lexi is but we love her and she's a kiss monster and now lexi's being trained to be a service dog or she's an evaluator actually sometimes we do place dogs with with kids who are in wheelchairs and and maybe a little less mobile and they don't need the dog for balance so they might want to smaller dog that can do seizure detection or blood sugar detection and i think it's really important that people educate their children about how to be around dogs and understand how not to approach them as well but lexi she's got an ok no we don't know what she is but she's she's definitely got a a great personnel and she's worked with a lot of children sometimes also will have kids who are or adults who are afraid of big dogs and will bring lexie in as an ice breaker so she's she's a pretty cool little do you want to take a nap now sorts of diseases you want to tell the viewer some of the lists and how you go about that training what we do is we work with dogs who have good noses and who are intelligent so sometimes you can have a dog like a lot of the sporting breeds that have great noses but they're flighty and we don't want a dog who's going to focus and lose it's attention span when it's got to work with a person for instance why it even when he's evaluating a child or he's working with cancer detection if my blood sugar drops he's back to me and that's a very important part of it is getting a dog who has the focus to be able to do his job but continue to be social potentially and do multiple jobs so what we do is we find dogs who are younger let's say under two and we train them for about a year that can consist of anything from you know that the sample detection which we use a sterile surgical mask that people breathe into for about ten minutes and the dogs will be able to detect any of the by products of cancer or other inflammatory diseases and then they're able to find the the ones who have that smell that positive smell now there are some people trying to do this and it's great to use blood or urine or body fluids but personally i don't want to have to hold on to body fluids and it's also by the time you're taking blood you've already got a life and full bottom is there you've already got blood you're going to run it at a lab so you're not a lap dog but a laboratory and if you a lot of people will say whoa i don't want to give you my urine because if i give you a sample and like maybe you're going to drug test me or i want to give you my blood because you have my d n a and that crazy things we hear but with a dog everybody just you know i got a dog in my face and he smelled my breath and he's great so we do the samples for the mask samples which are great this way we can get a preliminary finding of yes we have something that we want to look at to get or know we're in good shape with this once we get that positive meska sample we run for usually four dogs and we run them twice on each sample so once we have the positive then we bring in y at or savannah or whisper or kia or bruise or some of the others the ridgeback that i have that will actually stand up and check your breath and within two or three seconds they'll know if you're ok or not pretty cool and if you have a problem they'll actually tell you they'll point right to that spot so are they always on sensing that or do you have to specifically tell them to you know if here is the person we want you to check them have there been just instances where there's people in the general population where they're like i smell something yeah actually in the airports we're in the airport a lot and why it'll go  one of the dogs will go up to someone in the oh i can affect your dog and like ok i'm just meeting this person for five seconds to i tell him that he may have cancer or some other kind of big health issue or do i just walk away and that's probably the hardest part of this and i think the hardest thing for the people i train to do this because it just never gets easier when you know when you have one of the dogs hit on somebody up here you know what it is and you have to keep a poker face and it's just very hard and it's i imagine something like p t s d would be for veterans who have seen horrible things you you just you know that there's a problem and it's just hard arbel but no they don't our guys don't turn off because we don't use food to train them most people in general use some kind of food reward in order to you know entice the dog into doing whatever it is the problem is that you have who are you know on all the time why it actually found a mess still tumor that he had on his own leg they all started licking it and they found basal cell carcinoma on my shoulder six months before it popped up and they found cancer in me another kind of cancer as well and my mother and pretty much everybody we know who's been diagnosed but they find it so early so for instance with this i had posted on facebook that appears that sometimes before changes over a good friend of mine cindy l from international firefighter cancer foundation that first day we met why it was there and he actually stood up on her stood up with us paws up on her shoulders and hit a part on the back of her right arm her right in the middle of the back and on her head up and i was kind of concerned but i didn't know or well enough so i didn't want to say hey finney nice to meet you i think you have a ca so i called a mutual friend who had introduced us and i said get her to a doctor she's got a problem a big problem and she said oh no i can't have cancers can't be because i was just at my dermatologist the week ago and they're fine get margins