It was over a year ago that I had anything to say.  And it was 10 months ago that we packed up the dogs, baby, and the cat and moved to Reading, PA.  But here we are.  Six acres of farm in the hills.  At night I get to sleep in my field stone farm house built in the 1870s.  Every morning I walk out to the field stone bank barn to let the chickens out, check on the sheep, and water the gardens.  I have been blessed. 

Due to some back injuries I have had to cut back on the activities that the dogs and I compete in.  This includes walking away from SAR.  It turns out it takes a wise person to know when to end a chapter.  The end of that was over 18 months long.  I'm sure it would be a riveting read, like a soap opera where they keep going in close at a gazing expression and then someone gets shot.  Slow, slow, fast.  Hem and haw and the pull the trigger.  And that "poof" I was gone. 

We have a lovely litter of eight poodles on the ground.  Three weeks old today.  There will be no shortage of entries to follow.  For a recap of the time spent away I leave you with just a few thoughts. 
1. You are the company you keep.  
2. There are good people hiding everywhere, waiting to meet you. 
3. There are also assholes everywhere, waiting to fuck up your day.  
4. Figure out to cut loose the #3s and focus on the #2s.  I'm pretty cranky if I can't #2. 
5. No matter badly you want to go in one direction, if the winds aren't in your favor you just have to pick a new destination.  

BarkBox is a monthly subscription that sends you items for your dog.  One box contains both fabric toys and treats.  In general, the cost of the items in the box is $10-$15 less than buying these items in the regular market.  Or it was. When I first started getting the BarkBox the toys included were from mainstream toy companies that I had heard of and seen in the local pet stores.  Items that I didn't buy because of cost.  So waiting for the surprise of a BarkBox made sense.  

After about 6 months with a Large dog subscription it was clear that they had no idea what a "large" dog played with.  And after many toys were destroyed in mere seconds I took them all away.  Later I would get a puppy, and I changed the box to "medium" thinking they would be appropriate for a smaller poodle.  Of course they were for a puppy.  But that is about it.  If ever a toy was left behind the older dogs made quick work of it.  Every single fabric toy they were allowed to play with was destuffed, ripped, swallowed, and sometimes pooped out in the yard. 

After 6 months old my youngest poodle was no longer a friend to her toys.  They aren't heavy chewers, but they nibble, grinding their teeth into fabric.  Within a minute they can have the fabric toys open and destuffed.  Of course one of them is going to roll around in the fluff of the murdered stuffy.  But even the "destuffed" toys aren't great.  Because dogs will chew up and swallow the squeakers.  So really, there is no stuffed toy that they can have for very long.  If its a harder fabric then its no fun to chew.  Chasing a ball is their only real job, so long as it isn't a tennis ball.  Fluff on a ball is yucky.  

Recently, though I decided to give BarkBox another try.  Not for my older dogs, but for the new puppies.  

The medium BarkBox is great for puppies.  I am able to hold on to the toys, and change them out regularly.  This brings us to how I found out about their new marketing scheme.  So while I am a new/old customer I get random emails.  Too many in fact, asking me if I want to buy more toys.  Or reorder toys.  I will tell you that the toys have changed.  Now the fabric toys are exclusive "BarkBox" label.  So they found a way to cut down on cost by sending us their own toys.  They are cute, but they didn't get any better quality.  

The last email I saw was telling me I could join the destroyer club.  Here is the link to there promotion.  

I have to hand it to them, Barkbox found an interesting promotion.  Not only do they send you toys for $10 that they make for pennies, toys that have no regulated quality control, but they are promoting the destruction of these toys so that you have to buy new one.  And presumably you'll buy them from BarkBox. 

The rampant consumerism of America is a little disgusting, most of the time.  On rare occasions, where the wonton waste is right in your face, it's nauseating.  All these toys you let your dog tear up go in the trash.  Or maybe you are composting them, but I doubt it.  They go into a plastic bag, that goes into a hole in the ground where it lives for hundreds of years.  So where do you think we are going to live when all out land is filled with the plastic trashbags?  More to the point, where are we going to live when our land is filled with our dogs discarded toys?

Shame on you BarkBox.  Champion of homeless pet donations.  Warrior for quality time with pets.  Creator of endless amounts of garbage.  I can make a pull toy from an old t-shirt.  I can get a cheap stuffed toy from the thrift store.  Or I can teach my dog to fetch and not create any garbage.  Except perhaps for the balls we left in the woods because the were in a puddle to deep and gross for me to fish them out of.   It's way past time for us to look at our own actions and change our effect on the environment.  

