Teaching the Recall/Refind to Live Find Dogs with Michelle Metzner

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Hunt Find Your Lert, the K9 Search and Rescue Podcast, where we discuss everything related to the world of K9 Search and Rescue work. I'm your host, Zeffan Allen, and thank you for joining us today. Today we have a very exciting discussion with the old training partner of mine. I'll call her that about lifind dogs and recall, excuse me, recall refines. But before we get to that, I want to throw out a disclaimer for the listeners. I am currently traveling for work. I am in a beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, which is an amazing city. If you haven't had the opportunity to visit, with that being said, I'm writing downtown Vancouver. There's a lot of background noise. It's probably going to be a little bit of an echo. So if the sound quality isn't kind of what you're necessarily used to, then you'll probably just have to deal with it. But after all, this is a free podcast. So what's the big deal? So, but I'll apologize ahead of time for any sound quality issues that we may run into. So with all that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Michelle, how are you doing today? - I am fantastic. Whether in Wisconsin is beautiful. - Great, great. So with us today is Michelle Metzner. She is out of the state of Wisconsin, as you just mentioned. And as you may have noticed from her voice and her accent. So Michelle, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do professionally? And then we'll jump into your dog training background from there. - Okay, like you said, my name is Michelle. I was born and bred in Shabboygan, Wisconsin. I currently live in Greenleaf, Wisconsin, which is just South of Green Bay. I am not a Packers fan. So I'm gonna apologize to anyone who is. Yeah, that's pretty much me in a nutshell. My paying job, when I'm not doing search and rescue, I manage a veterinary clinic in the city of Green Bay that lies in the shadow of Lambo field. So you can say I'm living the dream. (laughing) - Yeah, it did a great thing to live in the city and not be a fan of the football team. With the disclaimer, I'm from Dallas, so you have to be a Cowboys fan. Otherwise, it won't let you live there. But I'm sure you run into a lot of issues with that. - I do, I do. And my entire clinic are all Packers fans and they all go see games and they invite me and I'm like, I would rather stick a pin in my eye. So yeah, I'm really the only person in Wisconsin who is not a Packers fan. - Yeah, so you're not a football fan at all or just not a Packers fan? - Generally not football at all. I'm a little bit more into the horse racing thing. - Oh, cool, cool, good, that makes sense. - So then let's jump into your search and rescue background. So let me ask just a couple of questions. So number one, when did you get started in search and rescue? And then number two, how did you get started in search and rescue? - So I got started right around the end of 1991, beginning of 1992, fresh out of high school. I actually met my husband who at the time was part of an explorer post. He was one of the advisors in the explorer post in Shaboykin that did search and rescue. And we ended up, I guess meeting, getting together, we started dating, we got a dog. I had been into tracking at the time and so we were starting our dog off with tracking. We happened to meet the canine officer of the Shaboykin County Police Department and Jeff saw us training in a park one day and gave us our business card for the first search and rescue team that I belonged to, which was called Rescue Med out of Graffton, Wisconsin. We were with them for a couple of years that morphed into another team. And then in 1999, Sean and I started canine emergency response teams, which is the team that we are still involved with today. - Oh, okay, cool. So I didn't realize that so your husband also does search and rescue. So does he do, is he a canine handler as well? Does he do ground search and rescue? - So he handled the dog for a long, long time and now he's much more on the medical disaster side of things. He's very active with a local medical reserve core unit. So he's kind of done more of the ground work, medical side rescue portion of search and rescue. - Okay, okay, cool. Well, at least it's nice that you, you all are able to share that together and respond together where it's needed. - So tell me a little bit more about your current team, like what size of your team, what size of your team, what type of calls do you handle, et cetera. - Sure, so we, our name is canine emergency response teams. We have two divisions in Wisconsin. So we're fairly spread out. I run the central division, which is kind of the central and northeastern part of the state. And then we have another division that's currently being run by a good friend of mine, Sarah Garfunkel, who is located in the north western part, almost on the Minnesota border. So we stay pretty active. We probably average about 20 to 30 calls a year. We do, we don't do any trailing on our team. We are primarily air scent, HRD, and then usar. 'Cause our team provides the canine resources to Wisconsin task force one. So we spend all of our time pretty much doing disaster, life find area search, and the different venues in the cadaver dog world. - Okay, cool. So just curious, are you seeing a trend for your team of more life on work or more a cadaver work? - I have to say over the years, I have seen it go more towards the cadaver dog world and it's interesting because when I started search and rescue, in 1991, '92, there weren't different venues. So you just trained a search dog. And your dog went out if it was a live missing child, if it was a homicide, and your dog just found everything. And so in the last 30 years, I've seen it kind of polarized into life find and human remains detection. And then all of the subsets that have happened in the human remains detection world. So it's been an interesting transition over the last three decades. But I definitely, when I look at the stats, probably in the last five or six years, we get a lot more cadaver calls, or they're calling a little bit later, and by that time it's already assumed that the person has passed away. So, and the more drones have taken over, we've seen our call rate go down a little bit too. And it's starting to rebound, but that definitely has put an impact in the number of calls that we've had. - Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And so just, I'm curious, I've never been to Wisconsin, so I'm pretty ignorant on the state. Is the area that you operate in? Is it urban? Is it mostly rural? I think you mentioned you don't do a lot of trailing work, or any at all. So I'm guessing you're probably more rural, but just what type of areas are you working in? - Yeah, so Wisconsin is primarily farmland. We do, Green Bay is a bigger city, Milwaukee, obviously, Madison's the college town. We do have our share of big cities, but really if you look at the general population of Wisconsin, you're looking at a lot of hunting land up north, you're looking at a lot of farmland, dairy cows, cornfield, soybeans. The western side of the state is a little bit more hilly, and you have a little bluffs right along the river, but we're pretty, we're pretty flat to Rolling Hill farmland type things. And then we mutual aid with some other teams that do the trailing work. So if we need one, we can call them and they come and help us all the time. - Okay, sounds good. Let's jump into your dog. So let's start just generally speaking. Let's work from your first dog up into your current dog or dog. Tell us a little bit about the dog that you've had and what they worked in, and then let's finish with your current dog. - Sure. So the first dog I had was a shelter find. His name was Buddy. That was the first one that is Sean and I adopted. He was a shepherd, a ketomix. He was fantastic. At that time, trailing was kind of the thing. So we were, and I was from the AKC world, so I was very familiar with the AKC tracking. So we did trailing. First, he passed away of cancer fairly quickly after we got him. And Sean and I ended up getting two shepherds, Duchess and Kayla. And that's when we switched into the kind of air scent world and I kind of got hooked on the beginnings of disaster. I went to a couple seminars with Bill Dotson and some of the people that are big in the disaster world. And so we kind of veered into that subset fairly early in my career. Even though there's not a huge call for that in Wisconsin, knock on wood, thank God. We don't have a lot of natural disasters. We have tornadoes every once in a while, but they're generally not horrible. So there wasn't a lot of opportunity to do the disaster work. So my first