Ep. 854: Dogs That Hunt Humans

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 854: Dogs That Hunt Humans (March 30, 2026)
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Doug Roller, former Chief Trainer, LAPD K9 Unit

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Episode Overview

This episode offers an extraordinary look into the world of police dogs—specifically, "apprehension dogs" that are trained not to find drugs or bombs, but to hunt, detect, and catch humans. Steven Rinella is joined by Doug Roller, a legendary K9 trainer whose career with the Los Angeles Police Department spanned decades. They dive deep into training philosophies, canine tactics, the science of scent, real-life apprehensions, and the very real bond—along with challenges—in building a true human-dog partnership for high-stakes enforcement. The episode is rich in insider knowledge, raw stories, and eye-opening revelations about the reality of dogs that “hunt humans.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Doug Roller’s Unusual Path to K9 Training

• Background: Doug started with a fascination for falconry and working with animals in the outdoors, setting the foundation for his later career in K9 training.
  • Quote: “I was probably about 13. I got my falconer’s license in California…” (06:29)
• Transition to Police Work: After a random ride-along with LAPD at age 19, Doug was hooked on policing and ended up in one of LA’s busiest precincts.
  • Quote: “I had no thought about being a police officer...I was making a ton of money in real estate. But after that ride-along, I was hooked.” (08:40)

2. Formation and Evolution of LAPD K9 Unit

• History: The origins of LAPD’s K9 unit go back to the late 1970s and 80s, a time of extreme violence. The unit was unique, facing more shootings than even SWAT—due to constantly pursuing armed suspects.
• Containment vs. Pursuit: Modern tactics shifted towards containment, using K9 teams and air support for controlled sweeps rather than chaotic chases.
  • Quote: “You’re not going to catch people if you’re chasing them...contain this guy.” (87:46)

3. Types of Police Dogs—Apprehension vs. Detection vs. Tracking

• Apprehension Dogs: Specialize in searching for, locating, and biting—if necessary—human suspects. “Dogs that catch people.”
• Detection & Tracking Dogs: Used for narcotics, bombs, or tracking lost persons; often distinct from apprehension work.
• Specialization:
  • “I can’t have a dog that’s trained to find narcotics also find bombs…there’s legalities in that.” (16:46)

4. The Science and Tactics of Human Scent

• Fear Scent: Dogs learn to detect the unique scent given off by humans in fight-or-flight mode—a "fear scent."
  • Quote: “When you’re in fight or flight, you put off a certain odor…a seasoned dog will pick up on it.” (26:23)
• Self-Discovery and Scent Pictures: Training focuses on allowing dogs to self-discover scent and learn “pictures” in various real-world settings.

5. Training Methodologies

• Off-Lead Searching: Doug’s primary method, utilizing electronic collars to let dogs move with minimal restriction—giving tactical advantages in real searches.
  • Quote: “When a dog’s working off lead…the magic really starts happening” (54:38)
• Building a Reliable Bite:
  • Dogs learn first to “bite out of fun”—gradually progressing to controlled aggression when needed.
  • Quote: “When a dog is biting out of defense and fear, he’s unreliable…you want a bite that’s fun, that comes from play and drive.” (113:56)

6. Real-Life Case Stories

Doug recounts several thrilling and suspenseful apprehensions, such as:

• Apprehension Example (43:10–48:40):
  • After a suspect shot at police, Doug’s dog, Kino, followed fear scent across multiple yards, disregarding distractions, and located the suspect in a bush. Kino’s years of exposure to real criminals made him exceptionally reliable.
  • Quote: “My dog was just telling me he’s got odor…he goes into the yard, dives into a bush, and he’s on this guy…guns out, laying over there.” (47:19)
  • Memorable Insight: Routine interviews with captured suspects revealed how they learned to evade capture—outsmarting not just police but also the K9 search patterns.

7. Dog Selection, Breeding, and Limits of Training

• European Breeding Dominance: Most apprehension dogs are bred in Europe—Hungary, Slovakia, Holland, France—and start at $13K–$15K.
  • Quote: “When I came on the job, we were picking up dogs for $3,500. Now you’re talking $13,000–$15,000.” (94:02)
• Nature vs. Nurture: Some traits (like bite willingness or quiet hunting style) are innate. Training can build foundation and reliability, but “don’t waste time on imperfection.” (96:37)
• Risks of Selling 'Executive' Attack Dogs: These can become legal liabilities for civilians when handled without deep knowledge—“that dog might get you in real trouble.” (98:02)

8. Barking, Legalities, and Tactical Protocol

• Find and Bark: LAPD prefers dogs that bark to alert (rather than silently attack)—helping confirm a suspect’s location, de-escalate, and respond with appropriate force.
• On Announcing Searches: K9 searches require verbal warnings, often timed and recorded, to give suspects a chance to surrender before deployment. (57:51–58:07)
• On Calling Off Dogs: Doug advocates for “verbal outs” to remove dogs safely and efficiently from suspects. (47:19, 78:49)

9. Building and Maintaining Control—Handler Relationships

• Bonding and Hierarchy: K9s go home with LAPD handlers to build strong bonds, but officers must avoid treating them solely as pets—structure and clarity of hierarchy are critical.
  • Quote: “You can love him…cry if he gets killed…but you gotta treat him like a dog.” (38:48)
• Reading the Dog: Success depends on the handler’s ability to recognize even slight cues for scent or impending action.
  • “A seasoned dog is like gold…you can read exactly what he’s telling you.” (55:37)

10. Professional Hazards & Cost of Service

• K9s Under Fire: Doug recounts dogs killed by suspects—shot, stabbed, or injured in dangerous searches; the department and handlers often grieve intensely for these “officers.”
  • Quote: “We had a dog apprehend somebody…the guy pulled out a knife and stabbed him—killed him.” (117:31)
• Handler Emotions: Deep personal bonds, with many handlers describing heartbreak after K9 deaths. (119:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• “A dog that has had a police dog that has had numerous apprehensions will be seasoned on that odor…fear scent.” — Doug Roller (26:23)
• “I had a great dog. Even the guys in the unit said…bring out your Kino, your dog will do his magic.” — Doug Roller (44:43)
• “Reaction time is everything…when a dog works off lead, that dog offers you reaction time because he’s way out ahead of you.” — Doug Roller (54:37)
• “When you are training a dog to bite, in the beginning as a puppy, they’re biting out of fun. You start off…playing tug, you work on the bite, you work on the grip…” (113:56)
• “When you contain, your chance of catching them just goes up…they give that suspect a chance to deescalate and you’re going to catch them.” — Doug Roller (88:31)
• “You find a good dog where a good dog is…you want to be greedy in your selection.” (95:34)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Doug’s animal upbringing and falconry (05:13–08:40)
• Why Doug became a cop and early K9 unit history (08:35–13:25)
• Explaining apprehension, detection, tracking dogs (14:37–19:54)
• Scent, fear, and ‘seasoned’ K9 noses (26:13–31:20)
• Training and tactics: search team environments, handler bond (34:19–39:32)
• Apprehension story: “fear scent” and high-risk search (43:10–48:40)
• Balancing dog traits, building the bite (67:23–73:38)
• On the problem with silent vs. barking dogs, legal nuances (83:02–85:24)
• Containment strategies and their evolution (87:46–92:47)
• Dog selection, nature vs. nurture, working with European breeders (93:00–97:47)
• Risks of civilian “executive protection” attack dogs (97:56–99:27)
• Comparing field trial dogs to ‘real world’ experienced dogs (109:24–110:38)
• Dog motivation and psychology (111:11–114:31)
• Loss and dangers—dogs shot or stabbed on the job (115:26–119:18)
• Doug Roller’s current training work (119:31–123:17)

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Conclusion

This episode is an absolute masterclass in how police dogs are selected, trained, bonded with, and deployed for some of the most dangerous jobs imaginable. Doug Roller offers untold stories from decades on the front lines—balancing humor, humility, and an unflinching look at the realities behind the K9 badge. Whether you’re a dog person, a law enforcement buff, or simply curious about the animal world’s interface with human law, this episode will fascinate, educate, and surprise.

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Listen to the full episode for a wild ride through the science, art, and heart behind the world’s most extraordinary working dogs.

Transcript

[Steven Rinella]

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[Doug Roller]

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[Steven Rinella]

We hunt the Meat Eater podcast.

[Doug Roller]

You can't predict anything brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First light builds no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com joined today by Doug Roller, who's who was the chief trainer for LAPD, Los Angeles Police Department's K9 unit. Doug spent his career working with this is big important point, apprehension dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

There you go.

[Doug Roller]

Meaning dogs that catch people. So in the dog world, you got detection dogs, guns, drugs, whatever. You got tracking dogs, which could be used as like rescue dogs to track people lost out in the woods. But his career is in using dogs to apprehend folks. He was a handler for seven years, then spent 17 years as the head trainer working with apprehension dogs. I met Doug, you know, a couple months ago.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Doug Roller]

I was at, I was with a friend of mine, Shane Yates, who's been on the show before. I was hanging out in a setting very similar to this on a couple couches in a living room, and Doug was kind of blowing my mind with this whole world of dog use and dog training that I was unfamiliar with. So we're going to kind of recreate that conversation about just an intricate, very detailed, in depth use of dogs. It'll kind of, that kind of blows your mind. Before we get into the police work, which is fascinating, man. And the, in the dog and the training and all that. I want to talk about your background a little bit. I didn't, we didn't talk about this when I met you.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

But, but Kryn was telling me that, that you got one of your initial introductions to working with. Sorry, that one of your introductions. Not even to dogs. What am I saying? You were into falconry.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, police work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Doug Roller]

Train, I guess, in training or whatever.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. That's come up before. When I've talked to people like, you know, they'll say, like, you know, what drew you? I don't know. You know, you're raised, and I was raised in a family that was Very loved animals and the outdoors and all that. Did a lot of camping and I don't even know how it happened, but I, I guess I had parents also that, you know, did the right thing and allowed me to go directions that they saw, but that maybe was not instinctual, but just. I gravitated toward that.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And I remember getting my first falcon was a little tiny falconet that I bought at the pet shop they bought for me. It's a little from India, smallest falcon in the world. And I had it as like a pet and it ended up dying on me because I didn't take care of it properly. But then I started reading, I got into all the books and I was very young at the time, and then I got into birds of prey and, and trapping them and catching them. Got my falconer's license in California.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, really? Huh.

[Steven Rinella]

And I was a very young age. I was probably about 13. I couldn't even drive yet. But because I got so much into it, I was on the verge of getting my master falconer's license at a really young age. And then the Fish and Game got a hold of me. I don't know how that occurred. I think he just came over to approve my muse and my equipment and he said, hey, we need to rehab, rehab birds once in a while that are injured or mistreated, whatever. Birds of prey, would you be interested? And of course, I'm a kid. Oh yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So they started bringing me birds to rehab, you know, like cooper hawks, red tails, you know, sometimes a prairie falcon in that area. So that, that actually fueled that. But then I got very much into it. I joined a falconers club and I got really into falconry. And then some of my buddies in high school, we all got into it and, and I got guys right now that I kind of lost touch with, but they're really into it. I mean, they're, I left it because I, my, my life went no other direction. You know, I got into police work, got into the dog thing.

[Doug Roller]

But you were, you were tuned up on, trained up on, kind of like mentally trained up on working with animals.

[Steven Rinella]

And not only that, it was like being able to utilize an animal in the, in the natural environment and hunt prey. There's something really neat about that. Like there's certain, there are certain birds you, you go hunting with. You hunt from the fist, you know, you, you like a goshawk, you're going to, you're going to look for jackrabbits or bunnies or whatever and you got to have the dog appropriately trained, the canine or the. The bird appropriately trained for that. But then you also have the falcons, which are taught to hunt from the. The stoop. So you actually teach them to wait on you. Okay. There's involved, like, bird dogs. Bird dogs will flush the game. Your peregrine or your prairie falcon will come up and stoop down and take them out.

[Doug Roller]

Got it?

[Steven Rinella]

Now, these guys put transmitters on their birds and everything else, because some of these stoops can last, go for miles.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

You want to lose your bird, so you got to track him down. There he is with the. The duck or the grouse or whatever, you know, a mile away. So it's pretty neat stuff, though, when you really get into it, at least for me, it was.

[Doug Roller]

What. What made you. What was your decision process in becoming a cop?

[Steven Rinella]

That's kind of. That's interesting too, because I had no. I had no thought about being a police officer. I was selling real estate. I was 19. I was making a ton of money. I was doing. Buying and selling foreclosure houses, fixing them up, probably on my way to making a lot of money. You know, I had, like, rental properties and all this other stuff. And I was at 19, 19, 20 years old. I had some investors I was working with, so. But one day, this buddy of mine says, hey, why don't you come on a ride along with lapd? And I even lost track of this guy, but it was somebody I knew at the time. So he worked southeast, which is a, you know, the Watts area. Very busy, very violent. Yeah. And of course, I rode with a sergeant, and I got hooked up. I go, this is neat. This is like. I mean, for me, it just was really, you know, it was a. It was an adrenaline rush. Dangerous. I'm seeing a world that I never was exposed to. Got it. I mean, I'm upper middle class, you know, white boy growing up in Southern California. Here I am in. In a really bad area.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. But I liked it. So for the heck of it and that. You bring up so many memories. God. I was married to my first wife, and she just didn't like that. But I went ahead through it. She did not think she was gonna be married to a cop. But I went in, I put in like this.

