught searched and destroy.
456
01:24:26.000 --> 01:24:33.000
I don't. In a former life, she's reincarnated. She might have been a. I don't know.
457
01:24:33.000 --> 01:25:44.000
I've always thought. At first I thought, well, she's just like. Thinks it's maybe Dangerous or something. And so she's protecting us. And I was like, oh, no, she's getting something out of this. And she likes. Definitely. I don't know what it was. But she would also go out in the cornfield and pick up a whole stalk of corn by the root and she would carry it into the yard and she would husk, husk it all, Take all the husk off, and then she would consume the whole ear of corn. But only if. Only if we were all sitting outside with her. That was like. She was a social eater. She was the best dog. We had some good dogs. We definitely had like a whole series of. Well, we had. We had two basset hounds, and then my uncle has basset hounds. And I can definitely see one of them. The first one we got was from like a. A breeder for, you know, show dogs. And he was ridiculously long, you know. And then the next one we got was somebody that was. They were hunting dogs and he just was just. I mean, you could just tell the difference in their shape. And then my uncle has had. He's on his. He's got two now, and they're just huge fat.
458
01:25:44.000 --> 01:25:45.000
Yeah.
459
01:25:44.000 --> 01:25:56.000
I mean, I don't even know. Yes. They are just for looks, you know, they are just. They are not working dogs, but it was. It's pretty fun.
460
01:25:56.000 --> 01:25:57.000
Well, Nathan's are great.
461
01:25:57.000 --> 01:26:03.000
We're coming into the short rows of it now. But thank you so very much for coming today. Thank you.
462
01:26:03.000 --> 01:26:04.000
Thank you.
463
01:26:03.000 --> 01:26:04.000
Very interesting.
464
01:26:04.000 --> 01:26:06.000
And I will tell you, we probably passed you again in the. At some point.
465
01:26:06.000 --> 01:26:07.000
Oh, yeah, we probably.
466
01:26:07.000 --> 01:26:09.000
Of course, I can talk dog anytime.
467
01:26:09.000 --> 01:26:13.000
Well, that's. That's what we love to do. We love to talk dogs a whole lot.
468
01:26:13.000 --> 01:26:20.000
Well, and if you have research or stuff coming up that you've finished or taken on or want to talk about, give us a ring and we'd love to do it.
469
01:26:20.000 --> 01:26:21.000
Sounds great.
470
01:26:20.000 --> 01:26:25.000
And when you make sure you let us know when your adoption days are coming up so we can.
471
01:26:25.000 --> 01:26:28.000
Oh, yeah, if you let us know about that, we'll talk about those too. We'll let people know.
472
01:26:28.000 --> 01:26:29.000
Oh, that'd be much appreciated.
473
01:26:29.000 --> 01:26:45.000
Oh, yeah. Well, I'm always. I'm a big fan of make making sure that dogs find homes and we don't have a bunch of. But the best thing about it is if you get a dog from there, you know that at least it's been through civilization training. Yep. Little bits and make it a little bit better human, but.
474
01:26:45.000 --> 01:26:46.000
Yep.
475
01:26:45.000 --> 01:26:48.000
Well, I guess we'll do this again next week. Yep.
476
01:26:48.000 --> 01:27:02.000
We will. We will be back next week. And next week, I think Cal Huffaker is going to be with us. So we're going to talk about what he has learned about. Yeah. Energy and land and data centers and all that stuff. So thanks again. See y' all next.
477
01:27:02.000 --> 01:27:05.000
The dogs are more fun. We'll see you next week.