dogs were all refined dogs. I mean, that's what everybody trained and that's what you did. And whether you were doing cadaver or you were doing, like I said, back then it was all just a search dog. So we did refines for everything. We just didn't know any better. When I lost those two dogs, I had them for about a decade. My second decade I wandered into the world of bloodhounds. That was my midlife crisis. Yes, I did not get a little red sports car from my midlife crisis. I got a little red-hound dog. And so Trace was my hound. I worked him until he went blind in trailing. And then I had that sort of when I shifted off of the shepherds and pointy-eared breeds and started going more towards the world of retrievers. Sarah, who is now my best friend, moved to Wisconsin from Florida. And she had flat coats. And we had a breeder of really nice goldens on the team. And so I sort of got hooked into that. And I've been doing retrievers ever since. So my current guys, and kind of that second decade is when things were really the early 2000s, late 1990s is kind of when the search dog world started really breaking apart that I remember and training life-fined and cadaver dogs as separate entities. And so probably my first retrievers, Fargo and Bret, were my first kind of separated dogs where I trained Fargo specifically for cadaver and Bret specifically for life-fined. And that's when the whole bark alert thing came. And I switched from refines to bark alerts. And yeah, I kind of haven't looked back. Right now I have a flat coated retriever, Aila that does cadaver. I have Bret's nephew tap from Pemberley Retrievers that does life-fined. And he is a fantastic little golden. I have a little yellow lab named Duke, who is training up to be Aila's replacement because she is eight going on nine. And flat coats tend not to live very long. They do have high incidences of cancers. So I'm training her protege. And then I have a little fox red lab that's being trained as well for cadaver. So that's kind of where I'm at now. So I have run the entire gamut of a dog that does everything with refines to dogs that are separate, that still do refines to dogs that are still separate that now do bark and holds. - Okay, cool. So I have to interject and tell her the story. So just a bit of context. I met Michelle a few years ago. And if anyone's looking for a really good air sentence seminar, the, I forget what it's called, Michelle. The Shreveport seminar out in East Texas. Please make sure to attend is in March of every single year. Michelle is always there, Sarah is always there. And then there's folks from the Shreveport Fire Department that are always there. Fantastic air sentence seminar. If you're looking for one and you're in the East Texas or Louisiana area, please go there. So to get to my story, so I've met TAP at the last time I went to the Shreveport seminar. And Michelle may not remember this story, but I'm gonna tell it anyway, because it's hilarious. - Okay. - So we were doing little drills with the dogs. And the drill was, we'd have someone lay underneath a blanket. And we'd have the dog run up and alert on the person underneath the blanket. And any idea behind it was the dog just need to alert on someone that they couldn't see that was undercover. And so I go up it to lay, lay down. And Michelle is getting ready to run her dog TAP. And she says, "Hey, are you sure you wanna do this?" And she said, "Yeah, that's the problem." And Michelle says, "Well, he comes in kind of hot, so just kind of be careful." And I'm like, "Well, I work with shepherds." And Miles, I'm not worried about this golden retriever. I was like, "Oh, I'll be fine." And so I lay underneath the blanket and she sends him. And he comes in a million miles an hour, jumps on my face, jumps on my head, spins in 15 circles, and I'm trying to get his ball out to give it to him. And soon as I come out underneath the blanket, all I see is his butthole come across my face. And he rubbed his butthole directly across my forehead. I mean, it was, I mean, right across, it was like he used my forehead as toilet paper. And I finally throw his ball, and then I look up and everyone is dying laughing. And I look at Michelle and she's beat red. She stopped breathing. And she finally squeaks out, "Are you okay?" And I said, "Yes, I'm fine." And then she let her out, let out a belly laugh. Like you've never heard before in your life. - Oh, God. That was a moment. (laughing) - And it was 10 minutes later. And anyone who met me, you know that I don't have very much hair. I was pulling that dog's hair fur out of my hair for the next 15 minutes. 'Cause I was covered with the fur from the base of his tail. So yeah, I know tap very well. Him and I've been introduced intimately. - Yes, yes. And from the perspective of, I remember that moment vividly. As a matter of fact, this year, I think we even talked about it at the seminar. And I remember all we saw was the blanket, like, flailing tap was like on the blanket and tried to get to you. I think your sunglasses flew off. - Yes, they did, yep, yep. And Kelly was like, should we help him? But none of us would move. We were just like, well, he'll figure it out. He'll get in the ball. At some point tap will get off of him. Tap is my hugger. So tap is very joyful. He takes great joy in finding people in the woods. And so he just assumes that if you are lost, you have his ball. And if he hugs you enough, he will get it. - Yep, so yeah. - So if anyone ever runs into tap and she asks you to lay on the ground, you may want to put a hat on or something. (laughing) - Let's put both here, he needs a ball helmet. He's the whole thing. - Yep, that's right. I'll never forget that story. That was so funny. I just couldn't stop laughing. All right, so let's get into the purpose of the episode. So again, we want to talk about the recall refined, specifically for life on dogs. I'm well aware that HR dogs also would do it. We're gonna stay in the realm of life on dogs. But before we jump into what is a recall refined, Michelle, what I'd like you to actually do is kind of talk through some of the other FTRs or final training responses that you have seen for wilderness area search dogs. And then what are some of the pros and cons in those? And then we'll end with what the recall refined is. And then why it's probably the preferred method for most area search dogs. - Yeah, so the two main types of alerts that I have seen and that I'm familiar with are the recall refined and then the bark and hold. And the different train final responses for the recall refined that I have seen personally are the one that I hear a lot of. He comes back and looks at me and gives me the look. And then I know I need to run and find them. Yeah, we'll get into that in a minute. The one where they come back and touch my hand, I've seen a lot of that over the years. So I don't know what happens when your hands are in your pocket, but yeah, so I've had that. There's the brinsel. I've seen a couple of people do the brinsel where they have something attached to the collar or what I kind of call the modified brinsel where the handler has something hanging from their belt or sticking out of their pocket and the dog comes back and grabs that as their alert or the modified bark, which instead of barking at the subject, the dog comes back and barks at the handler like, hey, come follow me. You know, kind of like Lassie. - Right. - Timmy, Timmy and runs back to the victim. So those are the things that I've seen. And I think they have, well, okay, some of them have good merits. So I like the, come back and bark at the handler. I think if you're gonna do a refined and you have a really confident dog, that's probably my favorite trained final response with a refined is because you can't mistake that. You know, they come back, they look at you, they bark at you, you know, you take a step, they spin around and run back to the person. My next favorite, if it's taught correctly, is the modified Bringsel, where they come back and they grab something, hanging off of their handler's belt or sticking out of the pocket. I think that's super noticeable too. The two that I really, it does kind of make my head hurt when I ask people at classes, wherever it is that I'm teaching, you know, what is your dog do? Is the come back and look at me and the come back and touch my hand thing. And that's just because I have seen, I'm also a lead evaluator for almost all of the disciplines for NASAR. I've been an evaluator for NOCTIS and NASDIN and NISDIN. So I've done a lot of evaluations and where they fall apart is during the stress of the test that touch my hand or look at me funny or you know, blink twice and raises their left paw, they don't do it. Or the handler doesn't see it because they're reading their map