It is not looking for lost pets.  We used to get that question a lot.  "Our dog ran away, Can you help us find her?" No, we can't.  We also aren't an animal shelter.  But the words "search" and "rescue" conjure up specific things in peoples minds.  Neither are accurate.  

Search and rescue is looking for lost people, dead or alive.  Like the old west without the bounty.  K9 search and rescue is looking for people with a dog.  Emphasis on "looking."  If you want to actually find someone, alive or dead, then you shouldn't get into SAR.  Most handlers go their entire career without finding anything.  The odds are just not good that you will be the one given an area to search that has the one missing person in it.  Odds are better the longer you are in SAR.  But in reality a lot of people are never found.  A lot of bodies are not recovered.  

Part of that reason is that you, the handler, aren't in charge of the search.  You go where you are told by law enforcement.  If their information says search this farm but not that one, then you only search the farm they asked you to.  You are still bound by all the rules of society, like the Constitution.  SAR dogs do not provide probable cause.  So you go where LE says they thing you should look.  End of story.  

A SAR dog will train for two years before certification.  Did you read that?  2.  Years.  So if you bring your 8 week old puppy to training and can manage to teach an indication by 4 months, then you could have them certified and ready to search by 2.5 years.  But its unlikely.  Its more likely your dog will be at least 3. And if its your first dog, well...you always ruin your first dog.  So just think what you would do with 2 years.  That's half a Bachelors degree. Or two Superbowls.  Training a dog takes time.  Even more time when you need help.  You can't hide for the dog AND be the handler.  You need someone to help hide, or hide the cadaver sources.  The type of people that are going to touch stinky decomp are also SAR handlers.  They have their own dogs to train.  Now you have a couple people training a couple dogs and then you become a team.  I laugh.  That's part of the reason it takes so long.  Groups of people take a long time to do things.  Two years is the average. 

I've heard lots of people say, "my dog loves to smell things.  It followed our trail into the park all the way back home.  He would be great at search and rescue."  Well, actually with that little information your dog would suck at it.  First, because you are not searching for your own scent.  And following a scent in the direction it came from is pointless.  You need to know where they are, and not where they started.  Besides, SAR dogs want to be out, not at home.  Thinking that you wandering dog would be good at SAR shows how naive you are.  And how shocked you will be when you get out in the woods.   

Most people quit SAR, its just there.  Its a fact.  They picked a pet they thought was hyper, but in reality can't work more than an hour.  They can't give up two or three days a week to train because the spouse doesn't want to take care of the kids that long.  They don't want to poop in the woods behind a tree (true story.)  They are smokers and are unwilling to quit.  There are tons more reasons people end up leaving.  SAR is a hug time commitment.  Its dirty and uncomfortable.  You aren't a super hero, in fact its unlikely you will ever find a missing person.  What you will do is spend a lot of time training a dog to finding someone and then a lot of time doing paperwork about what you did in the woods.  

I still dream of making the big find.  You know, locating a missing child, gathering them up in your arms, and running them back to their distraught parents waiting with TV cameras.  I'm sad to say its never gonna happen.  In my cadaver dog's career she only ever made one find, and that was locating bones from a body that they already found.  Forensics requested dogs to assist in locating the bones that animals had scattered.  We had a good chance of finding something, and we did.  Two somethings in fact, part of a foot we thought.  It was a tragic murder.  But when Juno indicated bone I had a huge smile.  We don't deal in reality, we deal in the game of finding things.  That was the one time my dog won.  It was awesome.  And it never happened again.  If you want to "win" you train.  If you want to search, well, pack a lunch because this is going to take a while.  

I also trained a live find dog.  She is awesome.  A tireless poodle that found 3 people in the rain over 160 acres.  She did not certify because she would not sit for 15 minutes.  What does that have to do with searching, you ask?  Nothing really.  But the team I was on felt that one test was the measure of a search dog, and without it she could not certify.  No way around it.  So I left that team.  There is a lot of ego in SAR.  A lot of antiquated rules.  So while SAR is working your dog, its also a lot of working with people.  Way too much, actually.  You have to politic on any team.  Be nice to the people that grade your tests, even if they are wrong.  I've even agreed to a few things that I was totally against because I had a test coming up and didn't want it to influence the outcome.  And it would.  So if you aren't ready to kiss ass and keep your mouth shut, SAR may not be for you.  