[Doug Roller]

Caught her by surprise.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. She just wasn't like, we are not going there type thing anyways. That's another story. But I put in for the application in September, and shockingly, I was accepted. And I was already getting ready to go into a class In December, which is pretty fast. And yeah, the rest is history, so.

[Doug Roller]

And you got right into dog work.

[Steven Rinella]

No, I didn't. Okay. LAPD is a big department. At the time was about 6,500 cops. Now it's about 10,000. But now they're, they're losing guys left and right for all the nonsense going on. So they get in a K9 unit with LA canine. Wasn't. There's a division in LA called Metro.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Metro has SWAT mounted unit B and C platoon and then K9. But when I got on, young K9 was off doing their own thing. They weren't in a specialized unit yet. So back in the old K9, there was when it started, like in the late 70s by two guys, Sergeant Moring and a guy named Darn Yarnell, it blew up. I mean, a lot of departments in the, in the country had canines, but L. A didn't. And these guys were like the fathers of our canine unit. And they went out and researched, did a lot of work, got the unit going, and they were, they were housed out of West LA division and they wanted to be part of air support. They did not want to go to Metro. There was a lot of Eagle stuff going on. But as the unit grew with to like four or five handlers, these guys are getting into shootings like a lot more than sis, more than some of the other specialized units because they're, they're hunting down armed suspects all the time. And it was a lot of violence back then.

[Doug Roller]

The K9 handlers are finding themselves in more shooting incidents probably they were getting

[Steven Rinella]

more shootings back then than any unit in the, in the department. Got it. Department Chief Gates says, you know, what's going on here? You know, we, we need to put this, this unit in the Metro. And you know, there was always the perception like, what are they doing here? Why are all these shootings occurring?

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, even back then, you know, are these guys a bunch of cowboys, whatever. But I don't think it was that. I think it was more like, you know, back in the late 80s, it was a really violent time. It was like, you know, the stats people talk about crime and where it is now, but back then, I mean, just as as an example, there was about one of some of the years, there was a 22, 2300 homicides in LA LAPD alone. And now for the whole city. And now you're lucky to break 130.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So look at exponentially different.

[Doug Roller]

That's the thing about, like, crime statistics get manipulated so often. Like, people have this perception that it's this perception that nowadays crime is so bad, but when you look at like crime trends 100, it's really just not.

[Steven Rinella]

It's not. They have. Even cops that I've worked with that are new, they can't even believe the numbers I'll throw out. The amount of searches that I did, for example, you know, in canine, it just. You don't hear about those numbers. That's why our dogs were so, for, for a training word, seasoned.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They were so good at what they

[Doug Roller]

did because they had so much action in those days. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But back to that. So when I put in for the unit for K9, I put in for Metro too. Because at the time they were in that crossroads, like they're going to bring you to Metro first and then you get selected to K9.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, back then I was the last group of guys that came in straight from patrol. I was working Rampart, very busy division. And then I went straight to K9. And then things evolved after that where you had to go to Metro, do about a year in Metro and then be able to put in for K9 or SWAT. And now they're called high risk positions

[Doug Roller]

where you actually get K9 is a high risk position.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, just like SWAT, you get more money, you get hazard pay, you get a take home car because, you know, it's, it's deserved, I guess. Yeah. But that's that history of that. So, you know, I did. It was a process. I got in and I got in pretty young. I got in less than five years on the job, which is pretty young for that kind of a.

[Doug Roller]

Is that right in la, Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, guys in other departments, they might get in after a year or two, but in L. A, it's, it's a lot more competitive. The expectations are a lot higher. All that stuff, good, bad or indifferent.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, let's jump to some definitions here. Explain to folks what an apprehension dog is.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Doug Roller]

In that like juxtaposed to a detection dog, a tracking dog. Like, like explain that specific term.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, in where I, you know, my shop, my, our claim to fame in LAPD K9. Now within LAPD there are several canine units that are separate from Metro canine. So you have Metro canine, which is the apprehension dog. The dogs that actually are. Are taught to search, find suspects, and if needed, they'll bite up. LAPD still has a policy of finding bark, which not a big fan of. And you know, I hate to say that, but I'm just not a big fan of it. As things have evolved and we can get into that later.

[Doug Roller]

Well, yeah, yeah, we got to come back to bite and bark.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a big deal because that's not.

[Doug Roller]

People aren't going to know what that.

[Steven Rinella]

They won't. And then it needs to be explained. But that being said, that's Metro. And we have done some tracking in the past. We put a lot of time and effort into it. I did a lot of experimenting with the tracking dogs. It's very time consuming and it works okay. But the problem is we just don't have the environment for that. You know, most of our searches, the vast majority, are going to be containments, like a perimeter search. You know, we lock down a block, two blocks, three blocks, or a building or a warehouse, and then we systematically clear it with numerous dogs. Sometimes.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, really?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And then, then you have the detection dogs. And for most departments, that's. For most departments, because of money and economics, they'll have what's called dual purpose dogs. That means these dogs also are apprehension dogs, but they'll also find narcotics or firearms or bombs. And you know, you can't do more, more than one odor with one dog. And we can talk about that a little bit. Like, I can't have a dog that's trained to find narcotics, find bombs.

[Doug Roller]

Really.

[Steven Rinella]

No, can't be done. Shouldn't be done. Because it's just not. There's legalities of it. You know, what's my dog really hitting on? That's why.

[Doug Roller]

So when you see it, if you're in the airport and it just happens to be there's a dog day, there's a guy in the airport, that dog isn't looking for everything. That dog's looking for a thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. And there's. That's another whole discussion. They have what's called vapor wake dogs now, where the dogs are taught to just scan by people as they're walking and they'll alert on them for maybe narcotics or maybe bombs, depending what he's trained for.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

But you're never going to know. And you know, it's, it's funny because back in the 90s, early 90s, before vapor wake was ever termed, we were already experimenting with that.

[Doug Roller]

With what?

[Steven Rinella]

With dogs that were taught to go ahead and detect odor by following somebody. Okay. Like an action instead of just pinpointing odor at a specific location, they were taught to find and follow. So a guy would be in the crowd walking. All of a sudden a dog would alert, show a body, a change of behavior and start following that person. And then you could have time to go ahead and do what you're going to do, man. Okay.

[Doug Roller]

We got a lot of balls in here. Because this is something I want to talk about. Like, because when we talked before, you talk about the difference between a dog whose nose is on the ground.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

And a dog whose nose is in the air. But, yes, apprehend.

[Steven Rinella]

So back to the absolute.

[Doug Roller]

It's all stuff I want to talk about.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like I said, you got to keep guiding me here, so. Because there's so much stuff.

[Doug Roller]

No, this. It's. It's. I want to talk about this stuff. Like, I first want to just clarify, like, what you mean by apprehension, how it's different than a tracking dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. In my world. Now, a tracking dog is an apprehension dog, too.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

But basically, these dogs are trained to find and locate, whether it's tracking or air sending, to go ahead and find somebody and bite them if necessary, or not bite them, depending on the circumstances. And we can talk about that. You know, a lot.

[Doug Roller]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Everybody's got different methods. I train a certain method that's a little bit unique. Not as unique as it used to be, because a lot of the. A lot of. I think teams are catching on to the. When we search in LAPD in a lot of units that I work with now with my business, I teach what's called off lead searching.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And we utilize this tool, this electric collar here. And some of your audience, I'm sure, is familiar with it.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, yeah. All my buddies have the trained dogs,

[Steven Rinella]

the Garmin 550 or whatever they use, and that's what we use primarily. That's what I like. But our dogs are taught to primarily air scent and find the suspect. You know, pinpoint the odor, change of behavior, bark at the odor, Let us know the guy's inside that cupboard or that shed or whatever. That's primarily what we do because of our environment. There are some guys, like, out here in Montana, they do a lot of tracking. They do both, and they'll actually hit a track, and, you know, they might be in the track for a half mile or a mile and find the guy in some bushes, in a creekside or, you know, maybe attracts to a building. And then they turn into. But they do apprehend to.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So at the end of the track, they have a chance to maybe take the guy into custody with no force. Maybe he takes off runs. They send them on him. They take him down. Yeah. I'm just giving you.

[Doug Roller]

So there's like a. There's like a Fundamental difference between. I'm going to give you two scenarios. One is a scenario you're in an agricultural, Rural agricultural area, right? And you know that a guy has gotten out of the car, like yesterday, got out of a car and ran off through the woods, Right? That's scenario one. No one knows where he is. Now, scenario two is he comes into this building. Right. Like, these are different.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Doug Roller]

These are different dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, they'll do both.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

It's not a big deal. A dog can be taught to track with different commands. Even like one command might be, you have him on leash, you find out where the guy was last seen. Some guys might even do discrimination where they show a part, you know, a jacket or something the guy might have left. That's another thing we can get into. But generally speaking, they'll pick up a track and nose on the ground, and they'll go footstep to footstep. But they'll also do what's called trail because they're air sending at the same time. But they're taught to be get their nose on the ground.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And these dogs are specifically trained. Like, for example, if you're gonna have a tracking dog, his nose needs to be trained on the ground immediately. Okay. In other words, if you take that dog and start teaching him how to air scent, it's gonna be very difficult to get his nose on the ground.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's gotta be trained first because the dog's gonna go, well, you know, if I want to go to A, to F, I wanna skip everything. Yeah. Which is air sending. But with tracking, it's more diligent. And the dog's gotta learn to put his nose on the ground and follow footsteps, crush vegetation, skin rafts that are falling, you know, like on a curb or, you know, it's amazing how a dog will pick up on this stuff, but he's got to be exposed to all these different environments to be a good tracking dog. And it's got to be followed up on. But like I said, if you try to take one of our apprehension, dogs that are trained to air scent, they've been doing it for three or four years, can be very hard to get them to track.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Because they're not going to want to do it. Very difficult. So that's. That's a little bit of the training thing on that.

[Doug Roller]

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[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

But you were explaining to me that, that the apprehension dogs you guys train with, they're smelling something very different.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we talked about that, remember? Yeah, yeah. There's a thing, and it's true, it's a fact, it's been studied. There's a thing that when you're in fight or flight, you put off a certain odor. It's enhanced scent. Some people call it fear scent. A dog that has had a police dog that has had numerous apprehensions will be seasoned on that odor. And it's not race specific. It's something that the body goes through. Noradrenaline, epinephrine, all these changes happen in the body when you're a fight or flight. I think it reminds me, I was watching a show once on boar hunting and these boar hunters are out there and they were talking about what they go through during a bore. In fact, I knew a guy, one of the guys in a unit, Joe Vita, used to go boar hunting in Catalina.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And hunt these things down on the caves and you know, back in the day, Catalina Island, Catalina. And he would carry nothing more than a.357 with a little scope on it and go into caves and hunt them out. And I guess you can imagine the adrenaline and the fear at the same time that not only is coming, going on in your own body, but also is going on in the body of the boar. Because when he's corners, he's in fight or flight too. Yeah. So that's kind of what a suspect does when he's in fight or flight, running from the police. He puts out that odor and trust me, he does, because.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, you mentioned to me that this, you're like, you're dealing with people who. This maybe is the most excited and scared they've ever been in their life,

[Steven Rinella]

believe it or not. Yeah, I mean, we talked about it. I mean, I found guys after and some of them weren't even bit, they were just scared, excuse the language. Shitless.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And they, they, they end up defecating on themselves because they're so scared from. Especially if they're bit by the dog. Yeah, some guys aren't, some guys are very aggressive. They're yoked up, they're, they're, they're seasoned criminals. They're prisoners, you know, prisoners and all that. And they take it, they take anything like a champ. But this, this is what you want to do with a seasoned dog over a period of time. When you're training a new dog, you obviously can't, they've tried to, they can't bottle fears in.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

There's companies that have tried to and I've tested them, experimented with them and I'm not seeing it. So the best you can do. This is old school stuff, just kind of funny. But I remember when I was a brand new handler and I'm in the unit, it was a guy named John hall, had his little dog named Liberty Rottweiler, we don't use ROTS anymore. But it was his own dog he bred and the dog was still in training and they're messing with me and you know, I'm a new guy. And he said, okay, we want you to hide over here and I want you to put this face mask on because he's going to go for your face. He's not going to go for my face, but he want to put that fear in me.

[Doug Roller]

Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

So that when I'm hiding and we're doing a training scenario, the dog will supposedly maybe hit on me of being a little scared.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it did get to me. I'm thinking, shit, I'm a brand new handler. I knew a little bit about dog, did some dog stuff before I got in the unit. I'm like, this dog's a face biter. Really? And you're hiding. So just that kind of thing. It wasn't going to happen. But he was trying to recreate that. Yeah, but you can't, you really can't. You, you can only do it by finding real bad guys, really.

[Doug Roller]

So if one of one of these apprehension dogs it's experienced, if I took like. So it sounds, it's an outlandish Scenario. But let's say you had someone that just was in a high speed chase, crashes a car, gets out of the car, runs. But all of a sudden you could nab that person and put them in a lineup of a hundred people. And the dog walks past 100 people. The dog's gonna go, this dude, he might has the odor. I'm, I'm interested.

