Honoring Our Canine Veterans: The Transition from Service to Retirement with Mission K9 Rescue's Bob Bryant

Ever heard the powerful tale of Attila the Czech Shepherd, or the bond between Army handler Angela and her dog Szultan? In this episode I am joined by  Bob Bryant, the compassionate co-founder of Mission K9 Rescue, who shares these heartwarming stories and sheds light on the lesser-known journeys of working dogs as they transition to retirement. We chat about the  remarkable lives of these canine heroes, from sniffing out danger in explosive detection to their vigilant roles with the TSA, and delve into the critical need for structured post-service care.

Bob walks us through the intricate process of rehabilitating and rehoming these valiant dogs, unveiling the challenges they face, including coping with conditions like arthritis and PTSD. We also discuss the legislative efforts to provide these four-legged veterans with the medical benefits they deserve. If you're keen on learning how to support the legacy of these retired dogs or considering opening your home to one, tune in to find out how every contribution can ensure that these devoted companions live out their retirement enveloped in the love and dignity they've earned.

Useful Links:
https://missionk9rescue.org/

Angela and Sultan's Story https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=284199347167928

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Well, first of all, thank you so much for popping on and having this chat with me. One of the visions, or the vision for my podcast is to kind of create awareness around all things dog, and one of the things that we haven't chatted about are working dogs. Dogs that you know work tirelessly, you know, in the military or police canines, even the dogs that we see at the airport, you know, like the TSA dogs, and I think that we're definitely not thinking about what happens to these dogs when they can no longer perform the tasks that are required of them or when they're ready to retire. Right, and you, bob, are the co-founder of an incredible nonprofit Mission, canine Rescue, whose mission is to let's hope that I can get this right rescue, re-home, rehabilitate and repair. Are we missing one?

Speaker 2: 0:56

Yes, and re-home reunite yes. Rescue reunite, repair, re-home rehabilitate.

Speaker 1: 1:01

We're tired working dogs.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Exactly Five of them, the big five R's. My co-founder came up with that. I am not responsible for the failure or success of you remembering it. I have to check myself sometimes.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot, but it's amazing work that you do. So I do have some notes and some questions for you, but I would love for you to just jump in and really tell us about Mission Canine Rescue and the incredible work that they're doing for our working dogs.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Just briefly I'll give you a little description. I'll also give you our 10-year statistics of this point, since we've operated for 10 years now. We're a rescue located just north of Houston in Magnolia, texas. We adopt out entirely all over the USA. There's no restriction to that. We brought dogs in from every corner of the world. In 10 years we've rescued 642 working dogs. Now these were either military working dogs without handlers or contract working dogs, tsa dogs, things like that, and we have rescued another 654. So that's 1,300 roughly total that we've reunited with their former handlers. And in 10 years we've paid. I think we've just bumped over $2 million in veterinary care payments and all of that is using 93 cents out of every dollar we're donated by the public. Torner work. We don't waste money and we try to do right by our donors.

Speaker 1: 2:38

That's fantastic. Well, let's first start off by talking about what a working dog is. What does a working dog look like?

Speaker 2: 2:48

Let's go over the gamut on where the working dogs come from. They come from law enforcement police canines. They come from TSA, which are normally explosive detection, single-purpose canines. Some are drug detection, but not too many we rescue well, actually we're not rescuing them. These contractors are very kind. They retire their dogs very early. Agricultural pest detection dogs these are dogs that run in orchards and they're trained to detect citrus pests and when they find a tree that's diseased with the pest they will alert so the orchard owner can remove that tree instead of the disease eating up the entire orchard. So we've got dogs that do bed bug detection. We have currency detection dogs that can literally find money. I want one of those.

Speaker 1: 3:45

I wouldn't mind one of those.

Speaker 2: 3:46

I've got a patrol canine yeah, I've got a patrol canine from Canada. All he does is wants to eat people and he finds me drugs from time to time. Other than that, he's kind of worthless.

Speaker 1: 3:57

I will not tell him he did that.

Speaker 2: 4:00

And then, of course, a contract working dog. People here military working dog, contract working dog. Contract working dog is simply a privately owned working dog, probably trained just the same as a military Same tasks, same kind of work but just not owned by the government. And of course, you're military working dogs owned by the government. Government property can have up to five handlers in their career. Government decides which handler the dog can retire with. They were routinely euthanized until 2009 when a law preventing that was passed, and we can talk about that later. But the most common breach you'll see for working with dogs these days the one the top small is a Belgian Malinois. We call them the velociraptor of the German shepherd family Very fast, very lighter weight than shepherds, less prone to hip dysplasia and other issues, plus their borderline psycho which helps when they're patrol dogs.