or they're talking on the radio or they're taking a drink. And now that behavior that was very target specific and training in the real world doesn't happen and they fail their evaluation. So for me, and I'm thinking if you're failing in evaluation, you are leaving someone probably to die in the woods. And so for me, those are the two things when people say those, I'm like, look, we need to change those. The body bang is another one that I see sometimes where the dog comes in and jumps up on the handler. I like that alert. I like it if the dogs are medium to small size but I've seen some really small people with body bang alerts, with really big dogs and the one thing that I see all the time is the cue. That dog is running back and the handler knows they found the victim so they brace for the impact. And again, that's a cue to the dog. The dog's like, oh, mom's, mom's bracing, dad's bracing, so I'm right, I'm gonna hit 'em. And when you take that ability away for the handler to know where the victim is, you don't always get that subliminal cue that you've been giving to your dog the whole time that you've been training. Plus as the dog gets older, I mean, let's face it, we're pretty hard on our search dogs. They're pounding their joints pretty often. As they get older, that alert may get less and less reliable. So I like the body bang for some dogs and handler teams but I do see the pitfalls of that one being that there's usually a subconscious cue that the handlers give without even knowing it. And as the dog gets older, it just gets too painful for them to do. - Yeah, my shepherd used to do, and it wasn't quite a full body bang, but he would come back to me and kind of lift his front paws up. And it was, I didn't want him to jump on me, but I wanted it to be distinctive. - Right. - Now that he's seven, he doesn't want to do that at all. So he comes back to me and spins in the circle. So to your point, as they get older, they just don't have the ability or they don't want to or they may have some type of pain that we don't know about to prevent him from doing that. So now he just spins in a circle in front of me. And I thought to myself, I wish I had started this from day one. This is much easier for him and me. - Yep, and it's super easy to read. So, I like the things that, as an evaluator, I'm looking at it and I'm looking at it as somebody when I'm teaching a class, these are the people that I might have to call some day to save my life, or not my, 'cause I wouldn't be calling. But to save the life of a family member, or to save someone that's a friend of mine somewhere. So when I'm looking at dogs, I'm looking at, is this gonna survive the real world? Are you gonna be able to do this when you've been out in the woods for five, six hours in the heat of every state, except Wisconsin, 'cause it's cold here? You know, is the dog gonna do this when it's tired, when it's exhausted, when it's hot, when you're hot, when you're reading your map, when you're tying your shoe. So that's kind of where, that's where I see things fall apart. Every single time, in every single class, the one thing that falls apart on the recall refined is the TFR. Yeah, so that's kind of my opinion of those things. - You know, it's interesting, 'cause you mentioned that, and I've been to enough seminars to know, and you've certainly taught enough seminars to know, that's the one thing that falls apart, and most good seminars will start with that, like your seminars always start with that. But a lot of people don't wanna train, and they say, oh, I just wanna go out and search 30 acres, and I've never understood the perspective of, I want my dog to search a bunch of acres, but who cares if it tells me if it found anyone? What's the point? If the dog finds someone you don't know, you serve no purpose other than to walk around and look cool, that does no one any good. I'm interested in your opinion, so I know you mentioned, and I know some of this is probably 'cause you work with the task force, of the pure bark alert where the dog is barking directly at your subject versus the recall refined. And I don't know if necessarily one is better than the other, but just what is your perspective on one versus the other? - So I actually switched to the bark alert for my wilderness dogs after my second disaster seminar with Bill Dotson actually down and Waldoxie State Park in Mississippi. It was a noctis seminar way back in the day, and I thought, oh my God, that is so easy. Like, that is so easy. And I was very lucky in that I have almost always have very confident, life fine dogs. They were very people friendly. They would give me up for a ball. I mean, you could have put tap in the car the day he put his butt on your face and took him away and he'd never looked back. So I watched a dog do that in a wide area search and it blew my mind how much easier it is to teach. Literally, well, you do have to have good subjects. I will give you that. You have to have good victims to teach a bark alert. But what I liked about it was that it increased my dog's ranging, right? Because I have nothing to do with the reward. They know that the reward is out in the woods and the person out in the woods has the reward. So they range like crazy. So it fixed any ranging problems I had. It was one and done. Find the victim, bark at the victim, get your ball. That's all the dog had to learn. Find the victim, bark at the victim, get your ball or your toy, my tap's uncle liked rubber chickens. And so he was the chicken man. And so it was just so easy to train. A couple of the pitfalls that I did find, when I've heard people talk about them and I can only talk about my experiences, they don't want the little kid to start screaming, they don't want the Alzheimer's patient to be afraid or have a heart attack or the big gloom and doom scenarios. My thought process and my experiences, what, that person may die if they're not found. So if my barking golden retriever scares them a little bit and they start screaming, I'm gonna know that they're right and we're gonna run all the quicker to find them. The first subject that Brett ever found was a little girl who fell off of her bike in the local park, she fell down a ravine. And when Brett went up and started barking at her, she started laughing. She wasn't afraid at all. We came upon them and that little girl was laughing because he would bark and then he'd kind of poke her like, hey, give me my chicken. And then he'd back up and bark some more. And so yeah, I've never had anybody scream and I have had a couple of finds. I've been lucky enough in my career to have those with my bark alert dogs. And it's never been a problem for me. The other downfall I hear about the bark alerts is that sometimes if the dog is ranging really far, you don't hear them. That I can say is sometimes true. There have been times that training where tap has been an eighth of a mile away from me and I barely hear him barking. But what I have found in my experience is my dogs will bark at the person for 3, 4, 5 minutes. And then they're kind of like, well, where is she? And how come I don't have my ball yet? And they'll kind of start doing just naturally this weird little refine-like behavior where they'll like run back and be like, hey, are you coming? And all I have to do is say, you know, get to work or whatever. And they spin around, they go back. And usually that I'm close enough to hear them bark. So they know that the reward comes from the victim and that they need to stay in bark at the victim. But I've seen it with both of my golden's for sure that if I really test the theory and I hear them barking and I just sit down and start reading a book, it won't take very long for them to be like, where did she go? How come she's not coming? No one's giving me the ball. So those are the two pitfalls that I hear most of the time in the refined versus bark alert thing. And for me, it's never been that big of a deal. If my dog scares a victim, oh well. At least they've found. Yep. And now they have, you know, I've never been one until tap. I'd never been someone who I didn't even have a GPS until I got tap. I didn't have a dog collar. Because if you've been to the seminars I teach at, I get super annoyed with people who are looking at their electronics and not their sent detection for a machine. But the nice thing about if you do have a bark alert dog is now they have collars that will tell you your dog is barking. So that's just an even little bit extra layer of protection in my opinion that if tap is really far away from me and I can't hear them, my electronics are going to buzz and be like, tap is barking at the rate of 30 barks a minute. So yeah, I have not really had an issue with any of the negativity things around the bark. I like the fact that it