Are you still interested in SAR?  Cool.  Go meet some teams.  Read their standards and find out what they are really going to ask you to do.  Then ask LE if they actually call that team for a search.  Some teams are not popular, they have a bad reputation.  I was on a team with a good reputation, but I should have asked more people.  My team was considered elitist, and while LE liked them a lot of people in the dog community did not.  But it would be even worse to train for two years for a game you never get to play.  Way worse. 

SAR is a lot of field work.  You need to know how to navigate in the woods.  Some people just can't.  No matter how long you teach them or how you explain a compass, they just can't grasp the concept of looking at a flat piece of paper and translating that into the mountain in front of them.   I brought a friend into SAR that got a dog just for the work and then left because she could not understand which way was North.  What do you do with your beloved pet then?  Keep it, rehome it, find another purpose?

SAR is awesome.  SAR sucks.  Both of things happen at the same time.  Just like life.  You take the good with the bad and if the good outweighs the bad then it makes sense to you.  If it doesn't then you leave.  You move out of state and create a new life.  Maybe you try again, maybe you decide you've had enough disfunction and take up knitting.  Oh, wait.  I'm projecting. 

But seriously.  K9 search and rescue is a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of pain.  Its also the most rewarding thing I've done.  At the drop of a hat I can be in the woods with my dog, my partner, helping bring home someone's grandfather that walked out of the house the night before and never returned.  People in this kind of work, and its normally unpaid BTW, do it because they love to work their dogs.  But you can get that same satisfaction from one of a dozen AKC or UKC events and without all the mosquitoes and sunblock.  

I mean, ten minutes and 59 seconds of searching in moderate rain.  That is what search and rescue people do in inclimate weather.  I used to train all the time in freezing cold, snow, rain, wind events, you name it.  Now I am just training on my own.  The rain doesn't stop us.  It doesn't stop death.  

II had to leave my search and rescue team when we moved to New Jersey.  I located other K9 teams but during the summer they repeatedly cancelled training.  I'm not used to that.  In VA we trained as planned.  Training was only cancelled if there was a search or the location we were training shut down, as it did at Prince William Forest during a blizzard.  

My exodus was a little more complicated than my husband took another job, but that is a story for a different time.  Right now I have a source waiting in the woods for Juno to find it.  I had not expected it to rain today, as I placed the source 24 hours before, but it really doesn't matter.  She can search in the rain.  Its pretty nice living in the middle of the woods and having easy access to training areas.  I used to have to leave sources wired to trees in larger parks, and come back another day to train on it.  Now I just walk out the door, which is great because its been a while since Juno was searching, and I know she likes to be busy.  

I used this search training to take a look at the woods beyond the fence.  Its pretty well hidden by underbrush in the warmer months, but the rock formations are very interesting if you can get past the briars.  There was definitely critter smells to distract her.  Fox, bear, and deer are common.  I've had to rescue the cat from a fox once already. So the woods beyond the house are a perfect training area.  She can't get to them unless I take her, but I don't have to get a babysitter either.  Yes, I have a child.   

Working up to the find was uneventful.  Its not really the sort of thing that people want to read about.  The dog sniffs, the dog runs around, the dog comes back.  She is working, but only I would notice the slight changes in her behavior that indicate if she is smelling critters or smelling human decomposition.  I had actually forgotten the precise location of the source when Juno look a hard left and stopped.  Her head disappeared behind a rock and then she lifted it to look at me.  She gave a little chuff and then a louder bark.  So I said good girl and fished her ball out of my pocket.  Her favorite reward is a blue Chuck-It Whistler ball.  Just the sight of it gets her excited.

I checked my stop watch.  10:59.  I wanted to get 10 min out of her.  I would have to put it further away for a longer search, but this was to make sure she remembered the game.  I threw the ball a dozen times, bouncing it from rock to tree so she had to change direction a lot.  Then I put on a latex glove, because I didn't want to come back out to retrieve the source, and headed back to the house.  Juno dropped the ball at my feet and when I leaned over I noticed that the sleeve of my jacket slide down over my glove and made contact with the top of the source jar.  Gross.  Guess I'll be washing the jacket.  I tightened up the cuff and went on walking and throwing the ball.  

I can be strict with washing.  I think its gross to have my clothes touch the sources.  Of course the dogs end up touching sources, even licking them, but that doesn't give me a moment of pause.  But my jacket touching it? Yikes.  I've seen people put latex gloves on to handle a source then forget to take the gloves off and start touching other things, like their water bottle or brush hair out of their face.  I choke just thinking about it.  Often SAR people take these things for granted.  We have just worked around them so long we handle them like anything else, but they aren't.