Speaker 1: 5:01

They're like German shepherds on speed.

Speaker 2: 5:02

Yeah, exactly. And then we have Labrador Retrievers, german shepherds, we have some German shorthaired pointers as well as Springer's panels, and Labrador Retrievers work for TSA. What do you suppose TSA uses them?

Speaker 1: 5:25

Good question. That's a trick question.

Speaker 2: 5:29

No, it's not. It's very straightforward. Why would they use a lab, a German shorthaired pointer or whatever else Springer's spaniel over, say, a shepherd or a Malinois?

Speaker 1: 5:45

Offhand, I would say, because people are often scared of shepherds, and Malin was.

Speaker 2: 5:53

You just won the prize.

Speaker 1: 5:55

They're not scary looking Okay, got it. That makes sense.

Speaker 2: 5:58

They get the job done and the public says, oh, there's a cute dog, I want a pet. I always keep a couple of little dog treats and my pocket drives them crazy. They hate me when I go to the airport and then we have military working dogs. Those are your breeds that we just went through. I've heard of dogs as small as Jack Russell Terriers that have been trained for use on submarines for drug searches back in the day because they could get in the little nooks and crannies, tight spaces. Also some little dogs that get in tunnels where bigger dogs can't. But that's kind of the gamut on the breeds we see.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Wow, that. When is a dog of retirement age and what are some of those qualifications? What does that look like?

Speaker 2: 6:51

Unfortunately, what it looks like for the military is when the dog loses work drive or is injured. We'd love to see dogs mandatory aged out at eight years old. That way they have some shot at an eight year retirement. Most of them are only going to get six of that before they pass. We see a lot of cancer in working dogs because of the compounds they're exposed to, because of the things that are used to clean their kennels. We see a lot of eye lingering, eye problems, disease issues from heavy bleach based cleansers and that. But unfortunately it's work drive determines that. We've taken a dog from the military that was 12 years old.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Wow.

Speaker 2: 7:35

But the dog still had work, drive Live six months into retirement. Thank you, all for saying that Wow?

Speaker 1: 7:41

Yeah, because you think about shepherds and I don't know. I know many shepherds. I have a few that I care for, but I don't know, I don't know. I've met a few Belgian alimans, but I know shepherds have hip issues and hip dysplasia and when they get to be that age, I mean it's just like they're some of them, a lot of them that I've known they're barely functioning. Those hips are just not working past nine.

Speaker 2: 8:04

We've done hip replacements on shepherds. Wow, now any vet care these dogs need when they come to us. They get it because military working dogs or contract working dogs, when they retire, their healthcare is retired as well. They get nothing from the government or their contractors and we're helping cosponsor a bill with a congressman. This is the second shot at it since 2018 of getting the government to agree that, because military dogs have served, you know they have whatever they've gotten, they've gotten it because of their service that they should be cared for and non-profits that are spending their money wisely meaning 70% or more on their work and being able to show what's going to veterinary bills Not some of these places that contact every dead person by mail within 200 miles.

Speaker 2: 8:55

You know, with a newsletter, farming with it would make me angry as a donor to send, say, $100 to help with the dog surgery and find out they use it for marketing, absolutely yeah. It's just not the thing to do. You know I use seven cents out of every dollar to market organization. I think that's frugal and nobody's fussed at me yet. So we'll see Now. I went on a tangent about spending and I probably just kind of forgot your question, so tell them home me back in.

Speaker 1: 9:24

What was my question?

Speaker 2: 9:25

My question was retirement age.

Speaker 1: 9:28

Retirement age.

Speaker 2: 9:30

Yeah, yeah, no healthcare. We see a lot of cancers in older dogs, we see joint issues, we see a lot of TPLO surgeries um distory and we see, unfortunately, some PTSD and people ask us well, how do you fix a PTSD? You don't. You just learn what triggers it and how to avoid those triggers and the dog will have a much better life.

Speaker 1: 9:53

You learn how to manage it. So there's there's no benefits for these dogs, there's no military benefits for these dogs whatsoever.

