San Francisco Fire K-9 unit receives special praise, partly thanks to talented trainer
SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco Fire Department's K-9 unit recently received national recognition with a grant that they'll use to buy food, toys and equipment for their working dogs.
The unit was awarded $250 by biohazard cleanup company Aftermath Services and given an honorable mention above thousands of departments nationwide.
The dogs are in large part supported by donations from their community, but the animals do their part to comfort and protect their community right back.
Over the last decade, Ricky Rivera has trained many Bay Area working dogs through his company Spectrum Canine. He considers his own dog, Icon, his living resume.
"We want a dog that has the desire and the want to look for its toy excessively. So for the average person, this would be really annoying behaviors would be something that bothers a lot. It'd be like the dog that's constantly looking for their toy throughout the house is and does not stop until it looks for that," Rivera told CBS News Bay Area.
He didn't grow up with dogs, but clearly speaks their language.
"The way his tail goes while you're dealing or the way his tail is flicking around as he's working tells you the whole story," Rivera explained. "Whether it's a detection dog, or even a pet dog just learning how to heel down the street. You know, their body tells the whole story."
Rivera trains all kinds of dogs from working to personal, but specializes in training working police and fire dogs. The K-9s are trained to perform a wide range of tasks like tracking at-risk humans, searching areas and detecting suspicious materials.
Rivera told Icon to detect a hidden item in a nearby park.
"The dog is not looking for target odor, because it thinks it's looking for its ball. The dog knows that once it's finds target odor, the ball won't hear. So we're not really tricking the dog," said Rivera. "We're teaching them and conditioning them that through finding target odor, they'll be able to access the reward."
His work can be seen in police and fire department like San Francisco Fire, where detection K-9 Xoro works with handler Capt. John Baxter.
"Xoro is amazing. Not only is he my best friend, my partner, he helps keep our infrastructure safe by making sure that there's no nefarious acts that would be potentially impacting our operations," Baxter told CBS News Bay Area. "He can also find somebody who's lost in say, a park or a rural area by getting a scent and then tracking that scent to the location of where that person would actually be."
Xoro's top priority is keeping the firefighters safe but he's equally a companion for the community, so long as he's rewarded with one special treat.
"Xoro loves french fries. So after we do training, we're going straight to Jack in the Box or In-n-Out and he's getting french fries. Without salt, of course," said Baxter. "He knows that it's time to go to get my fries, buddy."
These special dogs are hard to come by. Rivera says successful working K-9s have to show very specific characteristics as puppies like confidence and drive but most importantly their heart.
"So all of our police dogs, all of our working dogs go home and are completely a part of the family and it's super awesome to see," Rivera said. "You know this dog that outside of the home is such an independent hard worker, go home and lay on the canine handler's lap, the canine handler's kid's lap and just be part of the family. That's really really cool thing about any sort of canines whether it's police canines, fire canines wherever."
The investment is personal and professional. But Ricky says the work they do to protect others is the biggest reward a human or dog could.