gets rid of all of the ranging issues that sometimes I see with recall dogs too. But I do understand both sides of the coin. So you have to do what you have to do. Sure. OK. Yeah. And as a disclaimer, so my second dog, my labrador, her name is Prissy. She's a bark alert. And I went to the show for a seminar. And Michelle's dog was one of them. And I saw some of the other bark alert dogs. And I was like, when I get my next dog, that's what I'm doing. And she's a bark alert. And everything Michelle just described is exactly what she does. So good stuff. So let's jump into the recall refine. So let me ask this question. Because I want to make it practical for the listener. So let's say I'm starting with my dog. And let's just say for the sake of argument, I'm starting search training with my dog at a year old. I know somebody's going to say, well, you need to start that dog at 12 weeks. That's not an argument I'm going to get into today. Let's just say I'm starting at a year old. And I'm starting with runaways. Do you start teaching the recall refined from the first day that they start runaways? Are you started that dog later on in this career when they understand the game better? So what is your process to start? So for me, it's not the age that dictates the training method. The training method is the same in my opinion for a recall refined dog. The thing that I think people-- personally, the thing that I think people do wrong-- is they teach it as one giant circular behavior. And I think that's why they have so many problems with it when you start getting in the world of testing and deploying and all of those things. So whether you're starting a puppy at eight weeks or you're starting that dog at a year old. And I actually-- I like both. I like-- personally, I like to have my babies young because then I can train them up knowing nothing else. But when I'm bringing dogs in to train for other people, I will go look for a little bit older if I can get one, a little bit older candidate. Because then I know what their temperament is like. I know what their physicality is like. I know what their drive is like. I know what their play is like. So for me, that, the age thing-- I love both, just putting that out there. But the way I train refines is a way that I actually learned from Dr. Sarah Garfunkel, my best friend. And this was as mind-blowing of an experience 20 years ago as watching a bark dog. And that is, I teach the refine in four distinct steps. So whether you have a baby or an older dog, the first thing I teach is victim commitment. You're going to run out. You're going to find the person. You're going to get whatever your favorite thing is. So toys, food, whatever. I like toys, but that's a debate for another day. So I want that new dog to learn that the best thing in the world is out in the woods. And so I will spend a long time just finding the person getting the reward, finding the person getting the reward, finding the person getting the reward. I start out with the little baby-- the motivational puppy runaways, whatever you want to call them, the short and sweet real quick. And I am on that step of the refined until we're doing 20, 30, 40 acres. And that dog is ranging out and finding the victim and the victims, calling me on the radio going there here. We're playing, whatever. So that is the first thing that I teach all of my dogs, no matter what age they are. So a clarifying question. Yep. So in your first step, whether they're doing 20 yards or 20 acres, as soon as that dog finds the person, that dog is rewarded, is that correct? That's correct. OK. Good deal. Yep. And you do start. I mean, I do start out with the call-outs. You know, puppy, puppy, puppy, the runaways. And then those go to the auditory call-outs, where maybe the victim is a little bit further away. And the puppy's not going to-- the young dog's not going to hear the yell. So then I'll use a whistle on my victim, use a whistle, because I'm teaching two things at that first stage of search dog development. And that is all good things happen at the victim. And you need to range out there to find them. So that's how I get dogs that range, whether they're doing a refined or a bark alert. They know that the very first thing they learned was that their favorite thing is out there. And they need to go get it. And when they get it, they're going to get their very favorite thing. OK. Good deal. And I'm going to clarify it again, because this is a question that is often asked. When that dog gets to that person, we're not asking for any behavior out of the dog. The only behavior is the fact that they found them. Is that still correct? That is correct. Yes. That is a good point. Thank you for bringing that up, because I tend to forget that. I teach my train final response, my TFR, my alert behavior, whatever you want to call it. I teach that separately. So they learn whatever they're going to do. So if they're jumping on me, I'm going to ask them, up, jump on me, jump, jump, jump. I'm going to ask for that in the house. I'm going to ask for that when I'm standing there doing dishes and not facing them. I'm going to ask for that when I'm sitting in the chair. I'm going to ask for it when I'm laying on the ground, when I'm tying my shoe. I want that command for the trained final response to be bomb proof in any other scenario other than the search when I'm first starting with a young dog. So I'm kind of doing two things simultaneously. In the search world, I'm teaching them that victims are the best thing in the world and will have their favorite stuff. And then I'm teaching the muscle memory of my trained final response separate because I'll tell you what, if you do that, when you're ready to chain it in, it will be so easy. It will blow your mind. How easy it will be. Perfect. So I'm going to repeat that because I've seen it a few times where people say, well, all my dog to bark at me whenever it comes back to me on the recall. And then you say, all right, get the dog out of the car and tell it to bark. And the person says bark and the dog looks at it. The dog isn't ready to add that to the to the chain. It's not ready to add that to the search. So your point is once that that bark or that jump or whatever it is is on the light switch, it's on the trigger and it's unmistakable, then you can add it into the search. Is that correct? Right. When you're at that step of the four step refined training progression, then yes, they will know that command so solidly because you've taught it, you know, it's like teaching sitting down, you give a reward for sit, you give a reward for down, you teach them, you teach them a little bit at separate times, but the dog can learn two things at the same time. So in search training, they're learning to go out and find their favorite thing. And everywhere else, they're learning that when you say speak or you say jump, they do it no matter what you're doing. And I think if you get both of those foundations early on in your training, you will set yourself up for a bomb proof refined dog. All right, perfect. So we got step one. So I'm going to clarify this. So step one is dog goes out, finds the person, gets to toy immediately. There's a base level, level step of teaching the alert behavior, totally outside of the search training. So we're going to say that's an outlier. Step one is dog goes out, finds the person. All right, what's step two? OK, so now you're up, you know, you're doing 20 acre problems or whatever. Dog is going out reliably, finding the person, getting their reward, they're not getting distracted. You make sure you always have radios. Again, you make sure you always have radios. You always have radios so that that subject can tell you the dog is here. Wait a second. Wait a second. So we have a radio. Yes, a dog. Yes, yes. Because dogs learn to lie very quickly. And you want to make sure in that initial teaching phase where you're teaching them subject loyalty and the joy of the search game that they're not blowing by the victim, that they're not chasing deer, that they're not eating poop, that they're not putsing around. And so your subject can give you all of that information. Oh, yeah, you know, you fluffy came in today. But man, she was really, she was eating the grass and peeing on the tree before she finally came to me. That's something you need to know before you go any further. If your dog's not taken off and finding the victim and getting to the victim, you're not ready to move on to any other stuff. But let's say that you are. You've gone out. Dogs do and fantastic. Loves this game is doing really well. Now you're teaching step two. And step two is find the victim, come back to the handler. And when I get to that point, I shorten my problems all the way back up to basically puppy runaways