[Steven Rinella]

He might. But you know, lineups are very strange when you're doing that. You know, you've got to have so much corroborating evidence. Usually, you know, it's like, yeah, we have, you have to be careful on that. Relying on a dog for court purposes, just to discriminate on somebody gets you in a bad place.

[Doug Roller]

Got it?

[Steven Rinella]

Not, not, not to get too much into the weeds, but there was a, a program the sheriffs were using for a while and I'll keep the guy nameless, but he was running a bloodhound and he was claiming to do all this stuff. Dog can, you know, pick up on a drop of blood a week old. He can hit that track. He can find that guy three miles away going through the, the streets of LA and all this other stuff. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute, that's. You're, you know, you're, you're making up stories. I didn't believe it and I did some training with, not with him, but some observations. The department, the department wanted me to look into it. Robert, Homicide wanted to look into it. And I mean, I'll just say it, it proved out that I couldn't do it.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

But what, what sealed it was, he put a guy in jail. Based on what he said the dog had found this guy who was some kind of rape shooting suspect, male Hispanic guy did, was already in jail. DNA comes out, proves that he's innocent. I did like five years, got a big lawsuit out of it. And that hurt that program big time

[Doug Roller]

because they based everything that was like using the dogs, just the dog sensory

[Steven Rinella]

without any cooperating evidence. The dog nailed them and it caused them a lot of problems.

[Doug Roller]

Got it? Let me ask the same, let me ask the question a different way. Picture that you have that same scenario. A guy is in a high speed car chase. Bam. Crashes his car, gets out of his car, runs all around, enters a house. The house is full of other people. Okay, there's, there's a whole apartment building. Okay, whatever, it's full of other people. You guys are all there, the cops are there. What is the dog? Why doesn't the dog just run up to the first person in the house and be like, here he is. I got him.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, what would we do on that? Because we've had that. Okay. Many of those where we call him. He runs into a friendly.

[Doug Roller]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Or sometimes he just runs into a pilgrim's house. Like a non suspect, totally innocent citizen. Yeah. I can talk all day about some of the crazy stuff we've had. You know, we've had guys run into a house. We know he's in there. We bang on the door like some time has gone by. And we says, hey, is everything okay here? And the. The. It's like a movie, right? The lady looks at you and goes, yeah, everything's fine. Everything's fine. And I'm like, oh, oh, yeah.

[Doug Roller]

People listening. You're not. She's doing like a guy right behind

[Steven Rinella]

the corn with a gun on her. And she was trying to say, we're good because he's gonna kill her, right?

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, yeah, he was.

[Steven Rinella]

He was. Guys, this guy's wanted for murder, so he's got nothing to lose. And we ended up catching him, but we basically picked up on her eye movements. Like, okay, she scared shitless right now. Yeah, the guy's right there. And we ended up. We ended up trying to nail the house down. And this guy bails out of a window, crawls up into a crawl space, he hides, and we have to gas him out and.

[Doug Roller]

Huh.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we have to actually. We have to actually have to have had to use hot gas because we. What he did was he was ready for the gas. He put a bunch of clothing on his face. He was taking it like a champ. And hot gas is really hard to defeat. It's like, nasty. You got to be careful because you could burn down a house. What the SWAT guys finally did was they kept punching it in different parts of the ceiling. And he had corralled himself into an area where he wasn't getting hit. And then finally they put the hot gas right where he was hiding. And then he screamed out, I'm coming out. So that's just another story. But. But yeah, you got to be careful about discriminating like that. And usually you want to be safe and have cooperating evidence and all that to. You're gonna put someone in jail, take his freedom away? You got to be right.

[Doug Roller]

No, but I mean, what I'm trying to get at is what. How does the dog know that he's found the one he's supposed to find?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, that's a good point. I mean, after you have. When you put a dog in Training, obviously, he's just finding decoys. And that's a really good question that leads into a lot of good training. Right. When you're exposing a new dog, first you, you get your police dog that has all the right traits. You test them, you purchase them, you put them through the basic obedience. And then these dogs have the aptitude to do what we're going to do. And we could talk all day on that. But once that dog, before he hits a straight, he needs to work in what's called the search team environment. So you might. With us, we have a point guard who's married up to the handler, and we have a rear guard, two or three people behind us. And those folks play a really important part in the search. It's your backup. The point guard usually carries a, you know, either a tube or a Benelli or an ar, and he's married up right to the shoulder of the handler. Okay. So the dog has to get used to all this. He's got to get used to the team. And some dogs aren't. You get them new, Some of these dogs are, they're edgy. They're ready to just, you know, bite anything and everything. And you've got to socialize them and, and make them right. Not all, but you've got to train them appropriately so they're safe to search with. So you have to teach them how to work within that search team cell environment. Yeah. And you do that outside the search. You might just do a lot of ball work and playing and obedience with the team around you.

[Doug Roller]

I understand.

[Steven Rinella]

The dog understands in low drive when he's calm and cool. This. These are the guys I'm working with.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You don't want to introduce that environment when the dog's at this level. It's like trying to teach a human how to do things when he's in a gunfight. The gunfight teaching starts way before the gunfight, right?

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You have to teach him how to shooting platform, how to operate the gun. Calm and cool and collected, slow fire, single fire, all that stuff. Same thing with the dog. Most of the learning is going to be done in a, in a low drive environment so the dog can learn. And then you start escalating and you bring in a myriad of other things so the dog can chain all those different environments and situations and be able to perform at a high, you know, at a high drive level. You still listen.

[Doug Roller]

And these dogs are tied to a person.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes, for us, and for the most part, I did a lot of military training not as Much as I used to. I had a big contract with the Marines for a while, doing all their. Putting all their dogs on the E collar and, you know, God bless them, the, the way that. Not the specialized units, not the SF guys or the Delta guys, because those guys are married to a dog for maybe the life of the dog, seven, eight years, maybe. But your basic military guy, he might just be working that dog for one or two years and the dog's gonna go to somebody else.

[Doug Roller]

I see.

[Steven Rinella]

And the dog is kenneled at home in, in their kennel. I mean, in the, the, the camp kennel. So they, they, they go home every night, they come to the kennel and pick up their dog, which really isn't that. That good of a thing, because the bonding, you're lacking the bonding, you know, with a police dog and agencies, they take that dog home and that dog is their dog. The dog learns that that's the guy, that's his master. The dog stays with him all the time, stays at home in his kennel, all that stuff, so that the bonding is a little bit better that way, you know, And I think that the handler gets to know that dog intimately, you know?

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. Because what we always battle, we talked about earlier, even, even with a police officer who's trained in canine, is they end up treating that dog like a pet, and you can't do that. And we have more problems with that, you know, and I, I'm speaking to the choir people that are probably going to listen to this podcast. Go. Yep, yep, that's true. You know, you can tell a guy over and over again, he's a police dog, he's a tool. You can love him, you can cry if he gets killed, but you gotta treat him like a dog. And that's not a bad thing. It's just they're not a human. You know, dogs live for the. They live for primarily food, sex, love, and, you know, satisfying drive. And you have to look at them in that respect. And if you don't, you know, you got to establish that hierarchy I guess, we talked about earlier. Yeah. And if you don't do that, you have problems, especially with these dogs. You know, they're. They're up there. You know, you want to get a dog that's got that high drive and has all those traits for police work, but if they're not handled appropriately, you can turn that dog into a nasty dog, you know, and it's not the dog's Fault Sway's been handled. Yeah. I mean, coming up on the leash, biting the handler, biting search team members. These are all the things that happen in dog training. And it's usually a human problem, you know, Usually it is. Some dogs, you know, come out of a litter, they're just too alpha. They grow up very dominant, and they're not the kind of dog you want. You know, like when you're selecting a dog, especially as a pup, you're looking for the dog. If you were looking at a litter, you don't want that alpha dog. You maybe want the number two or three dogs in the hierarchy because he's going to be easier to manage.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, you don't want the, you know, number eight dog that's got no drive whatsoever and, you know, hides in the corner and all that, but you do want that dog that's got that. That drive and that alpha mentality. But, you know, you'll get some dogs in the litter that they're kicking all the other dogs asses all the time. They're like, they're just relentless. They. They don't get along with any. Mama's always correcting that dog to leave the other dogs alone. Probably if, if you're looking at a Malinois or a shepherd, probably not the great. The best dog for police work, really well, because you're going to see that same thing happen. Too aggressive, try to dominate.

[Doug Roller]

You got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And some of these things, like I said, they're. They happen over time. Like you talked about your pit bull thing. Some police department, some canine officers don't handle the dog appropriately. And next thing you know, I've seen guide dogs come out of training, and he was a great dog, great team. A year later, I get a call from somebody, hey, so and so, this dog just ate him up. I go, what happened? I don't know. But then I get out and watch them. I'm like, okay, I can see what's going on here. You know, you're not. You didn't maintain the alpha. You didn't in a fair way. You know, it doesn't mean about kicking a dog's butt. It means that the dog has to understand that everything comes through you. Like, I live through you. I get water from you, you feed me, you keep me alive. And you also make them earn everything, especially the dominant dogs, you know, like little things like. And at home, you know, the way he. Dogs have to be consistent. You can't treat them one way at home and then go to work and treat them another way. Because they're not gonna. It's gotta be very consistent and structured. The dog will respond accordingly. So it's little things like, you know, you go to put him in a police car, put him on a sit, open a door car. So you're telling him what to do. He comes out of the car, you open the door, you make him wait, come to your heel, because he's not going to want to wait. If you've done car deployments where the guy, the dog is sent out of the car to go and deploy and catch somebody, we do a lot of that. That can cause reactions that you don't want. He might just pop out one time and go bite the wrong person because there's no structure there anymore. Yeah, makes. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So you really have to, in everything you're doing, you got to really treat him like, like a dog.

[Doug Roller]

Walk me, walk me through. If you can think of a memorable apprehension. Walk me through an apprehension process.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, yeah. God.

[Doug Roller]

Something from in the field, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I mean, I've had some really good capers, but we talk about the fear scent. There was a time I was a, I was a handler and I wasn't a trainer. I was new in the unit and we had these cops, I think, in 77th, they were ambushed. They were deep in 77 residential neighborhood, probably taking a report call or whatever. And while they're getting in their car, guy pulls up, cranks off a bunch of rounds, blows out the back windows. The cops are okay, put out help call. So they set up a two block perimeter. And of course, this is when we were transitioning over to utilizing SWAT as our backup. So the policy was if we have that kind of a high threat, we have to use SWAT as our search team members, which is fine, you know, because they're trained at that high degree and they've got the weapons and all that stuff and. But, but they're also working with us now. So they have to do canine tactics and not SWAT tactics, which is another conversation.

[Doug Roller]

Because this dude shot at these cops.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Doug Roller]

And then he runs off. He runs up and you know within two blocks where he is.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, they had the containment up. They have the airship overhead. And we have a lot of resources, which is great. It spoils us. Because the airship, our airships are the best in the country. I mean, the way they can operate and communicate and use their FLIR system, you know, the, all that stuff, they're just, they're golden. And even back then, this, you're talking a long time ago, this like 20 years ago. But anyways, the guy bails out, he's into containment, and I start doing my. We do. We're starting a systematic search. And what. What I mean by that is we have, like a one block, let's say, and it's a long block. It's in deep 77th. And we have a team on each side. We have a team here and a team here. I'm searching over here. We've got SWAT personnel with us. And what we want to do is we want to hopscotch. So one team searches the yard and then pushes. Next team does the same thing and then pushes. But we don't want to be back to back because of crossfire.

[Doug Roller]

Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

So we want to make sure that we're safe. But at the same time, we don't want one team to get too far ahead because you want to keep pushing the guy one way. And these suspects are very savvy. I mean, they'll. You'll. We used to interview all of our suspects after we would catch them.

[Doug Roller]

Really?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. We brush them off and treat them really nice because we want to get info. We'd find out all kinds of stuff like, where did you run? What made you put down? Why did you move all these things? And really, we put it in our head. As far as, you know, tactically, how

[Doug Roller]

do these guys, like, you do, like an exit interview?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, almost. And, you know, I used to be mad at some of the handlers. They were new, and they're treating a suspect like a jerk, you know, which is fine. I mean, just, you know, maybe he's a wanted suspect or whatever. But let's think about. Let's think ahead here. Okay? Ask him, you know, and they'll tell you. And what they try to do is if one team gets too far ahead and they're glancing over the fence and they're watching the airship at the same time, and they know that if that airship orbits at a certain point, he's going to be out of view. And he'll say that during the interview. And he says, that's when I moved. Then I hit again because they're trying to escape. Some guys will just put down the old suspects. When I came on, a unit used to just run and put down. But they got very savvy because they knew K9 was going to search at LA. So then they started trying to break the perimeter and tried to find holes in the perimeter. Like a unit wasn't paying attention on the perimeter. He's looking. He's doing a peak See, he says, okay, I got time. I'm gonna jog over to the next block. You know, these things would happen. We develop, you know, so these dudes

[Doug Roller]

get savvy to how to. How to avoid a dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Unbelievable. And how to escape and all that. So we're pushing this guy. We're pushing. We're pushing. So I'm starting over here with. I think the backup guy was Ray Doyle. Good guy, SWAT guy, big guy. And we're pushing this guy. I get about the third yard, and my dog comes out. And I'll mind you. And I know it sounds cliche, but I had a great dog. He was like. I mean, even the guys in the unit, they said there was times when I got in one shooting. And that's another story where the handler actually says, hey, look, my dog's not getting anywhere. He says, bring out your key. Bring a kino. Your dog will do his magic. So anyways, back to this story. We're pushing. We're pushing. And also, my dog exits the yard and his nose goes up. Now, tactically, you don't really want to do this. I don't teach this. You want to. Even if your dog gets odor, you don't want to miss anything. So you keep pushing because you don't want to take a chance of bypassing a yard.

