Chocolate Lab training to be bomb-sniffing therapy dog at children’s hospital

When a team from Akron Children’s Hospital went to West Virginia last year in search of the hospital’s first dog to be trained as both a therapy dog and a bomb-sniffing dog, they weren’t expecting to choose one that day.

They didn’t even have any supplies with them to take a puppy home.

But when they saw the chocolate Labrador retriever who would eventually be named Chase, they knew she was the dog for them. The team members alternated holding the two-month-old puppy, who slept the whole way, on the nearly five-hour drive home.

“We fell in love with Chase,” said Whitney Romine, the hospital’s volunteer office coordinator and Doggie Brigade adviser. “You can tell she’s not very fearful. She’s very excited to learn.”

Chase was born July 23 at Chilbrook Kennels in Harp- ers Ferry, West Virginia. She lives with her handler, Offi- cer Ramona Caley, in her Tallmadge home with Caley’s husband, Joe, and their service dog, Jozie, a 5-year- old black lab.

Caley said she knew the hard work that goes into training a dog from seeing her husband train Jozie as a service dog. The couple are both dog lovers.

“What you get out of it, you can’t put a price on that,” she said. “I got to be the lucky one ?to train Chase?.”

Since Chase came to Northeast Ohio, Caley has been working with her on the daily training needed to start officially working at the hospital after she turns 1 this summer.

The pair did a six-week basic manners program at All Dogs Go To Kevin in Stow and have been working with the Summit County sheriff ’s K9 scent detection dog handler teams.

Caley also has been bring- ing Chase to the hospital to get used to the typical smells and environment there. Once she starts working at the hospital, she’ll follow Cal- ey’s schedule.

Caley, who’s been with the hospital department for 10 years, said the nearly 40-pound Chase, who will grow to be 50 to 70 pounds, is a happy puppy who “licks everything, anything and everybody.”

As long as she passes an evaluation after she turns 1, Chase will be part of the hospital’s Doggie Brigade, sponsored by Milk-Bone. The nation’s second oldest hospital dog therapy program, it was created in 1992 and currently has about 60 dogs, with future recruiting hopefully bumping the number up to 70 or 80 dogs.

“…Most of her life is going to be helping children,” said the hospital’s Department of Public Safety Director and Chief Jerry Klue. “But the rest of the time, it’s going to be involved with training because training is ongoing and continuous for the sniff- ing and the bomb detection.”

Once she’s trained as a bomb-sniffing dog, Chase will recognize nine or 10 scents associated with bomb detection, Klue said.

Romine said it’ll essentially be a game to Chase, who will alert Caley if she finds the scent she’s trained to find.

If a bomb threat were received at Children’s, Klue said, it’ll be valuable having a trained bomb-sniff- ing dog within the onsite public safety department rather than having to wait for a trained dog from an outside agency to arrive.

And when she’s not doing scent work, she’ll be able to help cheer up patients in the hospital. Ken McCort, an animal behavior consultant and dog trainer, told the hospital that Chase’s reward for her scent work will be visiting with people.

The hospital is planning to add a second dual-trained dog later this year, Klue said.

“We’re all about taking care of our precious cargo,” Klue said.

Bringing Chase to the hospital was made possible by a gift from Bill and Lesley Waldman of Portage Lakes. They said they’re dog lovers who are passionate about the hospital, as their son, William Jr., who turns 48 this week, was born three months premature and was treated there for three months after birth.

Lesley Waldman chose Chase’s name, saying she just liked it. But it ended up being a great choice for a dog working at a children’s hospital - one of the main char- acters on the popular children’s TV show “Paw Patrol” is also named Chase, a German Shepherd police dog.

The couple, who have a 5-year-old miniature schnauzer named Heidi, met Chase for the first time Monday morning at the hospital and gave her a blanket made by a friend.

“A dual role - one was for comfort, the other was for safety - I thought was really important,” Bill Waldman said.

Hospital officials want patients and visitors to know Chase will not be a typical police dog, since she’ll be a therapy dog, too.

“She’ll wear a working vest when she does the sniff- ing, and then she’ll switch to kind of tell the dog differ- ent modes…You’re not work- ing anymore, now you can go visit,” Romine said. “And then she’ll just get to walk around and hang out with people and get loved on.”

Imagine a human sitting by the proverbial campfire about 15,000 years ago with a few young puppies. This would have been early in the dog domestication saga, so the human may have been considering what the pups were good for. Food? Fur? Noble companion?

So let’s suppose the human tossed a stick. Several puppies ignored it, but one wad- dled off at a puppy trot to chase it, and at the human’s urging, brought it right back. Hmm, the human thought, no stew pot for you.

This is a purely imaginary scene. Scientists have not discovered a new cave painting of the very first game of fetch. But Christina Hansen Wheat and Hans Temrin, biologists at Stockholm University, have found some- thing almost as intriguing. They observed eight-week- old wolf puppies retrieve a thrown ball at the urging of a stranger, without any training.

Only three of 13 pups, over several years of testing, played fetch. And they were far from perfect. So it’s not as if this is a hidden talent of all wolves. But the researchers say that if the ability to engage with peo- ple this way is present in some wolves, it seems likely that it was present in the ancient wolves, now extinct, that were the ancestors of dogs, rather than evolving from new mutations during domestication.

This is the f i rst evidence, reported Thursday in iScience, of this kind of responsiveness in untrained wolves, Hansen Wheat said. “To my knowledge, nobody has tested play behavior in wolves before,” she said. If she’s right, the ability to engage with humans in play is “a very old trait” that goes back to the very beginning of dog domestication, she added.

“I still get goose bumps when I tell you about this,” she said.

Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, who studies the genetics of dogs, said the presence of the behavior in wolves was “completely consistent” with what we know about dog evolution.

The tests that led to the finding were important, she said, because “I think we too often assume that things we observe in dogs are special and unique, without really ever proving that.”

Elaine Ostrander, who runs the Dog Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, was less positive. She pointed out that the authors had “a very small data set of just 13 wolves, of which only