Military Dog

Even after receiving a purple heart for his service in Afghanistan, Loki, a 12-year-old Boxer/Rottweiler mix was not ready to stop working.

He may be done using his nose to sniff out bombs, but his keen instincts led him to his retirement in Crete.

Tina Rockenbach and family got Loki from Loki’s military handler/partner at the end of January. Retired First Sgt. James Page is married to Rockenbach’s best friend from high school. Once Loki met Tina, the two became attached.

“James told me that he [Loki] has never done that to anyone other than him and that it meant something,” Rockenbach said.

Page got Loki when he was a six-week-old puppy in a program training bomb dogs. He continued Loki’s training in search and seizure, explosive searches and anti-terrorism measures.

“Loki is what I call a ‘free spirit,’” Page said. “He’s real smart. Sometimes too smart for his own good. I had to make sure he’s real secure or I would find him in my bunk or laying on top of me. He was always a mischievous puppy.”

Loki was with Page for 12 years including two tours to Afghanistan. Checking out vehicles at a stop post sniffing out explosives and chemicals was Loki’s job.

Page and Loki were checking a family and their vehicle when Loki caught a caught the scent of something a couple kilometers away. The two went to investigate. As Page got close enough to investigate, Loki jumped.

“He smelled something that just wasn’t right and he jumped into me,” Page said. “It was a land mine.”

Loki took the most of the blast for Page and ended up with a chest full of shrapnel.

When Page woke up, the medic was checking Loki out. He was unresponsive. The medic used electric shock paddles twice to bring Loki back. Page begged medics to use them again. Loki woke up.

Once the two were stable, they were flown back to the United States. When Page woke up after extensive surgery, Loki was already back at his bedside.

This act of loyalty and bravery earned Loki a Purple Heart.

During Page’s recovery, Loki was given to someone else to continue his work.

As part of the program, when the handler gets hurt, the dog has to go to the next person. Loki was re-trained to work with someone else.

“[One of my captains] said, ‘Loki won’t work with anybody else,’” Page said. “I was like, ‘I could have told you that from the beginning.’”

Rockenbach said having a service dog is very different from having a normal pet. Due to everything he has been trained for, his perceptions on things is very different.

“He pays attention to things intently,” Rockenbach said.

He verbally alerts of people he sees that are strangers, have face coverings or hoods that block their face. He also does not like loud sounds and tries to take cover and get to safety as they remind him of bombs.

Rockenbach found out how smart Loki is. He learned what the spelling of o-u-t is so they have to say “external part of the house” now.

“I tried to warn her [Tina], you have to have a firm hand with him. If he thinks he can get away with something, he’s going to get away with it. He will give you those eyes like he didn’t do anything wrong,” Page said.

Since he had training in bailing out of a Humvee, he was trained on how to open car doors.

“We have to be conscientious of him more as a human than a dog many times,” Rockenbach said.

Loki also has a sense for those who have served.

“He knows when he is around soldiers,” Page said. “He will find them quickly. He has a sense of who he can trust.”

Rockenbach said Loki enjoys spending time at Riverside Cemetery and visiting the graves of veterans there. He has a sense for spirits, Rockenbach said.

“We don’t know them, but he seems to connect in a way that he understands.” Rockenbach said.

Since becoming a service dog, he is trained for comfort for post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

“When he has his vest on, he becomes a completely different dog,” Rockenbach said. “He switches from goofy pet to ‘GI Joe.’”

Rockenbach plans to get Loki certified with Healing Hearts Therapy Dogs and visit veterans and long-term facilities.

She also is interested in going to groups or schools and telling his story and informing people on what Loki was trained to do.

Loki may be retired from the military, but he will continue to work as a comfort and education animal. “He’s never going to truly retire,” Page said.

Veteran Adopts Dog

A black Labrador retriever named Blue has saved Byung “BK” Kang’s life so many times, he’s lost count.

The two served on more than 300 combat missions while serving together in the United States Marine Corps on a deployment to Afghanistan from 2011-2012. Blue, a military dog trained to detect bombs called improvised explosive devices, was so good at her job that she found one on their very first mission.