[Doug Roller]

Got it? Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Because he might okie doke you or fool you or whatever. It's just not good. But my dog was just telling me he's got odor. I mean, he's like a fishing line. I mean, he's got so much change of behavior that I'm using the caller to call him back. And I'm applying pressure on the caller. The E collar right here. Because he's got so much drive to just want to blow past these yards. So I look at Doyle, I go, look, he's got something down the street. I'm going to go with it. Airship, follow me. So we pass about five or six, seven yards, and he's just sucked in. Goes into the yard, dives into a bush, and he's on this guy, just taking care of business.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And guns out, laying over there. And Doyle's on top of the guy, all excited about taking him into custody. And I'm yelling at him. I says, hey. I go, come on back. I got to call my dog off. Because I do what's called verbal outs. I'm a very big proponent of that. We can get into that later. It's safer. It's tactically more safer. A lot of guys will do what you call choke off or hard outs. But then you're, you know, I don't like that. So. But I can't call him off until Doyle gets off him. So I literally grab him and then I call Kino back to my side, take him into custody. But Doyle goes afterwards, says, that was awesome. Your dog got that guy eight yards away. The fear scent that I'm talking about at that time, Keno probably already had 100 apprehensions, you know, at that point. Yeah, he was well seasoned.

[Doug Roller]

He just knew that smell.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, he was just. You could tell. I mean, and a lot of canine guys will tell you that. They just know you're searching yard, and all of a sudden you get about four or five yards in it and the. The adrenaline kicks into you and the whole hunt thing's happening. And you can see your dog alerting, we're on. We're on the right track. Or sometimes we'll say, hey, we'll get a hold of the other unit on the backside of the search, and I'll say, hey, my dog's picking them up, picking up a lot of odor. I think he's on your side. So you're getting close. Yeah, I got things like that. Hey.

[Doug Roller]

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[Steven Rinella]

Well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, and you know, that's another whole story. You know, what prevents a guy from shooting? You know, I think you have like two or three different kinds of suspects. Okay? One of them, you have a suspect doesn't give a shit. You don't care if he dies. Suicide by cop. It's hard to work that kind of guy because you know you can do the best tactics in the world and he's just going to Take you out. We've had cops get killed because of that. Then you have the other guy that wants to survive, you know, but he'll hurt you if he can.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So if you drop your tactics and he gives you an opportunity, he's going to hurt you. But if you overwhelm them with good tactics, you know, I used to, I teach this and I got it from a sergeant many, many years ago. He's a great sergeant. Jack Hoare passed away a little couple years ago. He's a great sergeant. And he had a thing he called the tactical clock. And when you have everything, even at 12, the suspect is always ahead because he has to be. He can be, he can be proactive. He can shoot you without any cause or whatever. Cop can't do that. He's behind the clock because he has to be reactive. He's got to wait and see what happens.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He just can't go out killing people. You know, it's not like a military operation, you know, where they're. And that's not the story. But you know what I mean? There's laws and rules and policy and you have to adhere to that. So it puts you behind the power curve. So the only thing you can do is to have tactics that are overwhelming. So the suspect's going to say, hey, I might take that guy out, but his backup is going to kill me. Yeah, you know, the, the rear guards are going to get me. Yeah, whatever. Because the way that we work and we do everything off lead, which is great, because when a dog works off lead and he's not restricted with a long line like a lot of departments do, and they're great dogs, don't get me wrong, and I work with them all the time. But I've been asked to actually do Mary classes with guys that do long line tactics. And I go, well, you know, I don't do that. I don't teach that. Everything you do is off lead. When a dog works off lead, that dog offers you reaction time because he's way out ahead of you.

[Doug Roller]

Good.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, he's within range to see, but reaction time is everything. You know, with a long line, you're restricted 20, 30ft, and the dog's always on the line and the land's getting tangled up on stuff and it's getting what wiped out. And plus the dog can't work right either. When a dog is working offline, especially when he gets good at it, the magic really starts happening because you're using, totally using the dog's natural instinct to Hunt with no restrictions. And he also knows through time that dad's going to direct me into odor. It's up to me to expose my dog to odor. It's up to the dog to listen and trust me that if you follow my direction, I'm going to leave it lead you to the promised land. God, when you get that connection, the dog performs really well. I mean, any guy will tell you a seasoned dog is like gold. I mean, because it takes so long to get to that point. It's just a lot of training and meticulous.

[Doug Roller]

Like the more experience he has, the more valuable.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, it's like you're like you're, you're like one. You know, you can read your dog. You know exactly what he's telling you, and, and you can trust him. So like, let's say, you know, there's a bunch of bushes over there and my dog would come in. A trained dog will usually hit the corners all by himself because sin has a tendency to bleed off into the perimeter of the yard.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

So you want to, you want to hit that perimeter first and then detail the rest of it. So it's a science and it's an art. You want to allow that dog to hunt and self discover as much as you can, but you also want to do it systematically so he doesn't miss anything.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Because sometimes, you know, you. A dog may not get deep enough. This will. Handlers will make a steak mistakes and they'll miss somebody. Because you didn't get his. Your dog on odor, you can't blame him on him. Because let's say you're doing a. A warehouse and you're not getting them deep enough into the rooms. Yeah. And scent plays a. You know, scent is not. Scent can be very finite sometimes depending on the environment. And not dog might have to get his nose right on the edge of that door and then boom, you know, he alerts.

[Doug Roller]

Got it, Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Change of behavior. Starts barking at the door. Okay, guys behind that door. So you.

[Doug Roller]

So, so you direct the dog's pace.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. Yeah. You don't want to over direct him, but you also want him to hunt, but he has to listen. And that's a whole training thing. You know, there's, you know, this E collar helps a lot. This E collar is magic because I can reach out and communicate with my dog 20, 30, 40ft, 30, 40 yards away.

[Doug Roller]

How do you, how are you communicating to the dog?

[Steven Rinella]

With commands and stuff.

[Doug Roller]

Like if you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog? I want you to go in that room more.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, good point. But like, let's say tactically, let's say if I'm entering a warehouse that maybe has an L shape to it, big warehouse, and you want to let your. You do your announcement, which is what? It could be a lot of things, but with us, it might be like, you know, this is LAPD canine. We're doing a canine search. We know you're in there. If you don't want to get hurt and bit, come out and surrender yourself. You got one minute to surrender. Come out with your hands up. Follow the light, follow my voice, whatever.

[Doug Roller]

And you mentioned the dog and you mentioned getting bit.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. You tell them all that. In fact, now it's really anal. I mean, back in the day, you know, now we have to record it. The units on the perimeter, like in an outside perimeter, they have a pre recording in Spanish and in English.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Then it's got to be timestamped and all those rules have to be followed so that, you know, you make sure. Like the guy. I never heard an announcement, that kind of thing.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You need to do your due diligence. Yeah. And that all takes time. So. But we battled that. Because now that we have to do all that, when somebody requests the canine airships overhead while we're on route, they get all that done.

[Doug Roller]

It's already done.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So when we show up, boom. Boots on the ground.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So because at first we're getting there, it's like, okay, we're 20 minutes into this thing. We haven't even kicked off yet. And time is of the essence in a search. It's not like a barricade where a guy's in a building. You know, when you may have a containment in a block, but that suspect has freedom of movement. Yep. And that'll get you every time. He has freedom to move, fortify his position, relax. You know, maybe get into a friendly house or even a. Or even a non friendly house, which they try to get into. So you want to start putting pressure on them as soon as you can.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

So I lost track. What was I talking about?

[Doug Roller]

Well, no, I was asking about when you go into a warehouse, how are you communicating to the dog? Like, no, no, go check that room more.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

Don't worry about that room. Like, how do you.

[Steven Rinella]

And we'll do that. Sometimes we have to do that because there's scent problems. We might recognize something through experience. That odor is going to play funny. Like, we might want to turn all the air conditioning off. Oh, yeah. Because it's going to suck up odor and do weird things. You know, scent does. We're like a lot of guys will be hiding in a false ceiling like this.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, they do?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Sometimes in buildings. And what will happen is the scent picture down here could be totally different than up there.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So my dog may hit at the corner over there, barking up a storm crawling up the wall. Okay, guys, guys up there somewhere. But guess what? He's over here on the other side. Consent is coming down there for some reason.

[Doug Roller]

I got you.

[Steven Rinella]

So all you can do is use the dog as a tool. Okay, I know I got odor. And then it turns into. Okay, I'm going to put my dog up. We got a hand. Search it now because the dog does as much as he can. Yeah, makes sense.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So we get a lot of capers like that. But a good dog will pinpoint, isolate, odor. And you have to give him time. You'll see him. You know, a new dog might take longer because he's working out that self discovery thing that we talked about. But a good seasoned dog, he'll. He'll bounce back and forth and boom, he's right on the corner of that door or that dipsy dumpster or. We found a lot of guys in trash cans. We've gotten some major shootings and trash cans.

[Doug Roller]

Guys like to hide in trash cans,

[Steven Rinella]

at least in la or crawl spaces. Yeah, they love crawl spaces. You know the race foundation. Yep. And it's hard because it's a hard scent picture. But when your dog finds his first crawlspace find, he'll never leave a crawl space like that again.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, really?

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. He'll be, he'll be checking every crawl space forever. It's like something happens with that scent picture.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because that's what dogs learn by. They learn by pictures and in chaining events. Right. So the more pictures, you show them in a positive way. It's like a snapshot. And that's how he learns.

[Doug Roller]

So they learn like some architecture. I mean, they learn like building structure.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure. Yeah, they learn. They learn. Like for example. And other dogs did it. My dog once, he got real seasoned. If you can picture a drone over a perimeter.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you see these big, wide open yards, you know, five, six, seven in a block. My dog would go in automatically at the corners, bisect all of himself. I'd go in, double check, come out, do the next yard. But my dog would do this. He would do the same yard. And let's say the dog here's a fence and there's A shed on the other yard. Yeah. And the guy's hiding in the shed. So we'd come over here and he'd alert, even though the shed's 20ft away in the next yard. But he can't get to it.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because the fence with. He'd be frustrated, and without me saying a word, he'd run out and be waiting at the gate.

[Doug Roller]

Really?

[Steven Rinella]

Because he knows I can get to him from the gate. Yeah. That's how smart they get. Yeah. Because you allow them to learn to be a predator. You know, their natural state, which is what they. You know, they were. Yeah. Like a wolf or whatever.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So, yeah, they learn structure. They learn structure, they learn association. And they chain those things together and they just become a better animal.

[Doug Roller]

Are they on hand signals?

[Steven Rinella]

Yes, that's a good point. I do. There are some units that don't. I teach them to follow the hand signals. That's a big. It's a good. Really good question. I teach them to follow hand signals and the light.

[Doug Roller]

So light.

[Steven Rinella]

The light in the dark environment, like

[Doug Roller]

you teach them to. Like they'll go where you shine a light.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. And I like the light. There's guys that have experiment with. And I have two with the laser. But the problem with the laser is dogs don't see very well at night. They don't see very. Like you and I. They need lateral movement. Okay. Like most predatory animals do. They need the back and forth. I mean, if a guy's hiding in a dark spot in a bush and I've seen this happen, and really dark. The dog will go in and I can see him. I can see the shadow dog will go in and start doing this. We can't see him. He's trying to fight. He's almost like bumping into him until he bumps him. Then he goes, oh, there he. There he is.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, really? So he smells them, but he doesn't.

[Steven Rinella]

Smells him, and the odor is right there. And he's excited, but he's working it out.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's funny to watch it. I've done. We've done stuff in muzzle, like, you know, where we actually hit decoys. And we do a lot of muzzle searching for a lot of reasons. Getting a dog ready for the street and all that. That's another hole topic. We could talk, which is probably something important to talk about. But yeah, we direct them with the light. We give them what's called a search command. And remember, it's. We've chained all these events. We've done the announcement that becomes A marker. It's time to search, especially for a new dog. So that consistency thing, okay, it's time to search. Put them on a down. Do the announcement. Back off from the entry level. Because the door is always a kill zone. You don't want to just blast them from there. We got guys that are shot there. You know, you gotta be wary of that. Cause the suspect's waiting. So if you have that big warehouse with that L shape, let's say you send a dog in and we let him have his head. We just let him kind of get some odor. But at the same time, before we let him go deep, we want to get our backside done first. We want to clear an area that is safe.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

So we. We. Structurally, we. We tell him sometimes with the collar, but most dogs will do it if they're trained properly. You call him back here, Revere. Hand signal to the right, hand signal to the left. Detail the backside. Okay, we got somewhere to go to now. And that's a safe area if something happens, right?

