Dog calls 911, barks into the receiver until the dispatcher sends help, and then unlocks the door when a police officer arrives.
Another cool dog hero.
Police, firefighters, and medical folks are to be considered “special friends with cookies.”
I think that’s an attitude we could all stand to adopt. 
[QUOTE=mrklutz]
Police, firefighters, and medical folks are to be considered “special friends with cookies.”
Ummm, that sounds pretty fishy to me.
How would the dog know someone was ‘medical folk’. A doctor? A nurse? Ambulance attendant? There is hardly a pattern that would make it a simple training task.
Cute story, but it seems highly embellished to me.
A doctor isn’t necessary. You’ll probably only see paramedics, maybe nurses, at home. Paramedics wear big green overalls and nurses have blue uniforms (in UK) so it’s not hard to train a dog to recognise those clothes.
These stories always make me cry.
sniffle
Do they really train dogs to do that though? Anyone wearing green overalls, or a blue uniform and the dog is supposed to unlock the door for them? That seems dangerous to me (too easy to make a mistake) and a waste of training time.
It’s expensive to train these dogs, and the benefit of that skill seems pretty marginal.
If it wasn’t already open, I’m sure the police officer responding to a 911 call would have kicked the door in, or broken a window to get in. That is hardly a problem worth specially training the dog to avoid.
Which is why I think what really happened is the door was already unlocked, just because the owner made a mistake and didn’t lock it in the first place. But that doesn’t sound as cool as a dog that is smart enough to recognize emergency personnel and unlock the door for them.
A bit of googling has informed me that “uniform recognition” seems to be trained by one school, and a woman named Sue Hoffman is linked with most claims of this nature. I’d hazard a guess that its not typical training for assistance dogs, but it is certainly possible. If my dog recognizes my mom as a special person with cookies, she could be trained to recognize a policeman or fireman as a special person with cookies.
I agree. Uniformed police and fireman I can understand. But she also said ‘medical personnel’, which is what lead me to conclude the dog’s abilities were being embellished.
Well, that’s your opinion, but here’s a google image search on EMT uniforms:
http://images.google.com/images?q=emt%20uniform&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&sa=N&tab=wi
Looks similar to me…
Similar to what? Do you mean EMT uniforms are similar to police and fireman uniforms? So the dog opens the door for anyone like that?
I see white shirts, blue shirts, dark pants, silver jumpsuits…
That would include a whole lotta people that are not medical personnel, but wear similar clothes. They might as well just train the dog to open the door for anyone.
Well, since the dog’s owner trained the dog at least partially, I had assumed that she had invited police officers/firefighters/EMTs over to her place to give treats to her dogs. It seems reasonable to me that those three groups could each have a specific uniform (uniform uniforms?) in that area. And the fact that the article quotes the owner as explicitly stating that she recalled checking the doors to make sure they were locked makes be believe that one of the dogs did actually unlock the door for the police officer.
The first two posts reminded me of a thread I started last year: The bomb squad was a dog.