“That IED could have taken a couple of our guys out,” Kang, 31, told TODAY. “So from there, Blue started getting trust and the respect of my platoon.” As Blue’s handler, Kang could read the dog’s body language to know when she wanted to investigate a possible IED. He’d allow her to run ahead of the group — anywhere from four to 60 Marines and enlisted medical specialists, Navy corpsmen. When she’d lie down as a final indication that she’d detected an explosive, he’d call her back for her reward: playing with a toy. Sometimes, there was time for emergency ordnance disposal technicians to confirm the existence of the IED and work to dismantle it. Other times, they’d take a step back for a security halt and get ambushed, needing to find a different path. “Since we knew Blue is effective, it was almost impossible for a squad or a platoon to go out without Blue,” he said. “Sometimes we went on three patrols per day and by the time we’d get back we’re all exhausted because we’ve been walking miles and miles in over a hundred degrees of heat in Afghanistan. So we did our best. Every chance, we tried to go out to possibly save the Marines and sailors.” Overwhelmed with gratitude to Blue for repeatedly saving his life and the lives of his fellow soldiers, one night in Afghanistan, Kang made a promise to the dog.“I told her, ‘What you’ve done for me and my guys over here in Afghanistan, we cannot pay back. So I’m going to give you a good home where you can cuddle all day, not worrying about going to war and finding bombs.’” After their tour ended, Blue was reassigned. Kang lost track of her, but he never forgot his promise. In fact, one of his first conversations with his future wife, Wendy, was about his plan to adopt Blue once she retired from service. Wendy Kang, herself a Marine veteran, used her connections with other female Marines to help track down Blue and to facilitate her adoption when she was finally retired. They welcomed her home in November 2018. “I did everything in my power to make sure that we could get Blue home,” Wendy Kang told TODAY. “After all the stories I’ve heard, I know for sure Blue is one of the reasons why BK is standing here with me and he’s alive.”

Dog Trainer Services

First Therapy Dog

It seems like every time that I write an article about therapy dogs or significant events in the history of therapy dogs I get a flurry of questions about which dog was the first therapy dog. That turns out to be a difficult question to answer. One candidate comes from the 1960s, when a clinical psychologist formally described the use of a therapy dog to the American Psychological Association. This was done by Boris Levinson and it involved his golden retriever, Jingles, who was being used to assist children with autism. Prior to that, in the 19th century, there was Sigmund Freud’s Chow Chow, Jofi, who regularly attended his therapy sessions, but Freud never presented data on the effects that the dog had on patients to any scientific organization.

One contender for the first officially recognized therapy dog turns out to be a diminutive Yorkshire Terrier, who weighed only 4 pounds (1.8 kg) and stood 7 inches (180 mm) at the shoulder, named Smoky. However, before she became a therapy dog, she proved to be a battlefield hero.Smoky’s origins are unknown. In 1944 she was discovered, full-grown, in an abandoned foxhole in the New Guinea jungle. Ultimately the soldier who was taking care of her found himself running out of money in a poker game, so he sold her to Corporal William Wynne, a photographer with the U.S. Air Force. She was purchased for two Australian pounds (which would be $6.44 in U.S. dollars). For the next two years, Smoky would be carried in Wynne’s backpack and would share his C rations. She would also accompany him on combat flights in the South Pacific. Ultimately she flew 12 air/sea rescue and photo reconnaissance missions with the fifth Air Force (and was awarded eight battle stars for this). Smoky suffered through all of the rigors of combat endured by Corporal Wynne, including surviving around 150 air raids on New Guinea and making it through a typhoon on Okinawa. Wynne had learned to train dogs back in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. So when not on duty he entertained himself and his military friends by training Smoky to do a variety of tricks. She was a remarkably obedient and responsive little dog and it was this which ultimately made her into a military hero.

The situation was that engineers were building an air base at Lingayen Gulf on the Isle of Luzon in the Philippines. The way that Wynne described the situation was that it became vitally clear that phone lines needed to be strung between the airfield and three fighter squadron areas. The problem was that the base was being heavily bombed by the Japanese every day. A culvert which was 70-foot-long (21 m) but only 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter ran under the taxiway and it seemed like the most logical place to place the communication lines.

If a conduit for these wires had to be laid by hand, it would have required many men working approximately three days and during this time the planes, to remain operational, would have to be moved to the steel matting along the runway. This would expose both the men working on laying the line, and the precious aircraft, to enemy fire. It would also clearly identify where the vital electrical lines were and make this area a target, increasing the likelihood that any newly laid communication wires would be quickly severed.

It then occurred to Wynne that the solution might be to send Smoky through the pipe. This would not be easy since not only was the culvert narrow, but its diameter was further restricted by the fact that sifted sand had moved into it and drifted into piles that cut the space by half in some places. Nonetheless, they decided to tie a string to Smoky’s collar and Wynne worked his way across the field to the other end of the pipe.