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then we start allowing the dog to search. And then we try to, as much possible, keep the dog in view, you know, because sometimes a guy can hide in a spot where the scent is. Very minute, you won't get that hard alert. You'll get a little bit of a change of behavior. And then that's where you've got to recognize, like, that head might go up, but if you don't stick with it and you move beyond it, you might miss the bad guy.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Because. And the dog could be a really good dog. But sometimes that scent is very subtle. And you've got to be able to see that as a handler. You know, when I'm doing certifications or new dogs, that's part of the problem. Getting that handler to be able to read his dog. Like, I'll have another trainer with me. And we're doing a search and we're looking, and the dog is alerting. He's showing a solid change of behavior. And then the handler just calls his dog and leaves it.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And then halfway through the search, I'll go, okay, stop. Put your dog in a down.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah. And hunting. In hunting birds, there's this thing like. Yeah, everybody's like, he's. The dog's getting birdie.

[Steven Rinella]

Right?

[Doug Roller]

And the guy that knows. The first guy that knows the dogs getting birdies, who owns the guy that owns the dog.

[Steven Rinella]

You can see it, but he knows a new guy will miss it, though. Yeah, right.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then. And I'll let him. And I, I don't want to go on and on with a search and knowing that he just bypassed that guy 20 minutes ago because then it becomes detrimental to the dog. And I go, look, I go, just to make sure I've got my other trainer here. And we both saw the alert. Yeah, okay. Sometimes when I'm hiding somebody, I'll tell him to go hide and not even tell me where he's at. It keeps me honest.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

So that when I'm evaluating somebody, I can say, I had no idea where he's at, but I saw your dog alert and you missed it. I got you, you boned up, so you can't do that, so get your dog back over there. And then he goes, oh, yeah, how did I miss that? Well, you missed it. And you don't want to miss a guy in the street. That's a big deal for units, especially with la. You know, you miss a guy and it's one thing to miss him. When you can't get your dog there, like a fortified structure, you can't get in. It's all locked up. And you'll tell the command post, hey, we searched everything except for that. You want us to bust in or not? He says, no, we can't bust in. Okay, well, it's not clear. Two hours later, the guy's found in there because we didn't get him in there. So canine missed him? No, canine didn't miss him. You didn't allow us to search. Yeah, but it's another thing when you have search and area and you call it clear and then suspect comes out. Yeah, and I've got some stories on that.

[Doug Roller]

That looks bad.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Do you?

[Doug Roller]

There's got to be things that you can train a dog to do and things the dog just has to come out of the box ready to do. You talk about biting, right?

[Steven Rinella]

Is, is.

[Doug Roller]

Can you train a dog to bite or does it got to be that that dog wants to bite?

[Steven Rinella]

That's a great question.

[Doug Roller]

Like wants bite from birth.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a great question. Because some dogs do, they, they have a propensity to come out and their first apprehension, they have the no problem biting a real bad guy. Oh, that's not normal. And sometimes when you have a dog that is that quick, maybe edgy, it brings about other problems because he's almost too much going that way.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Your normal dog is going to be, you know, need training when they come out. When you test these dogs, they're usually from Europe and they're competitive dogs in kvp. Ring, sport, schittz and work and it's really a big deal over there. They make a lot of money doing it. Not as, not as popular as it used to be, but it's still a big deal. You can, you know, look it up on the website and look at some of the trials and all that that they, that they do. You'll see the dog hitting the guy in the bite suit, the call offs, the recalls, the escorts, the obedience, the agility, all that stuff. And they compete with these dogs and they get different scores. And some of these guys, some of the vendors or even some of the big trainers out there, after they get a couple high scoring dogs, they'll sell their dogs to Americans. And sometimes they're titled and sometimes they're not, sometimes they're green. What I mean by that is they're brought to a certain level. They know how to bite their prey oriented, you know, they love the prey toy like this right here, whether it's a jude or something to play with. They've done maybe a little bit of search work, who knows, you don't know. And they're young though, they're very young. So they need to be brought along. And that's another story. And after 9 11, things really changed because the dog rule exploded. I mean it exploded with the apprehension, the bomb, dog detection, I mean the military, you know, they were getting hundreds and hundreds of dogs got it and the whole thing just went crazy. So the need for dogs was pretty high. And that's when some of the younger dogs started coming out. And they're good dogs. I mean you could take a younger dog. In fact, that's pretty much. The younger dog sometimes has a lot of benefits because he's not locked into the equipment. And what I mean by equipment is the bite suit, the sleeve, the undergarment sleeve and all that stuff that is used in training and, and competition.

[Doug Roller]

But how do you get it to.

[Steven Rinella]

Right, so that's the whole thing. When you're, when you're working a dog and you get some of the basic training done, you're teaching a dog how to hunt. But at the same time you want to start introducing things. You know, when, when I'm teaching a dog, everything I'm doing is for the end result, which is tactics and catching a bad guy. So you take some of those disciplines that are learned in ring sport and KNVP and shitson and you use them. You use some of those disciplines that make sense for you, but you trash some of the other ones that don't make Sense. And one of them would be to get them off equipment. So you do a lot of. You get that dog interested in, or you get him to accept the muzzle very quickly. And there's different kinds of muzzles, but you want that dog to be able to be neutral in the muzzle. Some of the problems. Just to talk about training, I'll put muzzles on some dogs that have had aggression training in muzzle, which is fine, but they're not neutral in muzzle. So when that muzzle goes on, he gets aggressive. And that's not what you want. You want. You want him to be gunfire neutral. You want him to be muzzle neutral. You don't want rounds going off and the dog's looking for somebody to nab or bite. Now he's not safe. You want him to be able to just accept the gunfire and move on, do his work. Same thing with the muzzle. So the muzzle allows you to. When you're playing cat and mouse, when you're playing, you know, hide and seek with the dog, and you're setting up training scenarios when that dog learns how to hunt in the muzzle, not only just hit in the muzzle, because when a dog is really good in the muzzle, you'll send them on a straight hit and he'll hurt you. I mean, I've had guys without protection,

[Doug Roller]

broken ribs and from the dog hitting, even though he can't bite.

[Steven Rinella]

Can't bite? Yeah, he just like rockets. They're trained, right. And I train them really good in muzzle. I do. I have a certain technique and, and my dogs, you know, they'll. They'll. They'll put some hurt on you. So sometimes we'll wear a vest. Sometimes over a big jacket, we'll wear like a ski vest or something, or a skiing vest, because they'll hurt you. Plus, it depends on the skill of the decoy too, obviously. But yeah, that's one thing you want to do. Another thing would be to do what's called a lot of civil fines. And when I say civil, it means no equipment. So when I'm hiding people, right away I try to take all the equipment off him. He's hiding in that cabinet. We got him stuck in there. And, you know, he's sweating up a storm. He's in his tight. But you want to mimic the real environments. Like, for example, you might start. This leads into something else. You might start a dog on a really simple odor, like a really small closet with a door, because you know the scent's going to be true and the dog knows how to apprehend. He knows how to catch, you know, take bites and all that. But you want to introduce him into odor. So we'll put a guy in a suit behind that door, and we'll let him cook up. That means he's a lot of scent is developing inside that small room. And we crack the door, make it super easy. So we may do the announcement 20 yards away or at the beginning of the room. And then, depending on the dog and what I think he might need. Lapd, Kamali, hands up. And then the decoy will do a peekaboo. He'll open up and he'll paint a picture. He'll start screaming at the dog. And the dog's barking. He's all excited. Then he shuts the door and leaves it cracked. We send a dog in. So now we want to teach him to be able to, you know, bark at scent. So he'll go in frustrated, going, okay, where'd he go?

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And he's thinking, some dogs will pick up on it really quick. They'll go and they'll start working it, and all sudden, you'll see his nose go up, and he goes to that corner, and then he starts scratching, and he gets frustrated. And it's important for the handler to shut up because you want that alert to be between him and the odor. It's called making a dog be obedient to odor. And you'll see the mistake. Sometimes the handler will be back. They're going, what you got, buddy? Dog looks around, he goes, okay, you just marked it. So in other words, instead of the dog self discovering, you've told the dog to alert.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And then what happens is the dog will end up falsing. He'll go to a door, check it out, look back at you. You'll think the guy's in there, and you'll go, what you got? Dog starts barking, open the door. Nobody's there. Yeah, because you marked it. And it's not about you. It's about what happens right there. That odor makes sense. Yeah, Little things like that will happen. And, you know, when I go do a lot of problem solving, I'll see it right away. The dog will be, you know, at the scent, and he's looking back. I go, you've been talking to your dog a lot, haven't you? Yeah. I go, you got to shut up. I go, in fact, get out of the room, go hide and let your dog do his thing. I don't want him to even see you. And then we fix it so that because you don't want that dog falsing

[Doug Roller]

hey, as outdoorsmen, we always spend a lot of time thinking about how we interact with the land, how we care for the land. But then yard care, like your lawn care, defaults to chemical, heavy routines. The tree Every yard the same. Well, Sunday offers a different model. They begin by understanding your soil and local climate, then build a customized yard plan designed specifically for your environment. Their products rely on nutrient dense ingredients like seaweed, molasses and iron rather than harsh synthetic chemicals. Everything arrives at your door and connects to a hose, simplifying what has traditionally been a complicated trial and error process. It's a more targeted, more thoughtful approach to caring for the space just outside your home. Less guesswork, less excess, fewer unnecessary treatments. If you're curious what your yard actually needs and prefer a smarter way to support it, Sunday makes that process remarkably straightforward. Go to getsunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That's getsunday.com you've heard about t mobile 5G home Internet, mostly for how easy it is to set up and then the value that you get. But there's some more big news you should know about. They now have the fastest 5G home Internet speeds. That's right, T Mobile now has the fastest 5G home Internet according to the experts at Ookla Speed Test. That makes backing up photos from your latest hunt, streaming a new documentary or pulling up a wild game recipe super quick. And yeah, it's a great value backed by a solid five year price guarantee. And and setting it up is still as easy as it gets. You just plug it in and go. So if you want the fastest 5G home Internet with a simple setup at a great price with savings that stick around. Get T Mobile 5G Home Internet Head over to t-mobile.com home Internet to check availability. Price guarantee exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Fastest balance based on Ookla Speed Test intelligence Data over the second half of 2025. All rights reserved. Spring turkey season is one of the best times to hand the hunt over to your kid. Part of the problem hunting turkeys with kids is a lot of the pre game stuff is all happening in the dark. They can't really visualize what you're talking about. But with Onx Hunt you can show them what you're talking about on your phone and make the whole thing real. Let them learn why their moves work and why they don't. You can show them exactly where you're allowed to hunt. You can decipher direction and judge distance on a gobbler with waypoints and compass mode and build a setup together instead of just telling them what to do. It turns a morning in the woods into a lesson. They'll carry the rest of their hunting life. Download the Onx hunt app and use spring turkey season to make better hunters. One spring morning at a time. I want to get back to a question I'm trying to.

[Steven Rinella]

So the bite.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, yeah.

[Doug Roller]

I mean, so dog might go up and find something, but how do you ever get to. How do you ever get to where you know the dog's gonna come up and bite but also not bite the guy in the face?

[Steven Rinella]

Sure. Well, you know, almost all the bites are going to be on the extremities.

[Doug Roller]

That's just. Because that's just what a dog is going to do.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, that's what he's going to be offered to. We're during decoy work. Okay. You know, one of the. One of my favorite bites is the inside arm bite. I like that one. There's also a thing called bite marking. Way, way back in the day, we used to do a lot of what's called pulling on the bite. And I called it more of like a prey bite. And it's not a. It's not a good bite. It's not a bite that's going to take down a suspect. You want a dog that's going to be digging in and you mark the. You mark that with a good decoy work. That means the dog bites and he pushes. Okay. That's just. That's just a detail.

[Doug Roller]

And you preferred he's biting on the inside.

[Steven Rinella]

I like it because the decoy can really work the dog. He can feel it. A good decoy will tell you what he needs, a good decoy. And I, my training groups, I actually hire a decoy. And it's. It's kind of. The handlers are kind of spoiled because back in the day, we did our own decoying. Now I hire people to do it, and it's hard work, but they're good and it makes that dog. You know, I can fix problems a lot with a good, skilled decoy. Guys that, you know, do bring sport, KVP and all that pay him some money. They come in, they help. But when he's. When that dog's biting, let's say, for example, that dog has a propensity to pull. So when you take that inside arm bite and dog comes in and he's pulling, you ignore the behavior. You don't give him a mark on it. And then you wait the dog out and Then pretty soon he's not getting any kind of reward, he's just kind of pulling. All of a sudden he does this, bites. Oh, you do a mark and then the dog does again.

[Doug Roller]

And pretty soon that reboot, you do a reaction.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you'll do it. You'll turn away, go to a submission.

[Doug Roller]

And he likes that.

[Steven Rinella]

And he likes that because you're showing that you're kicking his ass. You know, the dog, okay, dog picks up on it. Oh, I get a reaction here because what he was trained to do was some, we call them bite dummies. You're not doing anything for the dog. You're just a bite dummy. The dog will bite. He's pulling and he's pulling, and the handlers or the decoys going, he's marking. All bad behavior. So the dog learns to pull. The problem with the pull, bite. If you have a real apprehension, the dog might pull and rip off clothes and start shaking on it. A piece of prey that goes into another whole story. So you want that, that bite to be firm and pushing so you can

[Doug Roller]

like, you encourage the dog to bite how you want it, by the decoy overreacting when it's doing the right thing.

