A.R.M. Blog

Training the Air Scenting Search Dog By Michael Russell

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:27:00 -0400

Training the Air Scenting Search Dog
By Michael Russell

The best way to train an air scent dog is to start, once the puppy runaways are trained, with subjects that are hidden quite close. For the first time that you do this first "blind search" you will want to place the subject on a good windy day in a location that you know of for sure. Bring your dog into the downwind of the subject and make sure that you have planned it so that the dog definitely will scent the subject. Give your dog the signal to search. If you have a bell collar or a vest that you use, be sure to equip your dog with what you will want him to wear, so that he always knows when he wears his "uniform" that he is to hunt for a human. Run in with the dog when he makes the find and give a ton of praise and happy kisses and hugs.

Those first few times that a dog is going to search for someone that they have NOT seen run away are always exciting for the handler to watch, it is so thrilling to see that all the training you have done so far is beginning to pay off.

Gradually set these searches up for a longer distance and in different and more difficult wind conditions. The necessity of not going too fast cannot be stressed enough. It is highly important that for the first few searches the dog is always able to find and that the dog always ends without frustration. If you are on the ball, you will always know where your subject is located and be able to "walk" your dog into the scent if they do get confused or lose the scent. After a couple of weeks of setting up practices which are one acre or less, every three days, then it is time to stretch out the length of the searches and the difficulty.

An area of five acres should be the next goal and you should find five acre areas with different terrain, some brushy, some grassy, some heavy timber and so on. Furthermore you should also use differeent subjects as much as possible and subjects that your dog has not been previously introduced to. Always try to allow the dog plenty of time to work out the scent cones and the wind patterns on his own, but you must also begin to teach him about gridding an area with you and so it is important to begin using directional signals after about three weeks of doing these short searches

Next you will want to stretch out the search areas to ten acres. Every so often, back up and do a short and sweet one acre search. From this time forward, you will concentrate on different areas, different subjects, different wind conditions and practice, practice, practice. do not let it become boring to the dog, no matter what. Back off if he evidences any sign of boredom.

The most important thing to remember about teaching your dog to air scent or for that matter to trail is that the very act of finding a human should be his most overwhelming desire. That means that you should so train him that he will always want to do that more than anything else. The best way to get that kind of focus is to never let anything else be as rewarding to him!

For many dogs the best reward is plenty of praise. For other dogs that are highly prey oriented or have a strong toy drive, then playing with a very very special toy that they never get to play with at any other time is the best reward. For some dogs the best reward is a special treat, although most handlers do not feel that a food reward is sufficient to motivate the dog this highly.

The act of finding a human being should always be the most fun thing the dog will ever do. If you set these practices up religiously to follow that philosophy, you will never have a dog that is burnt out and you will always have a dog that will search for a human before he will run after a deer or any other thing.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Dog Training

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Russell

Psychiatrists debate using the word 'evil'

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 07:27:00 -0400

Psychiatrists debate using the word 'evil'

Some say predatory killers can be described no other way

Benedict Carey, New York Times

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Predatory killers often do far more than commit murder. Some have lured their victims into home-made chambers for prolonged torture. Others have exotic tastes -- for vivisection, sexual humiliation, burning. Many perform their grisly rituals as much for pleasure as for any other reason.

Among themselves, a few forensic scientists have taken to thinking of these people as not merely disturbed but evil. Evil in that their deliberate, habitual savagery defies any psychological explanation or attempt at treatment.

Most psychiatrists assiduously avoid the word evil, contending that its use would precipitate a dangerous slide from clinical to moral judgment that could put people on death row unnecessarily and obscure the understanding of violent criminals.

Still, many career forensic examiners say that their work forces them to reflect on the concept of evil, and some acknowledge that they can find no other term for certain individuals they have evaluated.

In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, Dr. Michael Welner, an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, has been developing what he calls a depravity scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details.

And a prominent personality expert at Columbia University has published a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, derived from detailed biographies of more than 500 violent criminals. He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis.

"We are talking about people who commit breathtaking acts, who do so repeatedly, who know what they're doing, and are doing it in peacetime" under no threat to themselves, said Dr. Michael Stone, the Columbia psychiatrist, who has examined several hundred killers at Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, N.Y., and others at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where he consults and teaches. "We know from experience who these people are, and how they behave," and it is time, he said, to give their behavior "the proper appellation."