on it and if that had been sitting there for another six months or a year chiller next checkup it would have been a lottery wow that that's just saying their ability and so do people hire these dogs to come in and do the disease detection how does that work well right now we're working with firefighters and first responders the reason we do that is they're exposed to so much toxic just sludge and and carcinogens and things that are just horrible and so their minds natural study group and what we're trying to do is test the fire departments and retiree's every six months so that we can check the now and six months six months six months this way if we do get something if we do find something we know it's only six months old at the max instead of how most men don't go to the doctor and they get all three years later they've got a mass and now it's too late but the cool thing about the cancer detection disease detection dogs is that they'll are our dogs i've trained them on my trademark the phrase exception detection our dogs train are trained on exception detection everybody else what and it's a great idea my like my husband was now is retired but he was the guy who started all the canine units up and down the east coast he was a big guy with a police dog so our forty some odd years way before every m and he taught me how to use you know the pseudo narcotics and things like that but then you're taking a smell it's like if i bake a pie and i say i want you to alert on the apple pie and i show you p pie and i want you to alert on peach pie you'll be able to alert on apple and peach but if there's a cherry pie you won't hit on it because i didn't train you on that smell right so what i do is actually train the dogs to hit on anything that's not a normal human smell so if the dog is let's say if the person has something like a very rare form of cancer the dog will we'll still hit on it and then it doesn't mean the thing is off right it's not a normal human smell and that not all the things when we go into the fire like we were just at the f d i c convention we go there every year and there's thirty five thousand and literally firefighters firefighters have bad knees because they get they fall and they carry in their eye and they all have these terrible knees so after about ten or fifteen minutes my dogs instead of hitting on their knees will just be like well you guys have terrible knees and i thought if i get it not going to tell you any right now they'll only hit on other things now who pays for the training that the organization you do funding comes out of that now let's tell the viewers what the organization is again and give the web site phone numbers so in case they're inclined to donate well this is kind of an awesome thing because we work are ready with about a quarter of a million firefighters and first responders i always get the people who say oh you know my grandfather or my cousin or my friend you know might have cancer can you check them out and it it's hard because if you bring a dog into one person the dog almost knows yeah i'm supposed to find something but we're really focused on right now because of funding what we're looking for is people to sponsor a dog and handler team takes a year for the dog sometimes a little longer and it takes about two years for the human wow so it's pretty expensive and it came it can be fifty to one hundred thousand dollars for the training and the insane it's just it's intense and remember where also when we're doing our testing facilities right now what we want to do in the princeton area to try to find a farm local is is to have a special building that would be clean and sterile that we can not only do the testing but also keep the men sterile surgical mask samples and be able to keep them and compare them from one to the next but if you go on to either united nine the letter k number nine professionals or united canine pros p r us dot com or merlin's kids you would look for the disease detection dog tab and you'll see  there's a lot of ways to donate but we also need in kind o nations we're really looking to have a nice farm down in the princeton area we love to have somebody sponsoring dogs or sponsoring a kennel building or something in honor of that special pet or that special person we don't accept anything in memory of they can be an honor of someone who is no longer here but you shouldn't be focusing on their memory you should be focusing on who they were or was they were so in honor of their life not memory of their death but it's what's great about it is when you see people who we found this one gentleman who's in charge of a group called fi arrow which is a fire service wonderful organization and gentleman robert we had met three years ago at the f d i c convention and savannah who was not quite a year old who is why it's nice hit on a spot that he had on his chest and what was interesting he had a big really scary looking fings mass on his neck so i told savannah to check him out and she checked them out and she went right past the mass on his neck and she went right to  this area on his chest then she went to an area in his groin and it turned out that he had four inches of ellen oh my that was across this chest and you know men have hairy chest teeth in seo and the doctor said that if wyatt had savannah had not found that when she did that it would have because it was already getting a little tubules all rhizomes going down into the chest cavity another few months he would have had it in his chest in he would have been in trouble m yeah so you know it's amazing and you see that like this man we