When Queensland woman Tamika Nash-Hahn took her one-year-old golden retriever out on their usual morning walk in Brisbane last week, she didn’t expect to watch her dog rescue an injured pet using skills she had taught him from Instagram videos.
“We were just on our normal evening walk and I noticed these splotches of blood,” Nash-Hahn said. “They were quite significant and they looked rather fresh.”
Nash-Hahn said she had been training Arlo from a young age using videos she found online, working on obedience, agility and scent work. Scent work teaches dogs to use their powerful sense of smell, up to 100,000 times more sensitive than that of a human, to locate specific odors before alerting their owner to the exact location of a hidden scent.
“I was just kind of following (the blood) as we were walking down our normal track and we got to this bridge and I noticed that the trail started to disappear,” she said.
Nash-Hahn has been training Arlo with tricks she learnt on Instagram. She said she believed there may have been an injured animal such as a rabbit nearby but continued walking. “But then Arlo started showing indications of this really specific area under a bridge. He was really going at it, and I was like, OK, this is curious,” she said.
“I pointed to a bit of blood that he was interested in and I said, ‘go search’, which is his cue to go find where this scent is coming from.” Arlo began searching exactly as he had been trained to, leading his owner down the path. “He just snapped into gear and his tail was going off and he dragged me back the way we’d come, but not with the blood trail I was looking at,” she said.
Arlo had scented the blood trail continued in the grass next to the footpath, which Nash-Hahn did not see. “We went all the way back (the way we came) and as we approached this little fencing area, I noticed him stop and he looked at me, he looked back, and looked at me again,” she said. “I was like OK and then I turned around the corner and I noticed (it).”
Arlo led Nash-Hahn to an injured dog, cowering next to a fence near the road. After checking a local Facebook group she found a lost dog post that matched the description and reached out to the owners. She later learnt the injured dog was a Staffordshire bull terrier named Murphy and had been struck by a car about 3km from where he was found.
“He was obviously injured and he was bleeding which was pretty sad and upsetting,” Nash-Hahn said. “I called the owners and they were so grateful to see him. It turned out Murphy had been hit by a car about an hour earlier and his owners were devastated. They thought they’d lost him,” she said. “(Arlo) did a great job. He found him.”
Nash-Hahn said her training with Arlo started as games and tricks she saw on Instagram, such as hiding a lemon around her yard and telling Arlo to find it. Other games include Nash-Hahn playing hide and seek with Arlo in the house. “It’s not only good for scent work and enrichment and fulfilment, but it’s also a matter of, if he does get lost, he can actually rely on that skill,” she said.
As for Murphy, his owners have informed Nash-Hahn he was taken to the vet for treatment and is on the mend. “I got an update the other day, he is recovering well but is still on pain medication,” Nash-Hahn said. “But fortunately he’s a staffy so he’s very muscular. He’s built like a Nokia and they think that helped him with getting hit by the car.”