Speaker 2: 9:59

Nothing, nothing. You don't have their handler or the adopter.

Speaker 1: 10:03

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:04

Yeah, totally, and it's wrong.

Speaker 1: 10:05

Yeah, absolutely. This should be something that the military or the government pays for, especially with, you know, the military working dogs.

Speaker 2: 10:12

Yeah, but instead two million dollars over 10 years of money. At least half of that should have been government funded because it went to the care of military working dogs that were retired even though they were veterinarily sound. When they retired they still had joint, she still had arthritis, they still had panacea lots of things that were going to cost money for the rest of their lives. Senior vet care for canines is about a thousand a year just for basics.

Speaker 1: 10:45

So how do people contact when a dog is ready to retire? How do they find you? Does the government seek you out, or are you seeking out dogs that are ready to be retired? And then how do you get them over here?

Speaker 2: 10:59

Ten years into it, the handlers know who we are and what we do, and when their dog is being dispositioned as what's called excess, then the handler reaches out to say, hey, my dog's getting disposed, he's at Fort Leonard Wood or he's over in Bob brain or, let's say, in Guam, you know, can you help us get him home? The answer is never no. It's always yes, because we have difficulty funding for veterinary care, which makes me sad, because everybody wants the dogs to come home and then they want somebody else to pay for their vet care. That's why I'm so hyped up on getting this bill passed, where government actually funds some of their own issues. But they will reach out to us and we'll contact their kennel master wherever they are and find out if the military is going to help it all with the transport Sometimes.

Speaker 2: 11:55

Back in 2016, obama signed a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act that within an included clause that military dogs retired overseas would go back to American soil, and they at that time got around it by calling forward operating bases to American soil. So until 2021, we didn't see a bit of help. But then one day we were surprised when they put three retiring dogs in a rotator flight that was going to Seattle. So even though we had to get them across the country, that was $6,000 apiece that we didn't have to pay to get them back from Japan. So they're helping now somewhat. Some they're not helping at all. If it's stateside, forget it Right. You know we have to go get the dog where the dog is, and a lot of people say, well, why don't the handlers just go get their own dog if it's stateside? They're working, they don't have the funds, they're not able to take the time off, and it's something I feel, it's a debt I feel that we owe to them to reunite them with someone that was a vital part of their military career.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Absolutely. This is something that that can help support. You know we talk about supporting the health and wellness and the mental health of our, of our veterans. Having your, the dog that you were working with and going through all of these experiences with you know it can provide some sort of of comfort and support to at least be at least be helping get the hand having the handlers get their own dogs back right. They should at least be helping with that part, correct? So now are the hand the dogs are going directly to the handlers, do they have to go through a rehabilitation process? Or they just do, or they just go just back to their handler and that's where they're going.

Speaker 2: 13:37

Yeah, no, when. When we get a dog from the military, normally we will reunite that dog immediately with a handler, Unless, for some reason, the handler is, you know, finishing up his service somewhere and he's having a permanent change of station. Then we might keep the dog for a month or two if they need to. Most of those are immediate, the dogs that require most of our heavy duty work or contract working dogs. When they come back to us, they're not always medically fit. We have to get them healthy. They need to learn how to be at home, how to, you know, be in a ranch house, how to be around other people. We need to test them to see how they are with other dogs, other other animals in general. Are they fence aggressive or they food aggressive or the crate aggressive?

Speaker 2: 14:26

A lot of that's going to tell us who is qualified to adopt them, and we evaluate all these things and we give them whatever they need to make them suitable for adoption to the public. And people ask us well, do I have to be a handler to adopt a dog? No, you don't. You just have to be able to be able to pardon me, be able to physically control the dog. In other words, if you're 90 years old and four foot eight, please don't want to adopt a hundred pound German Shepherd. It's not going to happen. Be able to afford the cost of care and we want them to have time for a dog.

Speaker 2: 15:05

Yeah, if you work all day, if nobody's home, don't adopt a working dog, please. A Belgian Malinois will eat your house.

Speaker 1: 15:14

I guarantee it, they require a lot of mental and physical exercise.

Speaker 2: 15:21

No, my, my shepherd is with me Probably 20 out of 24 hours a day because he just you know he wants to go and he doesn't care where he is, he just wants to be there, yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:35

Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2: 15:36

And that's that.