see him every year we see him at different events he comes over to me gets up and he's you know maybe in his seventy's gets down on one knee and he says i just can't thank you enough you know you save somebody's life so they're detection their success rate is pretty good i mean they've never tapped on something and you've not heard a story of the person although it might be a year or two later like with my  takes time and that's the problem is the dogs are so sensitive they can find stuff that that is just so so early that people say oh no i'm fine i'm fine it's amazing that they don't use them more than mainstream in regular medicine because sometimes you know even read elegy films can't pick up things until they're certain sizes but yet a dog can can smell it before it even starts to absolutely turn coolest thing is that the dog will pick up on the information and typically the information will precede the problem with whatever is going to happen right and a great thing about especially the fire service what will do is when wyatt or savannah are one of our dogs will hit on a particular area but we know there's nothing specific there yet let's say hits on well a lot of firefighters still hit on the breath in the lungs we had one guy out it killed a flashover which is another group and  convention and we were there and they set up everybody likes to set up their three people that we're going to test and then the third person is always the one well sometimes we get surprises number two was positive number three was fine number four was positive number five was positive so these were people two of them didn't know they had problems and one turned out he had been hit in inhaled flames pretty severely and he had necrotic lung tissue so he said no know i about it but the hit that i think i had savannah with me the hit that she hit was not a new chronic lung tissue it was something more so he's going for testing now but you have to watch because the dogs can pick up on it's so so early that people say oh it's fine it went to the doctor and finally that doesn't mean you're not but it's changing so you need to go back right then things now on the other episode we talked a little bit if you haven't watched you should but we talked a little bit about how shelter dogs are a big thing and that you have all kinds of relationships with shelters across the country and you will go in and get a dog to become a therapy dog or disease section dog or whatever  let's let's talk a little bit about that but first tell us how you got wyatt how long you had wired and then about lexi as well if you could great why it is actually one of my brain champion show dogs he just happens to be super talented and very pretty so he finishes championship in about two and a half weeks which is great because he's my service dog too so but i had why it's mother why it's grandparents great grandparents etc etc for bras thirty years or so  sometimes especially when we're dealing with children with special needs or veterans who might be a little bit you know stressed with p t s d what we try to do is make sure that we know the dog isn't going to react we've had kids actually when wyatt finishes championship at ten months of age he had a giant welts on the back of his neck and all three of the judges that weekend told told my handler dale that oh he's got some kind of little bump on and back of his neck or maybe a tick bite and the third day finally she said it's not from a take it's from a child and the judge says oh you mean this dog bit a child you know  carol but the dog the judge looked at her and said why would a child bite your dog and said well you know his owner works with autistic and special needs kids and one of the kids the dog and that's why he has that wild so you know when you have a child bite a dog you don't want the doctor but the child back but what we love to do i think the best thing is when we get to go to shelters and the shelter dog to service dog where i get to go and or we have one of my arizona and she is her time was almost up when you get or yeah she was she was definitely destined for something not good and she was a nervous wreck you were telling us see she's a love you just the best dog in the world and she's being trained for she helps us to do evaluations she doesn't do the medical detection but what we do with her a lot is working with special needs kids sometimes the  pretty much that's you know look pretty legacy right there so you know the nice thing is though that when you get to save a life and then the dog gets to save the child or the veteran so when we get a dog some of the dogs become cancer and disease detection dogs and because we don't just do one thing and i think that's people get pigeonholed when they do something we do so many different kind of dogs for service dogs and their dogs to go into hospitals we do those as well we do medical detection dogs and a dog might be a great dog for one scale but not for another so if you only do let's say diabetic alert dogs and you have a dog who's phenomenal if the pressure but diabetic alert does dog doesn't need to do that you kick him out of your program you cost a lot of money and what do you do with a dog you put thousands of dollars into the dogs and you wind up with with nothing somebody winds up with a very expensive pet but with us we when we get a dog in we we really determine what the dog is to be good at like we see oh the stogies able to do this particular skill so we can really utilize to the best of the dogs ability what girl but yes she was she was probably a day from dying we've had a couple of