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Recent News
U.S. Pups for Peace donates 30 sniffer dogs for work here
April 02, 2004 Nissan 11, 5764
Almost 70 people gathered last Monday night at the Tel Aviv home of Canadian-American Menachem Feder and his partner Yael Fishman, to celebrate the launch of Pups for Peace-Israel, the Israeli arm of a Los Angeles-based organization that has donated 30 sniffer dogs to the Transportation Ministry and Israeli police force. In the past, the puppies were trained in California; the training operations have now moved to an army base in the Golan.
"These dogs represent a nonviolent form of counterterrorism," said Feder, a who has lived in both Montreal and New York and is now the chairman of Pups for Peace-Israel. Unlike IDF attack dogs, he said, "[Our] dogs are not violent. They smell the explosive material and identify the location of the explosives by sitting next to them. At that point the security services would do what they need to do."
At Monday's party, a 2-year-old Malinois named Heidi demonstrated her ability to pick out the one person in the room who had been given a bag containing acetone, a common ingredient in explosives. It takes approximately three months to train a dog and its handler to work together as partners in urban environments where the noise, bustle, and variety of smells make the dog's job more difficult.
While the handlers are mostly former members of the IDF canine unit, the dogs are brought from all over the world; they are chosen partly on the basis of their playfulness, since, for them, the search for explosives is a game. The cost of procuring and training each dog is $10,000. So far over $2 million have come from American donors for the project.
Each dog placed with the police or Transportation Ministry is capable of working for four hours each day, for approximately four years. Upon retirement, most of the dogs will be adopted by their human handlers, with whom they develop a close bond.
Feder said the first "graduating class" of 30 fully-trained dogs and their handlers are already working in communities all over Israel. An additional 10 dog-handler teams will start working shortly, while another 30 dogs have completed part of the training but are waiting to be matched with handlers.
Pups for Peace was founded in 2002 by Californian Glenn Yago, who recruited dog "super-trainer" Mike Herstick to teach his methodology to Israeli trainers, who in turn instruct the dog-handler teams. Last week, MK Ruhama Avraham (Likud) pledged at a Knesset ceremony to lobby for more funds toward training sniffer dogs.