[Steven Rinella]

It's very subtle, too. You don't need to screaming. It's just little things. Like you're looking at that dog, you're feeling the confidence. The decoy will tell you, okay, don't call him yet. Don't call him. Let me watch him. He rebites. And pretty soon he's pushing. Oh, yeah. And pretty soon he's pushing and digging in. And the bite's really strong. And then you obviously keep your control. All my outs are verbal outs, which is another thing, you know, a lot of guys do choke offs.

[Doug Roller]

Do you ever get a dog that's got too much, like, he's too good at biting and it winds up being not safe to use the dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, he's only not safe. He's biting the wrong thing. Oh, you mean because he's so powerful? Yeah, that's a good point. I'll leave it nameless. There was a department I worked with. I still work with them. I have a contract with them. And one of their old handlers had a dog, and he was the son of his other dog from a really good breeding line. And it was a shepherd. And not a lot of shepherds out there anymore. There are. There's some great shepherds, but everybody's using the mouths and the dutchies. You know, I ran a great shepherd, whatever. But this dog was A powerful dog. And he had a couple apprehensions where he bit him. Wasn't long in a bite and broke the guy's arm.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And that can be a problem.

[Doug Roller]

Like, the dog's bite broke the dude's arm.

[Steven Rinella]

It wasn't like he was on him long. This guy, this dog. I mean, you would take a bite on him through the bite suit, and it would hurt. I mean, you have to wear neoprene undergarments and the bite suit.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Otherwise, you're feeling some good pain. You know, I remember working dogs back in the day. We had some pretty lousy bite suits. The department wasn't keeping up on our equipment. And I'd go home sometimes I didn't even know it. Take my T shirt off, getting ready to go to bed, and I can't get my shirt off. And I got blood dried up. Blood on my uniform. T shirt stuck. He didn't go through the suit, but the pressure.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Made me bleed. Yeah. My arm's all black and blue. It hurts, you know?

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They bite hard even with a bite suit.

[Doug Roller]

You, You. When we talked before, you explained something to me that I'd like you to tell people about. When you go to buy dogs and you're in the police work and you're. And you're shopping for dogs from the same sources that the military is shopping for dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

You're saying the military wants dogs that don't bark, but you guys want dogs that do? Yeah, police want dogs that do bark.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

And that's more of a thing that. That's just like the dog's tendency and not necessarily a thing that you train into a dog. Like, the dog will hunt silent.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, it's easy to make the dog silent.

[Doug Roller]

It's easy to make it sound.

[Steven Rinella]

Most dogs will come in silent. You know, you got to teach them to bark like an odor and all that.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, you do? Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you do. I mean, some dogs will pick it up pretty naturally, but some dogs are really quiet. We had a dog that came out of training from another vendor, and he's a good friend of mine, and they had a. They had a tendency of not getting that dog, Those dogs to bark on odor. And we had some discussions, but I go, hey, look. Because once that dog is allowed to find somebody in that closet or that cupboard and show him some indication, but no bark, and then he gets paid with a bite. You've taught him to be quiet.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you've done that over and over again. It's hard to fix.

[Doug Roller]

And that's Problematic for you guys because of legal issues. The dog's gotta bark.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's just. It's something positive that you can say and. And helps you as a handler. Like, I mean, for example, too, he. He may not even be able to get to source to this to where the guy actually is. Like, let's say the guy's up in that ceiling. The dog is trained to get as close to source as possible and bark. So you'll have a dog that can't get close, but he's as close as he can, he'll crawl up that wall and start barking. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's a pretty good indication to have. And he also. It steadies the dog. What I mean by that is the dog is given a behavior to do. And when you first teach him to bark at odor, you go with one or two barks, bite. Okay. Next one. One, two, three, four. Barks, bite. And then you want to vary it, you know, the variable to intermittent. And what that means is you're going to lock in the behavior. Sometimes I want you barking 20 times at that door. Sometimes I want you barking twice. Because if you don't do that, if you don't, you know, you use pattern to train a dog. But you have to know when to deviate from the pattern to make the behavior solid. You know, I mean, by that is it might be bark, bark, bark. Oh, no, bite. I'm going to leave because I always get bite on the third bark. So you want to build up the tolerance, you know, the time and the length and all that. So the dog stays at that odor because it might come up in a real search where, you know, you want to make sure the guy's there. Like, you're calling out swat. You got all these resources. You really want to make sure that guy's going to be there.

[Doug Roller]

So there's not a reason. There's not like a legal reason I thought the dog would need to bark. No, like, as a way to, like, announce itself to the suspect so the suspect couldn't, like, come at you legally.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure, sure. And sometimes you can bring them back and have the dog bark up, you know, but if your dog barks at a door, we're going to de escalate. We're going to call him back in a real search, and we're going to order the guy out.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And we're going to do it several times, in fact, with L. A. I'm not sure about some of the other departments, but even the departments I work with If a guy is in a shed and the dog is solid, he's barking and he just shot. Let's say he just shot a cop or murdered somebody. Time's on your side. You know, you don't need to make an entrance into there. Call your dog back, surround it, treat it like a barricade.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Then you have all these other tools you can bring in. You can 40 millimeter, gas it, whatever, but there's no. There's no rush to go in. And that would be my training, because you're going to get hit on that. It's like, you know, there's been a lot of lawsuits out there where guys, you know, they cowboy their way in and then they. They actually kind of make a shooting happen, you know, because. And that's. That goes into, like, why use a canine? You know, I can just get into this a little bit. Back in the day when canines on LA were still kind of new and there was a. We were having an issue with our use of force division, and they were teaching a lot of how to chase a suspect, how to chase, how to pie a corner, how to wait, be safe, all that stuff. And I watched it, and the sergeant I was doing it was a great guy, very good instructor. But I'm coming from another world, you know, I'm coming from canine, so I'm not teaching how to chase a guy. I want to teach how to contain. Mm. So you're not going to catch people if you're chasing them. Unless you can. Unless you're an athlete, you can run the guy down within the first 20, 30 yards, he's gone. If you're doing it safely, because when you're chasing an armed suspect, or potentially that guy cuts a corner, you're not going to cut the corner. You're going to. You're going to buy that corner slow and make sure he's not going to ambush you. Yep. Or you're going to get shot. Maybe. So if you're teaching, if you're. If you're chasing him properly, he's going to gain ground on you all the time because he doesn't have to worry about anything.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So why not back off and contain the guy? So we would teach like, hey, if you can't run this guy down quick and, you know, your average patrol cop, you're in the car, it's cold, it's. You're calm, you've been. Just had code seven, you just had something to eat, you've been relaxed. And now this guy, this athletic suspect, Boom. Is Running and you're coming out with £40 of gear on you. You get hurt, you're gonna get sick, you're gonna rip your hamstring, whatever. It happens all the time. So contain this guy. So the city of la, the way the cops are trained is to contain. And it's phenomenal. People across the country can't even believe sometimes our fine ratio, they contain him

[Doug Roller]

and let them settle in.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And de escalate. And the way I sold to the apartment, I go, hey, look, you want to get your use of force capers down, your use of force incidences, where it's an investigation. If you're going to chase somebody, run them down, there's going to be use of force. You know, you're going to tackle the guy. Could be a fight. Everybody gets hurt, suspect gets hurt, Boom. If you want to deescalate that, contain this guy, plus it's safer. Right. You give that chance, that suspect a chance to de escalate and you're going to catch them. So what I'm getting at, when I was on a unit, we had about a 50%. 40. 40, 50% find ratio on containments. Not too bad. And I was talking to one of the Algorin, one of the chief trainer on LAPD now, and they supposedly have like a 70 to 75% find ratio. That means every time a perimeter is set, that's the odds of catching somebody. And it's not because of the canine, it's because of the perimeter. Units are locking these guys in.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Like when you see a pursuit on TV and you've got, you know, the old thing used to be, and still you'll see it on tv. You got primary suspect traveling at a high rate of speed and you got seven cars behind them. Yeah, that's stupid, because your seventh car is not doing anything. So you're going through this neighborhood with a big daisy chain chase, chasing that guy. What our guys will do in other

[Doug Roller]

departments, like the final chase scene in

[Steven Rinella]

Blues, it's like, you know, there's a. Remember that a thing called the Animal Planet. There was a Attenborough, whatever doing a narration. Yeah, and he was doing it. They had some great footage, maybe a drone. I don't know what they had, but it was. They were filming the. Those African hunting dogs.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

There are a certain breed out there, and they work in big packs, not like wolves. There's like 30 of them. And they had them chasing a deer. And it was just like, I train or we train. They had about three or four of them Chasing this deer. And then they had the group splitting off.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

So they had a rolling containment. So by the time they surrounded this thing, the deer ended up going into the water. But they had him corralled.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because the deer had nowhere to go. Now if they. Well, it would have been all right here. He's got open space left and right.

[Doug Roller]

I understand.

[Steven Rinella]

But that's a natural thing that they developed, you know, without, you know, just beautiful. Right.

[Doug Roller]

So instead of seven cop cars chasing. Yeah. Spread out.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Well, an airship, a good airship and us will. We can tell when a guy is going. Like the airship will say, okay, you just be advised he's slowing down. I think he's looking for a place to bail because he's in a friendly area now. He's like in his own territory. Unless he's like doing some like, let's say a south end guy in 77th is Capering in West LA by Beverly Hills. He's going to bail quick because he's out of his territory. Right. He's got to get out of the car quick because he knows there's going to be a containment. So he's not going to go very long. But when you get into pursuit in 77th, he's going to stay in that car because he's going to go to an area that he knows and maybe get into a friendly. So there's a big, whole different mindset. But with that being said, the airship will say, okay, he's slowing down. Units, be aware of that. Starts setting up the containment now. Any units to the left and right. So we'll have like the primary unit, secondary unit, maybe a third unit. Everybody else is out here. So when that guy bails, we've already got units here and here. So we lock them in. You know, he's not going anywhere.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So.

[Doug Roller]

And then your dog comes in and does.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Find ratio just goes up because these guys are thinking containment and not chasing.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a whole different mindset. And I tried and you know, like there's some departments I work with like in Texas and great guys, they got some good dogs. I got. In fact one of the guys in Texas, you, Chris More, he runs a for Harris county. They run 20 dogs. And he's frustrated because he knows all these tactics and he's getting into the off leash thing like I teach him, taught him. But they just don't have the resources like that. And they do a lot of tracking. They just, they don't have that many airships because you need all that stuff. And I feel bad for some of the smaller agencies because you can really lock these guys down with a good airship. But they're using a lot of drones now. Drones are coming in real handy. These big drones, you know, like, size of this couch.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, these guys are operating them, and it's beautiful what they can do with them.

[Doug Roller]

So where did most of the. So you're saying that, like, you're still involved in dogs and dog training?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, most.

[Doug Roller]

These dogs are coming out of Europe?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, most of them.

[Doug Roller]

Most of them are like, why is that? Why is that? Why is the center of this kind of apprehension. Dog coming out?

[Steven Rinella]

It just always has. I mean, there's some breeders out here, and they've done some breeding. In fact, one of the companies I work with, Spectrum Canine, they bred a Dutchie that we got for Sao Pablo, and they bred that dog, and that dog is just tearing it up. Great dog. But they know how to breed. They know how to bring the dog up properly. And because it's a whole process, what

[Doug Roller]

countries in Europe are big into this?

[Steven Rinella]

You know, you got Hungary, Turkey, Slovakia, France, Holland, Germany. Germany used to be bigger because a lot of the dogs out of there were coming where they were shepherds. Okay. But some of the more desired breeds, it seems, seems to have really gone toward the mouths. And the Dutch shepherds got it.

[Doug Roller]

What's one of these dogs worth coming out of? Coming, like, coming out of Preliminary training.

[Steven Rinella]

When I came on a job, we were picking up dogs for 3, 3, 500. Now you're talking about 13,000, maybe 15 grand.

[Doug Roller]

And that's for a dog with just basic training.

[Steven Rinella]

Basic training, yeah. And some want more if they include some kind of training with it. But, yeah, they're expensive. And then you also, you know, you want to. Like. I used to work with a vendor, Von Lake Kennels out of Indiana, Ken Licklider Rennet. And they get. They were getting hundreds of dogs a year. Hundreds. His facilities in Indiana, we go there, I take my guys, I'd get a hotel, stay there for, like, three or four days, test dogs. Another one, Elders Kennels in Riverside, they get a lot of good dogs, too. But, you know, like my trainer told me once, he says, where do you find a good dog? You find a good dog where a good dog is. I mean, you have to keep your eyes open. But the problem is you want a vendor you can trust so you don't waste your time. You also want a guarantee, because you could have three months into the dog and things start happening. Medically or whatever. So you want that guarantee that, you know. But something that I learned kind of the hard way when I was working as a head trainer in la, you, I don't know, get a little complacent, maybe a little sloppy because you have all this time. And I had a tendency sometimes, not always, but. And a dog's not perfect, but I can make him work good. And then I paid the price for that because, you know, maybe I can make him work, but he's got to go to that handler. He's got to continue to make him work.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And I learned that, you know, just

[Doug Roller]

through you learn to focus on perfect dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Exactly. I learned to be greedy, and I learned. I learned to fly out to Indiana or go to Riverside or wherever I'm going and spend two days training and go, well, you don't have anything for me. I'm leaving. But sometimes when you do that, the guy will go, well, wait a minute. I got one dog you didn't see. I saved him for Special Forces. But if you really want to see him, I'll show them, he'll bring them out, and I'll go, you wasted three of my days. Wrap them up. Of course I want him. You know, you were hiding them for somebody else because a vendor will sell you what you'll buy. It's not anything against vendors. You know, they. They'll help you to a certain point. But their job is to sell dogs.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, so you don't want to

[Doug Roller]

think that would, like, if you look, if you think about bird hunters, do you think that, like, would your recommendation to people training bird dogs or duck dogs, whatever, would your recommendation be that same thing, like, don't waste time on imperfection.