our dogs we had four dogs we got from a shelter in georgia were all shaved the leg or worse was shaved where they were putting the fluid in to kill them to euthanize them and because i said why are all of them shaved i thought maybe it was spain neuter and they said no they were they were next remind go and all of those are service dogs that fancy and now the dogs you have a farm in missouri we talked on the other show but you have a place in missouri where the majority of men go to be trained and live and to get ready to go wherever they have to go next right and what we do there is we have my people who are really super trained i spend a lot of time out there and what i do is train the trainers so i train them and then i am out there every month for somewhere around ten days every month and sometimes more often whenever i can try to get out there and what we do is we train different people and we just got back from there today actually tired and that's why veronica is here because when we're training service dogs we have to use kids so we have a lot of kids we had ava and we had z z right savannah helped us and caylee and you know when you're training a service dog you need to use children or elderly people or people who are of that  similar need in order to make sure that the dogs are going to pick up on the right things and be good with kids so we pick them up and we we play with them and we probably do things we shouldn't but we need to make sure that the dogs are going to be rock solid so it  four canine pros and we'll help you out so if you can walk your chair wow so you give help with training dogs you know you'll go to people's homes as they need it ok and if anybody wants information about service dogs if they need a service dog if there's an organization who wants to help sponsor a dog or foster that we talked about fostering dogs if you need fosters well the neat thing about fosters is if we don't have a foster and we see a great dog in the shelter we have nowhere to put it the dog has to die and it breaks my because we've had that happen it happened to me in texas we were at one of the shelters i found this amazing dog and we didn't have space we i mean you can't just keep bringing dogs into your own home then you become a hoarder you know so that dog dog died and it just breaks my heart and i remember the door her name was china and i just remember this dog and it just haunts me so if one person who watches this program is able to foster even for only a few months some of them are a couple a week sometimes it's a few days sometimes it's six months or a year whatever it's up to you lexi sleeping and snoring by the way i was go not really allowed like snoring and pretty loud but you know fostering is a really important part and it's also tax deductable so if you pay for the food and things that's all taxing ductile it's a great way to teach your kids responsibility it's hard to have a dog that's not yours and then to have to give it up but when you see the dog with a child or with a veteran and how happy and how that person is just that life is changed forever so fostering is a really important part it's great donations are amazing and gosh we need that we need to farm a locally here so we can service this area but i think one of the most important things is fostering and helping so you need to go to the web site and again that's w w w dot merlins kids dot org and that's and e r l i n s k i d s org and when you get to that website there's information on there for the disease detection dogs there's the behavioral training there's that sarah the dogs there's how to donate how to volunteer all of the information on that site is there a telephone number as well if someone's not computer literate rather thinkable phone yes eight five five hi wyatt h i w y t t cause why it's slipping below us that's his his phone number so eight five five hi wyatt so give a call or get on the computer and check out the organizations there are wonderful groups they do phenomenal things and if you can be part of it somehow please try to get  involved before we wrap up the show is there one last tip you want to give the viewers about something they should really know about dogs if they have a dog if they're thinking of getting a dog yes you can get actually get my book which is only ninety nine on amazon it's called she happens s h h h happens dog behavior want to one by janice wolf and educate your kids do you know seventy three percent of dog bites are from your own dog or dogs a child knows through the middle you always support the dog and you don't put a dog right near your face and you don't allow your kids to approach other other dogs that they don't know or elbows and a lot of it i think is just education that people need to know if you have kids and dogs that's great we all hopefully had dogs as kids and it's a great thing for responsibility but you have to match the dog to the child that's one of the things that we do it united canine professionals is people will call us and say i want to get a dog will actually go to the shelter or go to the rescue with you and help you to find the right dog for your family and in my book she happens it has quite a bit on there about you know how to choose the right dog and the benefits of shelter dogs and i'm not a big fan of the designer breeds because they're i see all the bad parts i don't see the good no one ever calls me and says he janice i've got the best dog in the world come involved and thank you so much for coming thank you veronica wyatt lexi everybody and always remember get educated get empowered get healthy