Happy Endings - “Sniffing Out Happiness”

“Let's just say she was over-exuberant,” says Paul Gallagher, the head trainer of arson detection dogs at Maine Specialty Dogs in Alford, Maine, of a young black Lab named Lexi that he got from a rescue group in Florida. Lexi's family couldn't handle her and she was headed to the local pound.

At his school, Gallagher paired Lexi up with Assistant Fire Marshall, Bo Montague of Hay's County Sheriffs Department in San Marcos, Texas. “She didn't like me at first,” Montague says of Lexi. “She tried to bite me.” But after a five-week training course to become an arson dog, Lexi had not only found a new master and home, but she is also helping her community take a bite out of crime.

Lexi's nose can identify accelerants - gasoline, lighter fluid, karosene, and many others - in the rubble left by a fire. It would take humans weeks to go through the amount of material that Lexi can sniff through in minutes. To date she has worked ten fires with Montague. “She's a blast to work with,” says Montague, chuckling. “She's a strong alpha dog.”

Today, twenty-one-month old, Lexi thrives in her new life as a crime stopper and family pet. Of the dogs he gets from rescue groups to train, Gallagher says, “We give them a second chance on life.”

First published in Dog Fancy, June 2004

For more information about arson dogs, please visit www.arsondogs.com

A version of this piece originally published in Dog Fancy, June 2004

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