because I'm taking out the search. I am training a new behavior. So think about your recall refined as four separate obedience things. First obedience is I run out and I get my reward from my subject. The next step is I come back to my handler and I get my reward. So dogs search naturally. They do that most of the time instinctually. So now you're teaching them the next chain of the final behavior. So take the search out of it. Not sure if that makes sense. But what I do is I bring my victims back and I, you know, they go from here to behind that tree. And of course they're ready to go. They're like, oh my God, I'm going to get paid for Harley doing anything. This is fantastic. They run out. They get to the victim. They're waiting for their toy. Well, surprise. At this step, the victim is going to basically be unresponsive. Dogs are going to go there, going to mug them, trying to get their reward. And I'm going to call the dog back. And when that dog turns, I'm going to whip out that treat bag, whip out that toy and be like, come on, come on. And they're going to get a big party at me. Because they're going to run back. They're going to be like, oh my God, she has the toy. So they're going to go to the subject. They're going to run back to me. I am just going to keep playing with that dog. And I'm going to have the victim get up and come out to me. I don't want any chance for that dog to turn around and go back to the victim, because I don't want that yet. What I want now at this step is dog runs out to the victim. The victim is unresponsive. The dog spins around, comes back to me. And the problem stops right there. Yup, problem stops right there. And I'm going to call the dog. So I'm going to be at this runaway stage until the confusion is gone. And trust me, it's not going to take that long. The dog's going to run out, come back, spin around, and come back without me even getting the chance to call the dog. So what I say in my mind when I'm at this step with a dog is, all right, as soon as I see the dog get to the subject, I'm going to start counting to three in my head. And if that dog is not spinning around to come back to me by the time I get to three, maybe five, I'm going to start calling her whistle and do whatever I need to do to get it back to me. And then that party is going to happen at me. And I'm going to leash the dog up. We're going to party all the way back to the car. And again, this is where you're also going to need radios, because as you start to relength and out your problem, a little bit at a time, you're going to need the hand, the victim to say to you, the dog is here, calling back. Or the dog can't hear you, call louder, get your whistle, or whatever. So again, communication with the person hiding for you is critical. OK, so then on step two, are you also going out to that 20 to 40 acres and still going that length of search? Or is it all shorter runaway typework? Nope, I'm going to start lengthening it out until I can get 10, 15, 20 acres on that step two, where I know 9 out of 10 times that dog is running out there, finding the victim, and spinning back to me. And what's very critical for me at this point is I still want my search dog to get to the victim. Flyby's, whizby's, that's not going to fly for me. I need you to put your nose, your eyes. You need to get very close dog to that victim before you spin around and come back to me. And so I want that subject to be telling me all this. Oh, yeah, she came in and goose me with her nose or tried to take my mitt and her whatever. And she's coming back to you. I know I'm ready for the next step. When the subject is saying, she hit me in his honor way back before I even get a chance to think about counting in my head. Then I know, OK, now we're ready for step three. OK, so you want it to be automatic muscle memories, the words that I'll use. The dog gets to the person, sees them, acknowledges them. Muscle memory says, turn back around and go back. Yes, yeah, exactly. All right, perfect. Let's step three. Step three is when you introduce that amazing trained final response command that you have bomb-proofed every other scenario. So now dog runs-- you let the dog go. Dog runs out to the subject. Dog comes swinging and flying back to you. It's expecting to get its toy or treat or whatever you use. And now, as it's flying back to you, you give it that command. Speak. For a moment, you're probably going to get this kind of look like what? I don't have to bark. I just get my thing. So you might have to queue it a couple times. But as soon as you see that dog, and it's close enough that it can hear you, I start using that command. Speak, speak, speak. And the dog starts barking. I give it the toy, then the big party happens. If the dog gets all the way back to me and is a little bit confused, I'm still going to-- I'm still going to queue that which I hope is muscle memory by the time, so I don't have this problem. But sometimes they do. They're just so shocked that you're asking for it in their fun game that you need to do it a couple times, and then it's a big party, right? They're still not going back to the victim. I'll tell my subject, I'll be like, I'm playing with them. Come on out, or we'll walk back to the car playing. But that's when I introduce that bomb-proof trained final response that you've been teaching all this time in all these different scenarios. And the reason it's important to teach it separate is because you never know what you're going to be doing when that dog finds a person in the real world. So you need to teach that dog to jump on you, bark at you, take the toy out of your pocket when you're reading your map and talking on the radio or looking at your cell phone. So that's why I teach it separate before I bring it in step three. Because now I have two solid things. I have the trained final response. And I have a dog that's doing a bomb-proof recall. OK, cool. So clarifying question on step three. So once you transition from step two to step three, are you also shortening the distance again? Sometimes it depends on the dog. If I have a dog that comes back to me and I'm asking-- I'll do one or two where, OK, they're from here to the tree, I don't know, 50 feet, 60 feet, whatever it is. I'll have one or two of those little puppy runaways. But by this time, you've probably been training this dog long enough that if you do go back to the really super short problems for any length of time, you're not going to have to stay there very long. Because you're looking at a dog now that's, you know, instead of a year, it's probably 18 months, 16 months. So it's got the game. All you're doing now is queuing the alert behavior. So if you start to see the ranging falling apart because now the dog has figured out that you have the reward, you know, there are steps you can take to fix that. But most of the time, if you have trained a solid search and recall that this little step of adding the trained final response will go fairly quickly. OK, cool. All right. And so now let's let's say we're using a bark. The dog comes back in bark. Now we have that on muscle memory. So how do we transition a step four? So that is when I do shorten things up because-- and again, when I say shorten them up, I don't mean very long. Most-- and I'm going to say this in the nicest way, but most dumb dogs can do a recall, a refined. Like, they want to show you what they found. So at that step, the toy goes back to the subject. I shorten the problem back up. And now I have the whole chain together. Dog goes to the person. They don't even have to search. They just run to the person. They already know to come back to me. They come back to me. They're giving me their final response. They're waiting for their toy. They're not getting it. And at the moment, they bark at me. I'm going to say show me, and that's going to cue my subject to go, come here, come here, come here, come here, look, look, look, look, look, look. And not all of you, kids. My whole audience-- All the dogs, yeah. But that's going to cue the dog to run back to the subject. So for that last step, you are going to shorten it back up. OK. OK. And so-- sorry. I can hear the victim call them. And so at that point, when the dog comes back to you, you get your bark. You say show me. And show me is the cue for your subject to call the dog in. And then are you following the dog? Are you staying still? What are you doing? Nope. I'm going to take steps towards the victim. Because the dog will naturally start going the direction I'm going. And so I'm going to take a couple steps towards the victim. They're going to see the victim calling and waving the toy or the treat bag. They're going to run back there and get the party. And I'm just going to let the victim then play with that dog all the way back to