He then began calling the little dog. She struggled her way in his direction and when she was about 10 feet in, the string got caught and she ended up looking over her shoulder as if to say “What’s going on back there?” Her efforts, and some jiggling of the string from the other end, allowed it to be loosened from the snag and she struggled her way through the rest of the way. The string was then connected to the vital communications wires and it is estimated that she saved some 250 ground crewmen from being exposed to jeopardy, and she kept operational 40 fighter flights who would’ve otherwise been exposed to enemy fire over the days that it would’ve taken to dig in the new lines.

Smoky’s work as a therapy dog began when Wynne came down with dengue fever and he was sent to the 233rd Station Hospital in New Guinea. Wynne’s friends smuggled the little dog into his ward to keep him company. While she was there, the nurses observed the positive effect that the little dog had, not only on Wynne but on the other patients in the hospital. This was not only because of the tricks that she had learned to do but simply because her presence and friendly response to overtures from the suffering soldiers seem to break through the negative emotional malaise which is common in facilities containing injured soldiers. The positive effect that Smoky was having was ultimately brought to the attention of Dr. Charles Mayo, of the Mayo Clinic, who at that time was the commanding officer at the hospital. He then issued orders which allowed Smoky to go on rounds with the medical personnel and also permitted her to sleep with Wynne in his hospital bed for the five nights that he was there. It was this which started Smoky on her career as a therapy dog, which would continue for the rest of World War II and afterwards.

A number of widely read military magazines began to spread the word about the positive effects that Smoky was having in aiding the recovery of wounded veterans and this started a movement of sorts. The first example of this was at an Air Force convalescent home in Pawling, New York. The medical personnel there tried, based on Smoky’s example, to see what the effect of a dog might be on one severely depressed patient. The effect was so remarkable that they brought more dogs into the hospital and eventually built a kennel on the grounds to house them all.

In effect, Smoky’s major contribution was to start a trend. In much the same way that patriotic owners had volunteered their dogs to serve with the American fighting forces at the beginning of the war, they now brought their pets to serve as hospital dogs, to provide emotional support for injured soldiers recovering from their wounds. By the end of 1947, there were approximately 700 dogs that had been donated by civilians to serve in this way. I think that it might be sensible to say that it was these dogs that were the first officially recognized therapy dogs, and they were there because of the example that Smoky set. At the end of the war, Smoky and Wynne toured many hospitals trying to comfort recuperating soldiers who had returned to America.Smoky retired in 1955 and she died in her sleep two years later around the age of 14. Her efforts were honored by recognition by the U.S. War Dogs Association and a statue memorializing her was erected in Cleveland, Ohio near her final resting place.

Pittie Pet Therapy

 

Did you know that some pittie pups can make great pet therapy providers?! HSTC animal tech, Tracy Steffen, continues sharing some “pittie 101” with her dog, Mama, who also happens to be a pet therapy dog for HSTC’s Misty’s Pals Pet Therapy program!

All-Natural Pain Relief For Dogs With Pet Wellbeing’s Comfort Gold

 

Dr. Jan explains how the herbal formula found in Pet Wellbeing’s Comfort Gold can offer pain relief for dogs. At home, your dog may experience discomfort, have trouble sleeping, and require extra support, but many pet owners don’t want their dogs to suffer the side effects of pharmaceutical options and would rather find something natural to provide pain relief. For dogs, this formula supports healthy blood flow and movement, allowing your pet to naturally rest well. Help keep your dog comfortable and content without any nasty side effects. As a natural anti-inflammatory and pain relief for dogs, Comfort Gold is non-addictive and gentle on the stomach.

Bailey And His Bunny

 

Oh, Bailey’s such a gentle sweetheart – check out his best friend, bunny Jax!

St. John Ambulance Digital Therapy Dogs

 

Rosie challenges herself to ‘level up’!

Read To A Dog: QC CAN Therapy Dog Roxi

 

 

Virtual Reading Program

Santa Cruz Public Libraries popular reading program for children, Tales to Tails, has gone virtual. The library will stream wet-noses and furry paws straight to the SCPL YouTube channel for hundreds of kids to easily access and view.

Each week you register, the library will send you a printable dog bone and activity. These are dated dog bones your child can color and email to us. The following week, they will be displayed live on the feed.

Parents and caregivers are invited to post their child’s first name and city in the YouTube comments, along with the book they are reading, and program staff will read off as many names as they can, live, during the break for the dogs. Kids and parents will have the ability to comment in real-time and give a thumbs up. Please note, the children will not be on the screen — only the animals and handlers. The program will be available to access on YouTube anytime after the event, making access to this reading development program even easier.