Speaker 1: 15:38

And the vision is you know, I was reading that you your goal is to retire these dogs. They're not going to come back and work with someone. You want them to live a happy, healthy, family-oriented or, you know, relaxed life right.

Speaker 2: 15:52

Right, that is part of our adoption criteria is these dogs cannot be worked.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Right.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Period. We get a lot of people will. I want to get a police canine for my protection. Uh-uh, Get a young dog. You know, don't ask Grandpa to fight for you. Grandpa may win, but he's going to carry scars from the battle that you may never see. But you know, we just don't want that for our dogs, Right.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Right, so you know we have scars. What are some of the? You touched on a little bit some of the issues that may crop up with some of the dogs that have been, you know, out in the field and then come home. But what are some of the things that you see? You know that you said PTSD. How does that show up? How does that look like in our dogs?

Speaker 2: 16:37

It can look like terror, or it can look like aggression, or it can just look like indecision, where a dog can go to stick his head in the corner yeah, frozen.

Speaker 2: 16:48

We do not really want to lack of interaction and we try to determine what caused the dog to do that and then you know, do our best to not repeat it and just see you know what's up with it. Medical issues as I said, we see a lot of lymphoma, we see a lot of sarcoma, we see a lot of nasty, nasty blood cancer. My own dog passed from an oh hemangiosarcoma.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Yes, my dog just had that. He just had, but he had the subcutaneous kind, so it showed up in his skin and not in his, like his organs.

Speaker 2: 17:28

Okay, make sure to check him, because they got it out of her spleen and then, after being fine for two months later on experimental treatment, it had there was lesion in her gut, that burst, and basically she bled out. There was nothing anybody could do about it, Is it really really scary?

Speaker 2: 17:46

Now, I'm not trying to terrify people that might want to adopt a dog. So oh, your dog's going to get cancer. Some of them don't but understand that these are senior dogs. A lot of dogs get various cancers. Many of them are very treatable. There's a good quality of life. But unfortunately, if you adopt the dog, you'd be responsible for the cost of that care and we would expect you to provide the care. Now, can you ask, go fund me for help, sure, but let's get the dog surgery needs.

Speaker 2: 18:19

And if we're in a position to help, which we're very often not after dogs adopted, because many times we have to pull from transport funds and keep dogs waiting overseas to pay for needed medical care for dogs in our care at that time. So we just encourage our doctors to be able to afford the cost of care if and when it's needed.

Speaker 1: 18:41

And then we're moving into this understanding that they're caring for a senior dog and they are there to help the senior dog live out the remaining years in peace right.

Speaker 2: 18:52

Correct, that's correct no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 18:55

So you were saying that handlers have the first dibs on there?

Speaker 2: 18:59

Yes, yes, the government determines which of up to five handlers should adopt the dog. I don't know how they come up with it or what their formula is, but let's say they tell the current handler hey, great, you get to keep your dog. But the dog is a patrol trained attack dog. That's a Belgian Malinois, that's absolutely toy crazy and military member. Handler number one has a small child at home that's not going to work. So many times that handler will pass that dog to another handler and a lot of times they have agreements between them. They come see the dog whenever they want to, and so it works out well for everybody.

Speaker 1: 19:44

That's so great. That's so great. Along those lines do you have? We've all seen, you know, the beautiful, heartwarming videos of a dog being reunited with their handler. That brings most of us to tears when we come across them. Do you have any story that you would like to share like a heartwarming story of a dog that's?

Speaker 2: 20:04

been reunited.

Speaker 1: 20:06

I'm sure you have a million.

Speaker 2: 20:07

I've got one of them, and this was a little, very, very short video clip. You can probably find it on YouTube. It's military working dog, attila A-T-I-L-A. Beautiful Czech Shepherd, and Attila hadn't seen her handler or his handler, jd, in several months, and they were reunited up at O'Hare in Chicago and when he saw Attila from across the airport, he started squealing, making this goofy sound and noise. She ripped away from Kristen, my partner, and went flying over to him. So that was excellent. I really enjoyed that one.

Speaker 2: 20:54

And the American Association of Retired Persons, arp. They keep wanting me to join. I'm of age, but I resist.

Speaker 1: 21:03

I don't know that I need to necessarily meet them. Isn't 50 age now with the AARP, when you turn 50?

Speaker 2: 21:08

Yeah, they start bugging you and you start getting the hearing aid ads at 51,.