me. OK. Or the other thing that I've done is I will just walk up and tell the subject to just keep playing with them. Because I want the dog to understand that at this point now, the victim is back to being the most one. OK. And is that usually an easy transition for the dog to go back to the victim? Or is that typically take a little work? It's usually pretty easy. I have not found that to be a difficult step at all. OK. Cool. So let's do this. Let's have you go back through steps one through four just really quickly. And then we're going to get into it to a little bit more of the minutia of training this. So take us through steps one through four just really quickly just as a high level summary. Yep. So step one. Every time all of these steps, you have radio communication if you don't have visual on your victim. So step one, the dog learns to go out and find the victim gets its reward. Step two, dog knows to go find the victim, comes back to you, gets the reward. You know when you're ready to move on from that step, when the dog is springing back from that victim with automatic muscle memory, you don't even get a chance to call it. Your victim says they're coming in hot and basically doing back flips off of them. That's when you know you're ready to add your trained final response, which is step three. So step one, they find the victim, step two, they're springing back to you and getting their reward. Step three, they are going out, finding the victim, turning around, coming back to you. You're asking for their trained final response and giving them the reward. And then step four, the reward is going back to the victim. So the victim gets the reward, dog goes out, finds the victim, springs back to you, gives you the trained final response without the cue. And that's when you begin the show me. And then the victim is back to doing the reward. So you know you're ready to move on from from step one when the dog is doing 20 acres and isn't digging around and is ranging well and takes joy in finding its victim. You know you're ready to move on from step two when the dog is rebounding off of that victim without you even getting a chance to get to three in your head. You know you're ready to move on from step three, which is asking for the alert behavior when the dog is beating you to it. So you're starting to count to three before you give the cue. The dogs already come in and see in you and barking or run in faster to jump on you or grab in the toy or whatever it is. You're ready to do the show me when the first three steps are bomb proof. And you don't even get a chance to cue them. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So that that is a great summary. So let's let's dig into some of the minutia because I know you've seen this enough. What I want to talk about is proofing the recall refine and I'm going to give some context. And I heard you say this and whenever I heard you say this, it was like a light bulb went off of my head. What a lot of us do especially when we're starting this new handlers. We go through this process and the dog is coming back to us, it just found the person and we stop and we square up and we just become this gigantic statue looking at the dog waiting for the dog to do the thing, whatever the alert is, whatever the train response is. So talk about ways to proof that that recall back to you, whether whether you fall down, whether you're tying your shoe, whether it's night, whether it's morning, whether you have your back turned to it, how do you proof that and make sure it is truly bomb proof as you described earlier? So when I'm going to start bomb proofing my indication, I'm going to shorten up my problems. Maybe not puppy runaway type things or motivational things, but something where, you know, the dog is only going to do a short search, it's going to come back to me and I'm going to be ready. So before I get out of the car, I am making my training plan for the day because let's see what happens is a stupid training plan and no one should ever have it. So get, we put it on a t-shirt this year is offering, we put it on a t-shirt and all the instructors were on Tuesday. So you're going to have your plan today, I'm going to be talking on my radio, right? You don't even actually have to be communicating with anyone. The radio can be off if you want, but the dog goes out and finds the victim. The victim calls you and says, and I have them do this because you're not testing your training. So for the life of my dog, I have the victim radio me that they made the find because I want to know if there's any time between the dog making the fine and the dog getting back to me where there could be something going on like they chased a deer or eight poop or whatever. So I always have the victim call like nine out of 10 problems, I want the victim to tell me dog found me they're coming back. Okay, good. So now that I know that now I'm in, okay, I'm going to do it, I want to make sure I'm talking on the radio. So I'm going to get my radio out as soon as that victim calls me, I'm going to get, you know, maybe a second radio out and I'm going to start talking. Maybe I'm going to sing the national anthem, but I'm going to do something. So when the dog comes back, it has a different picture than it's probably ever seen before. Mom is walking around talking on the radio and I have it in my head. I'm counting to three. I see that dog. I'm counting to three if it doesn't look like it's going to be given me the train final response behavior. I'm queuing it. So I might be going, yeah, I'm having a great time. No, it's wonderful. Weather out here in my radio, speak, speak, speak. You know, I want this is the time where I'm going to fix that confusion. The dog is seeing something it's never seen before because I guarantee you all of us with refined dogs subconsciously queue the behavior by doing exactly what you said. You either stand up or I knew a gal with a golden retriever. She's a good friend of mine. She always bent over always. She always dog would be coming in and she would bend over and when she was doing her certification, she didn't bend over because she was reading her radio. She totally misread the dog had no idea what to do. It's sat down in front of her and she was like, would you like a drink? She's given it water. It's looking over her shoulder like there's a victim over there and she failed to revile. I broke my heart, but I was like, you never proofed your indication. So make your plan and go back to your cue, have that in your head. Today I'm going to be talking on my radio. Maybe the next training I do, the dog is coming and I'm going to turn around and walk the opposite direction. So the dog is coming into my back. Talk about a difficult situation for a dog. Most of them will not do a body bump if they're going to hit you in the back. They have to be taught, yeah, it's okay, you still have to hit me, you still have to jump on me, you still have to do that. So that's again where that muscle memory for the command for your train final response needs to be bomb proof before you even get to proofing it in your recall refined chain. So have your plan and go back to queuing. If you need to shorten up your problems while you're doing all of this adjustment, turning and walking away, leaning down and tying your shoe, talking on the radio, just go ahead and shorten it up. That way there, you're not going to forget to cue the behavior. If they're not getting it, you're taking all of the search out of the problem. Right now you're just teaching the dog to do that behavior, no matter what position you're in. And I can tell you, if you have done that before you put it in the search scenario, you may not have any of these problems to begin with. Because the dog has already learned, oh, mom's going to ask me to speak when she's sitting on the couch, or she's going to ask me to jump on her while she's doing dishes or doing the laundry or laying on the floor. You want to blow their mind, ask a jump alert dog to jump on you when you're laying on the floor. They have no idea what to do. So. That's a good one. Yeah. But you, you're probably never going to be laying on the floor. But what if that one time they find that little kid, you trip on a log, so yeah, those are pretty simple fixes. You can shorten up your problems and just be ready to cue the behavior, have your plan of what odd thing you're going to do when the dog is coming back for the recall. Okay. Cool. So let's, that great advice, let's jump into some troubleshooting questions and see these are some questions that I've, a lot of these I tried to pull from Facebook, just I, questions are commonly asked on there. So I want to run these by you. So first one I have here on my list is the dog doesn't so, so let's make an assumption. The