[Steven Rinella]

100, in fact. Huh. There was, you know, during the. After 9, 11, that got really big into the SSD dogs and some of the dogs that were looking for bombs, and they use that same method that the bird dogs do. You know, they'll. I did some training with the Marines on it, and they were at Camp Pendleton. I was down there training with them, doing a patrol dog class. But they brought in some of their SSD dogs. And, yeah, they were. I learned a lot on that because we weren't really into that. And they would contract these dogs out to certain organizations that made a lot of money. They were charging departments like, God, 40 grand for a dog, you know, for the training and everything. But they were good dogs. They were taught to hand signal, go straight out, get odor, turn around, face, do left and right. Some of these Guys in the Marines were actually using communication devices strapped to their collars so they could talk to them through that.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And they were finding bombs and all that because that would. They were. They were dogs that were taught to find ground. Ground explosives. Yeah. So that's all they did.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

They did a good job.

[Doug Roller]

What's your take on these services that you know these people now you get these people buying these like, high end, like kind of like executive dogs, you know?

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

It's supposed to be like these, these like souped up dogs meant to protect you and your family. Do you buy that?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Well, here's the problem with that. You can. Anybody can purchase a dog that's going to take care of business, but at the same time, that dog might get you in real trouble. Right. I mean, if a real dog, a dog that's really gonna take somebody down, you better go as much, you better go through as much training as that dog went through to handle that dog.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And really know the. It's like having a weapon, right? I mean, you know, you're. You just wanna hand somebody a gun, you teach them how to shoot. And you also wanna teach them about liability, risk management, because you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah. I mean, someone walking around with some, like some dog that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that means business.

[Doug Roller]

When he attacks a person or this,

[Steven Rinella]

he might look really good in, in the equipment and the bite suit and the muzzle, but will he really bite somebody? Because that's what we do. That's the problem. Police work, you know, because besides the muzzle work and the civil finds that I talked about, we do undergarments, we do prosthetics, you know, which is like the fake arms. We teach a dog to buy different services so that we throw a myriad of things at them. So that generalization occurs. That means that whatever that guy offers you, you're going to bite it. You're not going to freak out over it or release it or have some kind of problem with it.

[Doug Roller]

Hey, as outdoorsmen, we always spend a lot of time thinking about how we interact with the land, how we care for the land. But then yard care, like your lawn care, defaults to chemical heavy routines. The tree. Every yard the same, well, Sunday offers a different model. They begin by understanding your soil and local climate, then build a customized yard plan designed specifically for your environment. Their products rely on nutrient dense ingredients like seaweed, molasses and iron, rather than harsh synthetic chemicals. Everything arrives at your door and connects to a hose, simplifying what has traditionally been a complicated trial and error process. It's a more targeted, more thoughtful approach to caring for the space just outside your home. Less guesswork, less excess. Fewer unnecessary treatments. If you're curious what your yard actually needs and prefer a smarter way to support it, Sunday makes that process remarkably straightforward. Go to getsunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That's getsunday.com youm've heard about t mobile 5G home Internet, mostly for how easy it is to set up and then the value that you get. Well, there's some more big news you should know about. They now have the fastest 5G home Internet speeds. That's right, T Mobile now has the fastest 5G home Internet, according to the experts at Ookla Speed Test. That makes backing up photos from your latest hunt, streaming a new documentary, or pulling up a wild game recipe super quick. And yeah, it's a great value backed by a solid five year price guarantee. And setting it up is still as easy as it gets. You just plug it in and go. So if you want the fastest 5G home Internet with a simple setup at a great price with savings that stick around, get T Mobile 5G Home Internet. Head over to t-mobile.com home Internet to check availability. Price guarantee exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Fastest based on Ookla Speed Test intelligence Data over the second half of 2025. All rights reserved. One of the things I love about turkey hunt is it is a game of cat and mouse. The whole thing comes down to the setup. You get that wrong. Turkey nuggets are not on your menu. That is why I use the Onx Hunt app when I'm hunting turkeys. I think of it like an old Victor mouse trap. You use it right, it works. When you hear a gobbler like sound off in the dark, you can open up the map on Onx and try to get a good sense of where he is and you can use the compass mode on there. If you really want to figure out where he is, then you can take a look around the landscape and build a setup that's going to put you where that bird wants to be. At the same time, I know with certainty where public ground ends and private ground begins. So I'm not guessing or second guessing or worrying about where I am and getting in trouble with somebody. I like to just hunt knowing I'm in the right spot. If spring turkey season puts you in the woods, download the Onx Hunt app and set your trap right. You know what's funny about that man is when you set up electronic predator callers.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

It's so interesting to watch. When a coyote comes in or. I've seen cats come in when they hit that thing, how quickly they know that that doesn't feel like what it was supposed to feel like.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

I mean, they. They like, back.

[Steven Rinella]

They hate it, but I bet you have some dogs that bustle right through it.

[Doug Roller]

No, I've seen, like, with coyotes, once they make contact with it, they know it's like a little decoy.

[Steven Rinella]

Right? That's it.

[Doug Roller]

They know that that's not what they were at.

[Steven Rinella]

Like. Right.

[Doug Roller]

Just the feel of it. The bite feel, the way it feels on their paws, the way it feels on their body. They, like, hit it. They're out the door.

[Steven Rinella]

That's. That's a. That's a good example. Yeah, yeah.

[Doug Roller]

Like, they're like, that ain't what I thought it was.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. And we've. We've had that. You know, we've had that. In fact. Yeah. My. My dog and I was a brand new handler, and he was in a situation where he was supposed to bite, and he went in there and it was a find him. It was still finding bark, but it escalated to a situation where the guy needed to get bit. He got aggressive and he went in and he nammed him, and then he backed off. And I'm a new handler, and I'm like, I'm thinking, my dog's hard. He's doing all the stuff that we did, right. And my trainer, Donnie Ornell, I come out, I go, my dog's broken. What happened? And I was one of those guys. I got to be the best. That's just me. I mean, I'm. I put in tons of training, and anything I. Anything I do, I want to be really good at it. So I'm like, I want the best dog. And this is pissing me off. And lo and behold, he says, don't worry about it. Just like I would tell a new handler, now, we'll fix it. Not a big deal. So we did a whole lot of stuff. Muzzle. We didn't have an undergarments back then or prosthetics, but we did a lot of things to civil him up and to get him that way.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And the next apprehension that was required of him, he did a great job. And after that, after that, because he was such a strong biter and he had this natural reflex of biting and shaking, and so I had to have really good control over him because he was doing a lot of damage. And there's a thing called the 13th floor, if I should even be getting into this. But where the guy is submitted to a hospital. It's a jail ward, but it's a hospital.

[Doug Roller]

Good.

[Steven Rinella]

And a lot of his bites were turning into that. And the sergeant's looking at me like, what are you doing? Are you like, leaving him on a bite forever? I go, no, I'm not. I mean, I'm. He's coming right off. So they actually assigned a seasoned handler with me to keep an eye on me. I'm brand new, you know, And I'm

[Doug Roller]

like, because this dog's doing too much damage.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So. And I'm like, he's a great dog. But he's like, I'm calling him right off. Like, boom. Couple seconds. And then he saw an apprehension. And Sal looks at me and he says, you got better control than anybody in the unit. He says, your dog's popping right off. He just bites hard.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So I had to realize that and. And you know, do things accordingly. I mean, I had to maintain really good control over him.

[Doug Roller]

It was. Interesting point you raised a minute ago when I was talking about these guys. Like various buddies of mine talk about these dudes that like, make these defense dogs. It's an interesting point you make that if you're selling someone a dog that's supposed to protect their family. How do you ever really know if you've only had. You've only had them be in training until you take them out to attack someone?

[Steven Rinella]

100.

[Doug Roller]

You could have that thing sitting around for five years thinking it's some big bad attack dog. But that dog has never attacked anybody.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. And that's my whole thing, you know, that brings me into this.

[Doug Roller]

It's like an interesting idea that brings me into this.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Here's what's relatable to that. There was a time when the guys in the SWAT unit and we weren't getting along very well with swat. There was a lot of egos going on. Now when I left, we're golden. We like love each other. We work together with them. But there was like a competition thing. You know, canine's getting all these bodies, they're doing all this stuff. And that's a SWAT caper, that's not a canine caper. And this kind of silly stuff. So we had to. We had to get through that. But as they developed, for some reason, they started doing some work with Delta and some of these other, you know, high speed units because, you know, LAPD SWAT's great. They're like one of the best in the country. But they're doing all this advanced stuff all the time. And Delta, their teams are married with a canine guy like laso. Los Angeles County Sheriffs. Their canines are part of swat. Lapd. SWAT and canine are different. Different entities. So we don't work together per se like that. We do train together, we do work together, but we're not married up like that.

[Doug Roller]

It's not like in the military.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, not military or like la. So when they get a SWAT call, canine is there all the time. I see with us, it's going to be a special event. Yep. So, yeah, with that being said, after they did this training with Delta, they says, we want a SWAT dog. This kind of goes into what you're saying. What's a SWAT dog? All of our dogs are SWAT dogs. Our dogs are always there for you, you know, and we'll always pick a certain dog that might be better for a certain incident. Right. I mean, if I need a bigger, more powerful dog at this certain location.

[Doug Roller]

But I'm not understanding what you're saying. Who was saying they wanted a SWAT dog?

[Steven Rinella]

Our SWAT unit.

[Doug Roller]

Your SWAT unit wanted one of a

[Steven Rinella]

specific SWAT dog signed a SWAT that

[Doug Roller]

they picked up off from the Delta guys.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

And I'm thinking. And I knew it was coming and I thought, well, I go. The only. I go. They wanted to go in training and all that. I said, well, the reason that our dogs are SWAT dogs is because they've been out in the street for a year and most of them had about 40, 50 apprehensions already.

[Doug Roller]

Mm.

[Steven Rinella]

Now, for you to have a SWAT dog that's gonna prove you right and not fail you when everything's on the line, how are you gonna make that happen? You gotta be a handler for a while. Yeah. So you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Our. Our dogs are gonna take care of business. We're gonna train with you. We're gonna do. So we nixed it, but yeah, they wanted that SWAT dog thing and it kind of goes in line with. He's not proven. You know, I can do all the training in the world. Here's your SWAT dog. It looks great out in the field. Muzzle work, bite work, whatever. But is he really going to take care of business?

[Doug Roller]

This is the thing that. This is the thing I find with. With friends of mine that have hunting dogs is you got. There's like the hunting dogs that. It's just all training. It's like putting pen raised birds out.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Doug Roller]

Little Meadows. And the dog knows he's gonna find something in 10 seconds. Right. It's like that's all that dog ever lived. And then you got dogs that have been hunting for real.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Doug Roller]

And when I, whenever I hear about all that, my field trial this and field try that, I just, like, I don't. I don't care.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. I don't care. 100.

[Doug Roller]

Like the dog that's been out doing the real deal stuff in the real world. That's interesting, right?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, you know, we had the same thing. I mean, there's like a lot of canine trials all over the place. Not all over, but, you know, they. And our guys didn't really compete very much in them. Sometimes they would, and they may not even do very well in them, but they're competing against dog has maybe had one bite and they're five years in the job. And now you're competing with this guy that's had like 30, 40 in the year or 50 or more, whatever. You know, I had 121 bodies one year. That's a lot of. That's a lot of searching.

[Doug Roller]

Wow.

[Steven Rinella]

In our heyday and back in the day, 40% of them got bit. That was standard in the industry. Now that will get you fired. You know, now the bait ratio is looked at.

[Doug Roller]

So you had a year. You caught 120 people in 40 bites.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Doug Roller]

What like this kind of, kind of final, final ish question here. What is the dog getting out of this? Do you know me? Like, what drives that dog to want to catch a person?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, it starts from this little toy here. That's a piece of prey object.

[Doug Roller]

Let me see it.

[Steven Rinella]

It's just a toy. It's just a con with a rope. And I use a lot of it. And you know, this is what we train.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, it's not only it, but it's the natural instinct, the predatory. And most dogs have it. Even your little poochie dogs, they have some kind of pray, pray in them, you know, but some of them obviously have a lot more genetically predisposed for all that. But, you know, that's like detection dog. They do everything for this. This is their reward system, which is be a tennis ball or a kong, a jute toy, whatever it might be. But the dog's hooked on this. And you know, when he bites a man, it's just a bigger version of this really.

[Doug Roller]

You know, it's not like he's like. Because, yeah, he's got no concept of justice.