Western religious leaders, evolutionary theorists and psychological researchers agree that almost all human beings have the capacity to commit brutal acts, even when they are not directly threatened. In Dr. Stanley Milgram's famous electroshock experiments in the 1960s, participants delivered what they thought were punishing electric jolts to a fellow citizen, merely because they were encouraged to do so by an authority figure as part of a learning experiment.

In the real world, the grim images coming out of Iraq -- the beheadings by Iraqi insurgents and the Abu Ghraib tortures, complete with preening guards -- suggest how much further people can go when they feel justified. In Nazi prisoner camps, as during purges in Kosovo and Cambodia, historians found that clerks, teachers, bureaucrats and other normally peaceable citizens committed some of the gruesome violence, apparently swept along in the kind of collective thoughtlessness that the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil.

"Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

Simon considers the notion of evil to be of no use to forensic psychiatry, in part because evil is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, shaped by political and cultural as well as religious values. The terrorists on Sept. 11 thought that they were serving God, he argues; those who kill people at abortion clinics also claim to be doing so. If the issue is history's most transcendent savages, on the other hand, most people agree that Hitler and Pol Pot would qualify.

"When you start talking about evil, psychiatrists don't know anything more about it than anyone else," Simon said. "Our opinions might carry more weight, under the patina or authority of the profession, but the point is, you can call someone evil and so can I. So what? What does it add?"

Stone argues that one possible benefit of including a consideration of evil may be a more clear-eyed appreciation of who should be removed from society and not allowed back. He is not an advocate of the death penalty, he said. And his interest in evil began long before President Bush began using the word to describe terrorists or hostile regimes.

Stone's hierarchy of evil is anchored by the names of many infamous criminals who were executed or locked up for good: Theodore R. Bundy, the former law school student convicted of killing two young women in Florida and linked to dozens of other killings in the 1970s; John Wayne Gacy of Illinois, the convicted killer who strangled more than 30 boys and buried them under his house; and Ian Brady who, with his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, tortured and killed children in England in a rampage in the 1960s known as the moors murders.

But another killer on the hierarchy is Albert Fentress, a former schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., examined by Stone, who killed and cannibalized a teenager, in 1979. Fentress petitioned to be released from a state mental hospital, and, in 1999, a jury agreed that he was ready; he later withdrew the petition, when prosecutors announced that a new witness would testify against him.

At a hearing in 2001, Stone argued against Fentress' release, and the idea that the killer might be considered ready to make his way back into society still makes the psychiatrist's eyes widen.

Researchers have found that some people who commit violent crimes are much more likely than others to kill or maim again, and one way they measure this potential is with a structured examination called the psychopathy checklist.

As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true.

The psychologist who devised the checklist, Dr. Robert Hare, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said that average total scores varied from below five in the general population to the low 20s in prison populations, to a range of 30 to 40 -- highly psychopathic -- in predatory killers. In a series of studies, criminologists have found that people who score in the high range are two to four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime when released. More than 90 percent of the men and a few women at the top of Stone's hierarchy qualify as psychopaths.

In recent years, neuroscientists have found evidence that psychopathy scores reflect physical differences in brain function. Last April, Canadian and American researchers reported in a brain-imaging study that psychopaths processed certain abstract words -- grace, future, power, for example -- differently from nonpsychopaths.

In addition, preliminary findings from new imaging research have revealed apparent oddities in the way psychopaths mentally process certain photographs, like graphic depictions of accident scenes, said Dr. Kent Kiehl, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale, a lead author on both studies.

No one knows how significant these differences are, or whether they are a result of genetic or social factors. Broken homes and childhood trauma are common among brutal killers; so is malignant narcissism, a personality type characterized not only by grandiosity but by fantasies of unlimited power and success, a deep sense of entitlement, and a need for excessive admiration.

"There is a group we call lethal predators, who are psychopathic, sadistic, and sane, and people have said this is approaching a measure of evil, and with good reason," Hare said. "What I would say is that there are some people for whom evil acts -- what we would consider evil acts -- are no big deal. And I agree with Michael Stone that the circumstances and context are less important than who they are."

Checklists, scales, and other psychological exams are not blood tests, however, and their use in support of a concept as loaded as evil could backfire, many psychiatrists say. Not all violent predators are psychopaths, for one thing, nor are most psychopaths violent criminals. And to suggest that psychopathy or some other profile is a reliable measure of evil, they say, would be irresponsible and ultimately jeopardize the credibility of the profession.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a psychiatrist in Dallas earned the name Dr. Death by testifying in court, in a wide variety of cases, that he was certain that defendants would commit more crimes in the future -- though often, he had not examined them. Many were sentenced to death.