assumption is we've gone through all four steps. We've actually trained it correctly and we're a quote unquote season search dog. And now we're just things are breaking down. So the first one is dog doesn't alert when recalling back to the handler. So the dog finds the person comes back, but doesn't give the alert. What are some things that you've seen that that can help train or excuse me resolve that issue? Most of the time they, they have either lengthen their problems too fast and the dog is tired or hot and it hasn't learned the muscle memory to still give that indication even if it's hot. So the main issue if you have that problem is the dog has either never been rewarded at you as the handler for giving it's trained indication or it's just not bombproof. You just need to go back to Q in it. The dog is the one that decides when you get to stop queuing. I know that sounds weird, but trust me on this, the dog is the one who decides when you get to stop queuing the behavior. So don't go to the show me part until that dog is coming in to you and giving that alert before you even get a chance to queue it nine out of 10 times. So the major problem is the dog just doesn't understand that that's a requirement and that that's what's going to get its reward. So if you have that problem back up, dog goes to the subject, run turns around, comes running back to you, you're queuing the behavior and given them the party. Okay, perfect. Stop the show me part. Just go back to step three, go to the victim, come back from the victim, give the trained indication before I get a chance to queue it, have a party and do that for a while. Don't do that just twice or three times or four trainings. Do it for a while because that is the most important part of the entire sequence. If your dog finds somebody and can't tell you, that person dies on your watch. And what are you going to say to the mom of that little kid when your dog didn't come back and do what it was supposed to do? So get rid of the show me part and go back to queuing it until the dog is doing it nine out of 10 trainings without being the queue without being queued. Perfect. Next question, the dog is distracted and either the recall or refine. So it performs the behavior, but you know, it goes and each poop like you mentioned earlier, it goes and sniff the tree. What do you do in that situation? I shorten up the problems because again, I'm back to an obedience lesson. I'm not searching now. Now you're learning, run to the person, turn around, come back to me, queue the alert, give the reward. And the person run back to me, queue the alert, give the reward. If you're a reward, there is one caveat to that. If you're a reward sucks and you're not paying the dog the way it needs to get paid, that can also cause that problem. You're no fun. Like who wants to come back to you? You're giving me a ball and I hate balls. So you also want to have a good reward system that will keep a lot of this from happening. But you would be at that same thing, shorten your problems up if the dog's getting distracted so that all the dog needs to do is go to the person, come back to you, queue the alert, give the reward. And make sure you're given a good reward, like make it exciting. Like that dog, you should be the most happy, excited person ever when that dog does what it needs to do because that's hopefully what's turning your dog on, hopefully you don't have a shy dog because that's a whole nother problem. But you know, you want you want that dog to know that what it just did was the best thing ever and it's going to get its favorite thing. Okay. Cool. Good deal. Next question. I'll call it friend alerts or even fossil alerts on the subject. So the dog, let's say you have a bark dog. The dog goes and ranges out 50 yards. You can't see it. It comes back and gives you a fake bark to try to trick you. Actually, I'll stop right there. So how would you fix something like that? Well, first of all, remember, you're always going to have a radio. Aha. So if you haven't gotten a call, you just ignore it. Okay. Just keep walking. Worst case scenario if you have a really hard headed, you know, sometimes the point years can get a little hard headed when they're lying to you. You might have to be like, ah, you know, given not a correction per se, but a, yeah, you're full of crap. So if generally, if you don't reward their lies, they'll stop doing them, which again is why radio communication is vitally important at every step. So you never teach them to lie. Got you. Got you. Okay. So a variation of the same question. So let's say you have a dog that soon as it gets into odor, it comes back to you, even though they haven't actually found the person, soon as they hit that odor cone, it's like, I found something. I don't know where they're at. Let me go back and tell mom. So there again, you want to make sure that you have radio communication because the victim should be saying, hey, they haven't found me. So if your dog just comes back and gives you a trained final response and you've had no radio communication, I would ignore that. That would be the first thing. Now let's say the victim says to you, they saw me. So you know they were probably in, like you know, they found the person, whether visually or in order, and they're just shortening up the distance. Then what I would do is give the victim a little cookie or a toy or something that they, and they see the dog on the next problem, I would say, have that victim call the dog in, give them just a little cookie, and then you call them for the refined. So you can, and I've actually, I did this with a dog, Malinois that I really, really love, and his handler, the first time I met that dog, that's what his dog did. His dog would just get into odor and be like, oh, it's good enough. And so I was like, well, you have to wait. And that dog, I mean, it took 15 minutes. The dog would like, go hit the edge of the cone, and we knew we could see. We set it up in a field where we could see that the dog wasn't going all the way in, and the dog would come back and give its train firing response, and we would just keep walking. And he was like, I don't know what's happening. Why am I not getting my toy? And finally, we got to the point where we were pretty much making our pattern and getting within six feet of the victim, and the dog went in, had to touch the victim, because we kind of forced it to, and then came and then got the reward. So the next problem, when we did the second problem, we gave the, the victim a little piece of liver treat or whatever, and when she saw the dog, she put her hand out, and of course, the dog went in, got the cookie, and then did its refined. So generally, that problem is because the dog was never taught victim loyalty. Okay. Nothing good ever came from the victim. The reward always came from the handler, so why even go to the victim. Gotcha. Okay, cool. Any other common issues that you see with such in the recall refine? I think you've probably hit most of the ones that I've seen earlier in the conversation. Generally, those getting distracted, not ranging, I would say if your dog goes back to not ranging, take a couple steps back and let the victim reward them for a couple trainings, just to bring that joy back to finding the victim, and then, you know, make sure that there's nothing physically wrong with the dog, because sometimes that happens too. The dog's had an injury or it's not feeling good, it's got tick-borne illness or something's a little off, and it's just not taking any joy. If you have that, go back to just doing a motivational problem a couple times and let the victim reward on the find, and that usually will fix that problem right up. Okay. Perfect. Well, yeah, this has been a great discussion, very much appreciating Michelle. Hopefully, the listeners appreciated to cover a lot of information, but I think it was all very relevant. Again, I've seen on Facebook, this question has been asked so many times recently, I talked to a handler who was like, "Hey, how should you teach to recall refined?" I was like, "Well, let me just pair it to you." What I heard Michelle say years ago, so I've been using your advice for the last several years, because whenever I heard you and Sarah explain it for the first time, it just made so much sense to me, and it was almost like, "If you could have seen the light bulb above my head, it would have turned on." So thank you so much for having this conversation with us. Before we adjourn, as always, I'd like to give you the opportunity to talk about any memorable searches that you've been on in your career. You've been doing it a long time, maybe two or three stories that really stick out to you from searches that you've participated in or your team participated in. I can tell you