[Steven Rinella]

No, not at all. I mean, although there is something to. To say about protection of, of the handler and all that they.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, you. Okay, that's a factor.

[Steven Rinella]

I think there is some of that, and I'm not so sure how much with every police dog, but for a home dog, let's say you're going to see some of that. Like, I saw it in my mouth, like we talked about. I can't. He's not totally the most trustable dog. He's got a lot of guardian and he's very guarded to the family.

[Doug Roller]

I see.

[Steven Rinella]

And once I get somebody to know him, he's totally cool. But I found out the hard way that I gotta watch them.

[Doug Roller]

So one. So one of your apprehension dogs could develop a professional like, or develop a personal relationship where they are in some part motivated and you know that that's protecting their handling.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a really good question because the way that I preach to guys, and this is, you can tell them all day long, this is, you know, for the most part, this is a working dog and he's not a pet. And the worst thing you can do, really, I think, is to treat him totally like a pet pet. First of all, you want to contain that drive. That dog stays in the kennel when it's working. And of course you want to bring them out, socialize them and all that. But when he becomes too much of a family dog, there's been a lot of times when that's bite you in the butt because the dog will perceive something. You know, maybe a neighbor will come over and do something or move or make some kind of furtive movement. And next thing you know, he gets grabbed by this police dog and the lawsuit happens, you know, and. And I've got stories about that. So you got to be careful about that stuff, you know, I mean, it's safer just to treat him what he is. He's a police dog. He goes in the kennel, he goes to work days off, bring him out, run them around, have fun with them, play with them, do some toy work with them, whatever. But he's. His job is to catch bad guys.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, and some dogs never like that dog. You know, the dog's not angry when it goes at somebody.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, that's a good point. So when you are training a dog to bite, in the beginning as a puppy, they're biting out of fun. You start off, you know, maybe with a Jew toy. You know, dogs like, you know, so big, you know, three months old, you got him on a little Jew toys having fun. You're playing with them and he's biting and, and that's how you want to Bring a dog up, you don't want to do what's called like the old century dogs where they treat, teach a dog to bite out of aggression and sometimes even out of def and fear. When a bite, when a dog is biting out of defense and fear, he's, he's unreliable.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Because he's not biting out of fun. The aggression will come later. You know, you want to build aggression to where he's biting out of fight, but that's later on. That makes sense. Yeah. So you do that too soon and the dog can be, can be very unsettled.

[Doug Roller]

But a dog, it's aggressive as a youngster and biting out of fear and anger. You're not going to do it.

[Steven Rinella]

A toy, he's coming at you, biting him. You have him on a leash, you let him run around, the toy in his mouth, you grab it again, you play tug, you work on the bite, you work on the grip, you get all those things, then you develop into a bigger tug. And as a dog gets older and he has his adult teeth and you bring in the sleeve and then you graduate from the sleeve to the bite suit and you bring him along that way. So by the time he's nine months old, he's on his way. He saw he's got a nice bite, he's biting for the right reason. You know, he's not biting out of, you know, I want to just kill everybody. Yeah, it's a fun thing, Tug award, all that stuff. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Doug Roller]

So have you, did you ever lose a dog? Do you ever have a dog, get shot in the line of duty?

[Steven Rinella]

I've been around it. Yeah. You know, that, that quick story. I was a new handler. I wasn't in the street yet. I was still in training and. We had a dog. The, the radio was talking about John hall and he was a seasoned handler. He'd been in a lot of shootings, a lot of very violent time. Back then we had a, it was a traffic stop by two motor cops to pull two Hispanics over and he's going to give them a ticket, but he had no idea. They just robbed a bank. Oh, or a store. They robbed a store. So they're thinking, shit, you know, they came out of the car, shots fired, pursue them, help call and they bail out into a perimeter in West LA, which is a really high end area of LA and K9's called. So we're all the whole units en route. We're, you know, back then we didn't use swat. It was, everything was patrol. The Unit was a lot newer than it, you know, is now. John hall shows up with his dog. And I think it was another canine. I was on the other block, side of the block searching. And while we're about halfway in, maybe an hour into it, I hear the shots fired go off and the help call comes out and I can hear the shooting going on. And what happened was he went in there and there was a sergeant, a canine sergeant. Mark Moore was on his search team as his backup with a couple of patrol cops. The dog entered the garage and he was ambushed right away. The dog is on the bite. He's already shot in the neck. The dog is, but he's still taking care of business. And now John's having a gunfight with the second suspect. And he gets hit in the hand, transitions to his other hand, and ends up taking down the suspect. And then Mark Boring shot one of them too. And then Liberty was still on the bite, finally released and is bled out right there.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, good.

[Steven Rinella]

So she, she died. And that dog was really sad because he raised that dog from a pup. There's one of the dogs he raised from a good breeder, trained all, you know, did all the training. We've had dogs stabbed. We had a dog, a really nice dog, apprehend somebody in a bunch of. Inside of a building, and the guy pulled out a knife and stabbed him. Killed it, Killed him. There was another one. We ended up actually changing policy on this one. Sal Abadaka had a dog, Newton Division. And very sad too. He had a really good dog, Marco. This dog was a nice dog. A lot of apprehensions been in gunfights with him. And they had a guy under the crawl space. And then he was wanted for like a burglary or something, like a low grade felon. He wouldn't come out. And this is when we changed our tactics, you know, so he sent his dog under the house. Well, the guy was ready for it. And he wrapped himself with an army jacket. He took the bite. He had a screwdriver and he shanked him behind his head several times. And Sal heard the whining. Dog came off the bite. He came out and then he's in his arms, like you know, laying there. It was kind of neat because the airship, they would never do this today. The airship. Now this is a, you know, a rough area of Newton Division, residential area. I think it was like gauge and it was a 50th and some street, Broadway or something. The airship landed in the middle of the street, picked the dog up and flew him to the vet in west la. Oh, really? Pretty badass. No, he died.

[Doug Roller]

Oh, really?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we. We all showed up at the vet and Sal's in tears, you know, tells a hardcore guy and he's crying.

[Doug Roller]

But they get close. Guys get close to the dogs, man.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I cried like a baby when my dog passed away at home. He got bloat and had my two boys with me and I'm like, she's losing my shit. Yeah. Yeah.

[Doug Roller]

So what's your business now, man?

[Steven Rinella]

So I do, I do a lot of, you know, I started my business like in 2010 and basically we were getting even before I started my business. We would get called to help other agencies do training.

[Doug Roller]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

It would be on duty stuff. It was just kind of mundane tactics and stuff like that. But then I noticed as I was training, I couldn't do. When I started my business, I wanted to offer advanced tactical training. That was kind of my thing. But I soon found out that I couldn't because I started in 2010. Because most departments weren't doing anything. What we were doing. They weren't doing off lead work. They weren't using the caller like I use it. The caller was more used like a punishment device and not a way to communicate, which. And you probably heard that from other guys. Right. In the bird world, you know, not using the collar properly, causing all kinds of issues. There's a lot of that going on. So I developed an E collar course, a five day course for units to get the dogs to work off lead and do it the right way.

[Doug Roller]

Give them directions from a college.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And just I got to the point where I developed the class over a period of time through some trials and tribulations that I got a really solid class now that I can take 10 guys and get them pretty much going as long as they're certified in the street. So that's primarily what I do. But I also have contracts with a few agencies that I do their maintenance, training and. But I'm slowing down. You know, I'm pushing 69 now and my wife wants me to not be gone so much.

[Doug Roller]

You don't deal in dogs? You don't.

[Steven Rinella]

I have, I don't do that. I have done some patrol classes, but I'm pretty expensive, so it's really not, you know, for my time. They can probably do a better job going to a vendor.

[Doug Roller]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And getting their patrol done in a group of guys.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah. You know, what's the name of your. How do you work?

[Steven Rinella]

Just under dog, roller, tactical, K9 tactical canine, tactical. Canine. And yeah, it's going good. It's been a. It's been a great. Been great, great career. Great job, and I love what I'm doing, so.

[Doug Roller]

And you. And just to be clear, you keep a couple pet dogs around, and I

[Steven Rinella]

keep a couple pet dogs around. Yeah, they're a pain in the butt, but, yeah, trying to do a little more traveling now and all that stuff. But. And I got. I brought two other guys on that are going to be doing a lot more work so I can feel. Feel more stuff. Guys that I trust. Yeah. That are going to do the same thing I do.

[Doug Roller]

You ever think about raising a bird dog?

[Steven Rinella]

No, but I've worked with them. It's pretty interesting.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah, I'd be interested to see if, like, I'd be interested to see if you, you know, if you worked with a bird dog, what the result would be.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I think a lot of the concepts are probably. And I've worked with them with the Marines. I learned a lot how they worked them.

[Doug Roller]

In fact, I. Oh, doing the bomb dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Doing the bomb dogs. And we talked a lot about that. Like, here's a quick story. When I first saw them working in Pendleton, and then I did some work in Camp Lejeune, but they were doing. What they were doing is we're teaching a dog to go out and do the left and right hand signals. Commands, dog, turn around, sit. Cast them left and right about 150, 100 meters out. And they were using a reward system. And the reward system Tritronics used to make. Before it became Garmin, they used to make a. A bird launcher or. Yeah. What it would do is it would. It would be. You could hide it, put the bird in there in a cage, remotely press it. Bird comes out, you know, Bird, bird. Yeah, yeah, bird launcher. And for. I guess the bird dog guys were using it. Well, they took that same concept and they would put a toy in there. All right. So the bomb motors over here. That's hidden over here. So the dog would alert, passive alert, because it's a bomb. It would just sit there and wait. And then boom, pay them. Toy goes up in the air to get paid. That's the marker and all that.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm watching them do this. I go, well, you know, do you have any other method of paying? I said, is that. Is that the marker?

[Doug Roller]

You guys call it paying? Like giving them a payment.

[Steven Rinella]

You're paying them? Yeah, pay the dog. Pay the dog, especially in detection. Pay him. He's on odor. Throw the ball on top of his head. So he gets the marker. So he goes, oh, yeah, yeah, it works great. I go, well, I see a problem. I said, your dogs are alerting on the bird launcher because of the picture, right? Oh, no, no. They'll. I go, let's do an experiment. I go, put that bird launcher 30 yards over here or 20 yards away from the bomb, the source, which is what you want to find. And every one of those fuckers, they went in and they fringed and they got the bomb odor, but they left it and finaled on the bird launcher.

[Doug Roller]

Is that right?

[Steven Rinella]

Because they know. So I said, you've got to vary everything right? Now, one way to counter it, which they actually do now, is if you had, like, 10 bird launchers and have the bomb motor here so that they can't just find one, the primary scent is going to be the. The bomb odor. And there's a lot of. A lot of things that guys do where they. They mess things up like that.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They don't realize that they use one thing to bridge something, but then it cost them.

[Doug Roller]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

In another way. You know what I mean?

[Doug Roller]

Oh, for sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Doug Roller]

And you can. Part of your work is coming in and troubleshooting.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you can troubleshoot that stuff. Exactly. Sometimes handlers don't even know. I mean, simple little things like marking behavior. I mean, you know, you'll get. I see a dog doing a guy doing obedience with a dog, and every time he puts him on a sit, he sits and he jumps up in his face. And I said, well, you want him on a solid down, right? You don't want that to happen. But what he does is. What he does is. I watched him working him. The dog would sit, and then every time he sits, he pays him with a toy to jump up. Well, that's what he's doing. So stop. Get rid of that ball. Too much ball work, too. That's another thing. So you can identify things like that. They don't even know. I even told guys when I was working a dog just to drop your ego. I says, look, I got a problem with this dog. What am I doing to cause this? And they'll say, you know, Doug, you're doing X, Y, and Z. Really? I didn't even realize it, you know, so you just got to drop the ego and figure out that, you know, you're doing something innately that you're not even paying attention to that is causing a bad. A bad reward for the dog or a bad marker. Yeah. So sometimes it's good for people to evaluate you, you know, like we're doing e collar work and we have this out here and, you know, you'll see dogs really quick. It's like in a dark environment and they'll pick up on it and they'll get, maybe not even get hit with the stimulation, but when you call them off the bite, they're going to the guy holding the collar.

[Doug Roller]

Really?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So then you gotta hide it or everybody has a problem.

[Doug Roller]

They just tune into weird, not weird stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

You paint that picture and you gotta be careful what picture you're painting. You always gotta be aware of that, you know, and a new handler has a hard time because, you know, I mean, I've trained thousands and thousands of dogs and that's why they hire me, because I can see those things right away. But it wasn't always that way, you know, it just took a lot of experience. Yeah, that's good.

[Doug Roller]

Well, Doug Roller, thanks for coming on the show, man.

[Steven Rinella]

A pleasure. Thank you for having me. And thank you all the people I know out there.

[Doug Roller]

Well, I bet you're going to get some emails, people wondering, gonna ask you a bunch of dog questions, man.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure meeting you. And especially a shout out to the task force heroes. Yep, that's how we met.

[Doug Roller]

Well, task force heroes Shane Yates.

[Steven Rinella]

Shane Yates does a great job. And you know my buddy JD that got me to go. God bless you.

[Doug Roller]

So thanks for coming on, man.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, thank you. Foreign.

[Doug Roller]

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[Steven Rinella]

this is an iHeart podcast.

[Doug Roller]

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