Back in the yard I change my latex gloves because I need to touch the freezer and the outside of the source box and I want to keep those places clean.  Its a policy of mine.  I use a lot of latex gloves.  One glove for the clean box, one glove for the dirty source.  Oops, I touched the lid.  New glove, start over.  

This is my Garmin fitbit type device.  And yes, that is the side of my jacket that touched the source.  So now I need to clean the watch also.  I never used to wear a watch, so it wasn't a problem.  But the Garmin has a stop watch so I get better accounting for the time I train and be more accurate on my training logs.  Its actually the first time I used it for this.  I've been moving, then raising a Malinois litter, and now the holidays.  But the working dogs need to work.  I even switched my live find dog to Nosework, which is also a different story.  

So...pouring down rain, a dirty jacket, and a happy dog.  That really was the point of all this.  Juno is 6 years old.  She already certified in cadaver.  She still has a couple more years of searching but I would have to locate a team that I can work with.  I'm not willing to let her skill set just go.  She's a very committed search dog.  Unfortunately SAR involves people too.  People with egos and histories.  The longer you are in SAR the more mired you are in your ways.  Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of expertise in the old timers.  But there is also a reluctance to progress and upgrade.  Technologies get better, you have to change with the times or become obsolete.  

Until I find out place again, we have to find the time to train on our own.  Like most people, you prioritize your time for the things that are important to you.  I may not wear a team patch but I'm still dedicated to SAR.  I like it.  I'm good at it.  I'm just waiting.  In the rain.  Its a good thing I like the rain. 

I keep an eye on sales, not just around the holidays.  In general, my dogs don't care about Christmas.  They only care that I won't let them near the tree.  On this Black Friday I started getting emails about sales, or posts on FaceBook.  So here are some things I located that might interest you.  

1) AKC is not cheap.  I got a notice on FB about sales on AKC.  Sike.  If you click on that link you are gonna discover that the AKC didn't put anything on sale.  

Don't take my word for it, go ahead and click it.  40% off "select" items.  I'll translate, 40% off of things they can't sell and the rest is overpriced.  They are hoping you will see something else and pay full price, but the goods they have are half as much as Wal-Mart.  Not that I advocate the small business killing, soul draining, Made in China conglomerate that is Wal-mart.  But if you just need a dog bed you can get it cheaper elsewhere.  

2) If you want expensive beds you can try LL bean.  Their usual Christmas sale involves getting a $10- $20 gift card for every $50 you spend.  Just today is 20% off if you spend $50.  But you still have to spend the money.  They have nice custom things, and if the item falls apart in the first year their customer service is very nice.  But in reality you will do better and pay less at Costco for a dog bed.  And those I have the dogs LOVE.  

3) Chewy.com has some of the best deals all the time, not just on holidays.  When I want to compare prices I look to them first.  Their customer service is great.  Whenever I have had an issue they fixed it fast, and I got something for my trouble.  They ship fast and free, most of the time.  

4) What should you get the dog lover for the Holidays?  I recommend the really neat items at Black Dog.  They are in MA, and even though the prices are mainstream, the items are good quality and very cute.  I am slowly collecting a selection of coffee mugs.  I even asked Santa for the new blue Striper mug.  Its worth a look.  The pub glasses looked to be a good deal. 

5) A small dog rescue decided to make dog wreaths this year on Etsy.  They sold out.  BUT...they will likely have more next year so keep them in mind and save the business in your Etsy profile to be notified when they make them again.  They were around $38, which is pretty good.  And they were very cute.  They benefited a rescue, also.  What else can you want?  Its win-win. 

6) For people that love the outdoors, check out these dogs topiaries.  You can purchase the wire frame or get it already entwined with greenery.  They are not on sale, that I know of.  I think that the thought matters more than the sale price.  Who needs another pug tie?  So if you are looking for unique this may help.  If you didn't find it on Etsy, anyway. 

The truth is that there aren't a lot of sales just for the dog.  Black Friday is about getting the left over items out the door, and electronics are the most discounted.  Cyber Monday might get you free shipping, but its unlikely to result in much sales on dog chews.  The rest of December will prove to be a study stream of sales and deals, so keep your eyes open and check the junk mailbox for email notices of sales.  How many bull pizzles do you need?  I don't know, but I would look to get them on Small Business Saturday, where you can get them right away, gift them when you get home, and check the label to make sure they aren't from a foreign company that irradiates them.