my favorite story that did not end up with a find, but we were working a case where there was a lady who was missing, and it was sort of an urban, rural situation. So it was kind of a long, busy highway, but it was a little bit rural. We were searching farm fields and whatever, and I had brought, and Brett lifted, you know, he did his, I like to call it like my Stevie Wonder impression, that his head went up, and he just, you know, he was kind of swaying to the music, swaying to the sun cone, and he took off like a shot. And you know me, I am not a skinny woman, okay, we're not gonna pull any punches, I'm not. And so he takes off like a shot, and I'm like, oh my God, oh my God. And I can hear him barking, right? So he starts barking, I look at the officer, the officer looks at me, and we both take off running. Well, of course, he's this nice, skinny, fit young guy, so he is way ahead of me. And all I can think about to this day, all I can think about is the people who are driving by on the highway, who are like, why is that fat woman chasing that cop? Why is she running after him, there's a farm field, like that is the best day. I wish I could talk to someone who pulled over a lot, because I saw people fall over, and I am sure that they were just wondering why I was chasing that officer. And it ended up that Brett did not find the woman, he found a woman who was out picking mushrooms. He went in and was barking at her, and when we both finally got up to the woman, she was laughing too. She's like, I don't know why he's barking at me. I gave him a couple mushrooms, but he doesn't want them. And so I can't speak, because I just ran through a porn field. But the cop is like, yeah, no, it's fine, we're so sorry, we're looking for, you know, if you've seen this person. And so that was the funny moment, probably my best search was with tap. It was his very first official search after he certified. We went and it was like November, October, November, so Wisconsin can be nicer, can be cold, and it was, it was cold, it was wet, and there was a gentleman who walked away from an elderly housing complex, and he was naked. And when we made our plan, we talked about our lost subject behavior, what do dementia patients usually do, where's a good area, blah, blah, blah. This was kind of an urban area, like a rural farm town, but it was in town. And I let tap go, and he took off. And we could hear him barking in the distance, and when we got up to him, the gentleman was severely hypothermic, and laying half in and half out of a frozen creek. And tap was actually laying on top of him barking, and it was, I proudest moment because it was about a year and a half later, I actually got to meet the gentleman and his family. And yeah, that was, that was probably my best moment ever. That's cool. Save life. Yeah. Most people who found, who find people never get to meet the family, never get to thank you, and we don't do it for that, but it's so nice and rewarding that you got the opportunity to do that. That's great. Yeah, I mean, I was, I was humbled by that experience, and it made me even more, even more cognizant of the fact of the power that I have as a search team, the, the ability I have to save a life or take one, and yeah, that, that was probably my best moment ever. And then I have one other funny moment that's probably not politically correct. I'm going to tell you in any way because it was hysterical. Please. So we were, yeah, we were just new to the whole search and rescue thing, right? And this actually wasn't a search. This was a training. We got asked to do a training with the water patrol out on Lake Michigan. And Lake Michigan is big, it's, it's like Wisconsin's ocean. So we had, and this is one of my first two dogs, Duchess and Kayla. So Sean and I are on this big Boston whaler out in Lake Michigan, and we hit rough seas. And the boat is bouncing and bouncing, and I can see Kayla, my husband shepherd, turning green. I could see her turning green. And I was like, oh my god, we're two miles from shore. Please don't throw up. Please don't throw up. And she must have heard me because she turned immediately and vomited all of her dog food into the crotch and the lap of the sheriff of the county, right? And so I'm horrified. I'm like, oh my god, she uptucked a half a pound of kibble on this guy's crotch. So what do I do? I get up because I don't know anything. I'm like 19 years old. I don't have a clue. I get up and I proceed to get down on my knees in the crotch of the sheriff on a pitching boat and start flinging the vomit out of his crotch. And I look up, right, because I mean, I'm scooping, you know, right there between his legs. I am picking up vomit and flinging it into Lake Michigan. And I look up because I realize that the boat has gotten dead quiet. And I look around and all I was the only woman on this boat, all of the police guys were like red and staring at me. And the sheriff was so far back against the seat that he had his hand like, I'm not touching her. I'm nothing to do with this, you know, God, I hope my reelection's not coming up. But yeah, that was my most embarrassing moment because I was not married to my husband then, but he was like, do you know what that looked like? Like all I could think about, Hunn was getting the vomit off of this sheriff before we got into the into the port. So yeah, that was my other most embarrassing, barely lived that down. So now, from that day on, whenever we're doing water training with any agency, I just don't feed my dogs in the morning, I'm just imagining, you know, two years later, you're walking down the street and you happen to see the sheriff walk in the other way. And just the awkward look that you do give me, I mean, we were on searches with him and I was just like, don't look at him. No, it's okay, don't look at him. Well, you're lucky it wasn't today because everyone, it would have been on Twitter and Facebook. It's like, oh my God, yes, thank God, thank God, we did have cell phones back with this all started and all the grams and yeah, that's right, talks and all that stuff. Oh, God, yeah, that had been terrible. Oh, Lord. So yeah, those are probably my funniest moments. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing that. So as we adjourn this interview again, just really appreciative of your time, if people want to contact you for training or they want to join your team perhaps or come out and help high for the dogs and maybe hey, handler somewhere wants to bring you in for a seminar in another part of the state of the country, how can folks reach out to you? Oh, I'm easy. So phone number that goes to my cell phone and it's better to text me because I live in the sticks. My cell phone number is 757 506 4535 so you can call or text any time. I love teaching and I do it fairly cheap, so if you want to email, my team email is my accounts. So it's K-E-R-T-W-I. So Kurt, [email protected] and my information is on the NASAR website too because I'm a lead evaluator and fund SAR instructor and I'm a lead evaluator for the levels of area three and two, all the levels of you SAR live and cadaver and all of the cadaver testing. So if you need testing or you need an evaluator, you can hit me up for that too. Great, that is perfect. So again, Michelle, thank you so much for your time. We greatly appreciate it. This was a wonderful discussion and we are definitely in debt to your knowledge and your experience and the search and rescue community. There's so few people who have the number of years experience that you have and so thank you so much for staying in the fight after all these years and continuing to reach out and help other people gain the knowledge and experience that you have. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. This is my first podcast. I have to say it was great. I loved it. But I love sharing. I mean, I'm certainly, I don't know everything, but I will share whatever I do know with anyone who wants to ask and if I can help make anybody a better team so that you can bring that little one home to their parents. I want to do that because I live through every dog that has ever been through a seminar. There are still people who text me and are like, we had a fine today. I mean, I am as excited about that as I am as if it were my own dog. So if I can help anybody answer any questions, give any bits of advice, I would love to do that. Cool. And for the list that is out there, she actually means it. A lot of people say that, but they don't really mean it. She actually means it. So I'll put her her information in the show notes and on the Facebook page, please follow the Facebook page. I would greatly appreciate it if you did and as always, thank you so much for listening to Hunt Find Alert. And we'll see you next time. Have a great day.