"I agree that some people cannot be rehabilitated, but the risk in using the word evil is that it may mean one thing to one psychiatrist, and something else to another, and then we're in trouble, " said Dr. Saul Faerstein, a forensic psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. "I don't know that we want psychiatrists as gatekeepers, making life-and-death judgments in some cases, based on a concept that is not medical."

Even if it is used judiciously, other experts say, the concept of evil is powerful enough that it could obscure the mental troubles and intellectual quirks that motivate brutal killers, and sometimes allow them to avoid detection. Bundy, the serial killer, was reportedly very romantic, attentive and affectionate with his own girlfriends, while he referred to his victims as "cargo" and "damaged goods," Simon noted.

Gacy, a gracious and successful businessman, reportedly created a clown figure to lift the spirits of ailing children. "He was a very normal, very functional guy in many respects," said Dr. Richard Rappaport, a forensic psychiatrist based in La Costa (San Diego County) who examined Gacy before his trial. Rappaport said he received holiday cards from Gacy every year before he was executed.

"I think the main reason it's better to avoid the term evil, at least in the courtroom, is that for many it evokes a personalized Satan, the idea that there is supernatural causation for misconduct," said Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist in Newport Beach (Orange County) who examined the convicted serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, as well as Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were convicted of murdering their parents in Beverly Hills.

"This could only conceal a subtle important truth about many of these people, such as the high rate of personality disorders," Dietz said. He added: "The fact is that there aren't many in whom I couldn't find some redeeming attributes and some humanity. As far as we can tell, the causes of their behavior are biological, psychological and social, and do not so far demonstrably include the work of Lucifer."

The doctors who argue that evil has a place in forensics are well aware of these risks, but say that in some cases, they are worth taking. They say it is possible -- necessary, in fact, to understand many predatory killers -- to hold inside one's head many disparate dimensions: that the person in question may be narcissistic, perhaps abused by a parent, or even charming, affectionate and intelligent, but also in some sense evil.

While the term may not be appropriate for use in a courtroom or a clinical diagnosis, they say, it is an element of human nature that should not be ignored.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of psychiatry at Creedmoor who works with Stone, said she was skeptical of using the concept of evil but realized that in her work she found herself thinking and talking about it all the time. In 11 years as a forensic examiner, in this country and in Europe, she said, she counts four violent criminals who were so vicious, sadistic and selfish that no other word could describe them.

One was a man who gruesomely murdered his own wife and young children, and who showed more annoyance than remorse, more self-pity than concern for anyone else affected by the murders. On one occasion when Hegarty saw him, he was extremely upset -- beside himself -- because a staff attendant at the facility where he lived was late in arriving with a video, delaying the start of the movie. The man became abusive, she said: He insisted on punctuality.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/13/MNG7QB9A8D1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Abduction Statistics

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:47:00 -0400

Abduction Statistics

I remember thinking, "our son's been murdered, and now we've got to be the ones to do something about it." It was a sad thing for this country that the fight had to be led by two broken-down parents of a murdered child. But we had to, because no else was going to do it.
- "Tears of Rage," John and Reve Walsh

? A study examined 403 attempted kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances that were reported by police or news media in 45 states from February 2005 to July 2006. It was conducted to learn how such attempts are foiled. The study did not look at successful abductions. Six in ten victims fought back and escaped, according to the ongoing study's initial findings. Three in ten ran away before any physical contact, and about 10% were saved when an adult nearby intervened.
- National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, USA Today 9/06/o6

? Data analyzed for 1999: That year, 115 stereotypical kidnappings were reported - ones in which children were abducted by strangers or barely known acquaintances, taken more than 50 miles, detained at least overnight or held for ransom. Half were sexually assaulted, and 40% were killed.

A much large number of children, about 58,000, were taken that year for shorter periods of time, mostly by people they knew but not relatives. In those cases, nearly half were sexually assaulted; fewer than 1% were killed. Nearly two-thirds were girls, mostly teens.
- David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research center at the University of new Hampshire in conjunction with the United States Federal Justice Department.

? About one child is slain per 10,000 missing child reports.
- 1990 U.S. Justice Dept.

? In 80% of abductions by strangers, the first contact occurs within a quarter mile of the child's home. In many cases, the abduction does, too.
- 1990 U.S. Justice Dept.

? Most strangers grab their victims on the street or try to lure them into their vehicles.
- 1990 U.S. Justice Dept.