Speaker 1: 21:14

I think.

Speaker 2: 21:16

But they did a great video feature on one of our female Army handlers, angela Her last name is Neil and we reunited her with her military working dog, zoltan S-Z-U-L-T-A-N. And there's a video on YouTube by AARP done believe it was last November or November 2022, that you can go back and see. It's beautiful. We've done 654 reunions to this point and all of them are somewhat special. That's so great.

Speaker 1: 21:50

I'll definitely put the links. I'll try to find those videos and I'll put the links in the show notes to those.

Speaker 2: 21:55

Cool.

Speaker 1: 21:56

Back to the adopters. So if the handlers, for whatever reason, cannot take on the dog and you are putting the dog out for public adoption, what are some of the some more things that people need to know they need to be prepared for? We covered it a little bit. Do they need to have previous breed experience?

Speaker 2: 22:14

No well, they just need to be able to handle a larger animal, got it? In other words again, if you're Mr Casper Milk Toast and you know you struggle to open doors for people in the supermarket, you probably don't want to adopt a working dog. They need to not have a lot of other animals in their home. Most working dogs are not friendly with other dogs, especially they don't want another dominant dog in the house. That's a recipe for disaster. Make sure of that Again. Space for the dog. We don't want a dog that's left outside. If your idea of owning an animal is to put it outside and just go say hi to it every once in a while, don't ask to adopt.

Speaker 2: 23:05

We have adoption coordinators. They have a way of finding out everything. We adopt our dogs to the best candidates out there. We have several hundred applications at any one time and these two ladies work their tails off going through them to get our dogs the best home possible. The only thing we charge for adoptions. We have a $300 fee and basically it doesn't even cover the cost of what we spend on them. We ask for it for the neuter in the space because male dogs are intact when they come here, and although I call my partners the ball taggers, there is a valid reason for neuters. Less cancers result of it, and you may have other issues that are significantly less. As a male, I still want to protest.

Speaker 1: 23:53

It's a complicated issue. We've covered a lot. Is there anything else that you want people to know about Mission Canine Rescue and how we can support them?

Speaker 2: 24:07

I'll tell you a little bit about the supporting issue. As I mentioned, $0.93 out of every dollar goes to our work, which is pretty unheard of. We are really no profit. Nobody rides first class, nobody has fancy cars. My partners do hard working females in their 50s that travel the roads and transport vans with these dogs, taking them wherever and all over the world.

Speaker 2: 24:32

To get military working dogs home and Korea, spain, italy with dogs in just past three months, this year especially, we need to build a new kennel facility. Our initial kennel was built in 2016 down in Magnolia. We need to reside it because, due to the humidity and the weather in Houston, we've got some rusting along our bottom panels and we want to alleviate that re-water proof but, in addition, build a new structure to handle up to 40 more dogs. People always ask us to do more. We try to do so as we have funding. As with any non-profit, it's nature is to have its hands stuck out. You know we want your money, but we want to come by your money honestly and at this time I can tell you that we appreciate anything somebody would reach out and want to donate to us for fundraising for our kennel.

Speaker 2: 25:27

We have six mind detection dogs that are over in Bosnia right now. We need to bring them home. It's about $20,000 in cost and we have several military working dogs to reunite with handlers. Those costs vary between a thousand to seven thousand dollars depending on where the dog comes from and how we have to get them. Here. You can see most of our recent work on Facebook. We're Mission K9 and our website, where people can donate if they choose to or apply for adoption, is missionk9rescueorg. It's a letter K than number nine and I'm available. If anybody wants to chat, they can reach out. Our 990 is public information. You get that from the IRS and we're well-rated.

Speaker 1: 26:17

What about that cool sweatshirt you're wearing? Is that on your website? Is that part of the Mission K9 Rescue? I love that pressure.

Speaker 2: 26:28

No, we do this several times a year. We'll have t-shirt, campaigns, hats, and next time we do people can buy them and it helps us with that as well. That's great.

Speaker 1: 26:38

Well, thank you, Bob. I really appreciate you jumping on and having this conversation. Thank you for all the incredible work that you do and that you continue to do to help these dogs and the people that love them as well.

Speaker 2: 26:51

Thank you. I appreciate the chance to be on your podcast and if you need to know anything else, just reach out. And thank you again.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Thanks, Bob.