? About 74% of the victims of nonfamily child abduction are girls.
- 1990 U.S. Justice Dept.

? There are about 5700 active cases carried in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's computerized files
- Smithsonian, Oct. 95.

? In 1988 there were as many as 114,600 attempted abductions of children by non-family members, 4,600 abductions by non-family members reported to police, and 300 abductions by non-family members where the children were gone for long periods of time or were murdered. There were as many as 354,000 children abducted by family members, 450,700 children who ran away, 127,100 children who were thrown away, and 438,200 children who were lost, injured or otherwise missing.
- 1990 U.S. Justice Dept.

? Each year 3,600 to 4,200 children are abducted by someone outside the family; 1/2 of them are age 12 or older; 2/3 are female; at least 19% of these abductors are not strangers to their victims-Finklehor, p. 10. *The chance of a minor being kidnapped by a stranger is 1 in 560, by a family member 1 in 180.
- Discover Magazine as reported by Gannett News Service 5/28/96.

? In a recent study of parents' worries by pediatricians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, nearly 3/4 of parents said they feared their children might be abducted. 1/3 of parents said this was a frequent worry-a degree of fear greater than that held for any other concern, including car accidents, sports injuries, or drug addiction.
- Redbook, February 1998

? More than 1/5 of the children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in nonfamily abductions are found dead.
- Smithsonian, Oct. 95.

? More than 750,000 children were reported to police and entered into the FBI's national crime computer in 1993-more than 2,000 missing children a day.
- Associated Press, 9/8/94.

CHILD ABDUCTION PREVENTION

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:44:00 -0400

CHILD ABDUCTION PREVENTION

The following information is from The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

In light of the high profile abductions of several children, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) encourages families not to panic. Instead, parents need to empower themselves with information that can help protect their children.

CHILD ABDUCTION: STATISTICS

Parental abductions and runaway cases make up the majority of missing children in the United States. In 2001 there were about 725,000 children reported missing, or nearly 2,000 per day. The vast majority of these cases were recovered quickly; however, the parent or guardian was concerned enough to contact law enforcement and they placed the child into the FBI?s National Crime Information Center ? a computerized national database of criminal justice information. It is available to Federal, state and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies.
Each year there are about 3,000 to 5,000 non-family abductions reported to police, most of which are short term sexually-motivated cases. About 200 to 300 of these cases, or 6 percent, make up the most serious cases where the child was murdered, ransomed or taken with the intent to keep.

SAFETY TIPS FOR PARENTS:

Be sure to go over the rules with your children about whose homes they can visit when you?re not there and discuss the boundaries of where they can and can?t go in the neighborhood.
Always listen to your children and keep the lines of communication open. Teach your children to get of out of dangerous or uncomfortable situations right away, and practice role-playing and basic safety skills with them.
Teach your children in whose car they may ride. Children should be cautioned never to approach any vehicle, occupied or not, unless accompanied by a parent or trusted adult.
Make sure children know their names, address, telephone numbers and how to use the telephone.
Choose babysitters with care. Obtain references from family, friends and neighbors.

SAFETY TIPS FOR CHILDREN:

Always check first with your parents or the person in charge before you go anywhere or do anything.
Always take a friend when you play or go somewhere.
Don?t be tricked by adults who offer you special treats or gifts or ask you for help.
Don?t be afraid to say no and get away from any situation that makes you feel uncomfortable or confused. Trust your feelings.
Don?t get into a car or go near a car with someone in it unless you are with your parents or a trusted adult.
Never take a ride from someone without checking first with your parents.
Never go into a public restroom by yourself.
Never go alone to the mall, movies, video arcades or parks.
Stay safe when you?re home alone by keeping the door locked. Do not open the door for or talk to anyone who stops by unless the person is a trusted family friend or relative.

INTERNATIONAL PARENTAL ABDUCTION

In situations where parents have not resolved the issue of child custody, and one of the parents has ties to another country, there is the risk that that parent might take the child with them to a foreign country. Parents who are in this situation can find useful information about international parental abduction in ?A Family Resource Guide on International Parental Kidnapping? published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

For more information please visit www.missingkids.com or call NCMEC?s toll-free hotline at 1-800-843-5678.

TO FIND PROVIDERS IN CONNECTICUT'S COMMUNITY RESOURCES DATABASE:

Search by service name: Child Identification Programs

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SOURCE: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Refer Database
PREPARED BY: 211/fj
CONTENT LAST REVIEWED: January2008