Support Your Local Animal Shelter

Enjoy the Christmas open house at the Shelter for Helpless Animals In Distress (SHAID), 950 Mullock Road, from 1-4 PM on Sunday, 30 November 2008! Call the Shelter at 902-543-4849 for directions or details.

Here is a reminder to anyone who isn't on the direct mailing list that the annual SHAID open house is on and needs your support. Dogs and cats to meet, a craft and bake sale, it doesn't get any better than this. And while you're there why not make a donation. Any size is fine. The shelter always needs non-clumping cat litter, tinned dog and cat food, dry food with no dye, small blankets, and Javex for cleaning. Please NO treats because they have plenty. It's the basic necessities of every day life that get short on supply.

To follow up, and for your consideration, here is an article Randy originally wrote and published nearly a year ago that comes out of how we feel about animal shelters, those who are called upon to operate them, and the animals that come into their care ...

Musings on the Subject of Starfish
by Randy L. Whynacht
(Originally published 25 December 2007)

As I sit here happy and content on Christmas day 2007, my fiftieth Yule on this earth, I spend a stint at my computer to send a few greetings of the day and sip my hot buttered rum as I reflect on the life the Gods have bestowed upon me. I have a perfect woman who loves me, I'm in excellent health, I have a few people in my life on whom I can bestow the title "friend" without reservation or doubt and who do me the honour of reciprocating in kind, I have a rewarding career, and three incredible dogs one of whom is warming my feet as he sleeps under my desk. In my more than 20 years in the profession of solving other peoples' problems I have been either directly or indirectly involved in saving the lives of many people but it's the animals that have crossed my path that stick with me.

Milo, the one who's under my desk at the moment, came to us at one year of age with less than no respect for human leadership and both Diana and I wear the scars of his education, although Diana bore the brunt of it in his case, and I don't think I misrepresent the situation when I say that we were his only chance. Now this sweet creature sleeps and warms my feet as I write.

Gunner, our newest arrival, was sentenced to death and only lives because a very few special people (you know who you are) cared enough about justice to send him our way. Before that, every human that entered his life had let him down.

Dusty, our grand old man, now 10, came to me as a skinny half grown puppy, the runt of a litter born to a promiscuous mutt named Shadow. Shadow had a wandering nature, was picked up several times by the police in Lunenburg and brought to me in my capacity as temporary shelter for wayward dogs. Shadow fell in love with me, soon figuring out how to bypass the middle man and come straight from home to my door whenever she went on a toot.

One day she showed up to the usual barkfest from my own pack but this time her behaviour was different. Instead of dashing in as soon as I opened the gate she kept looking at me and running over to the green compost bin in the driveway. She obviously wanted me to see something that was behind it so I followed her to find the scrawny frightened little white waif that grew into Dusty. That, my friends, was an honour that still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. I later played a role in saving two more of Shadow's pups from an icy death and finding them good solid homes, but that's a story for another time.

Diana and I have committed ourselves to dog rehabilitation and recommend to everyone that you help out your local animal shelter as much as you can. Find out what they need and make a donation, even a few cans of dog or cat food, whenever and as often as you're able.

So many abandoned and abused animals, so little time and money. A job like this my father used to call, "shovelling shit against the tide." On that note though, here's an illustrative story that has always spoken to me.

Once upon a time there was a young man who went every morning to the ocean to clear his mind with the habit of walking along the beach before he began his day's work.

One day as he was walking along the shore he looked down to the beach and saw a human figure who was moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself to think of someone who would dance to the day, and he began to walk faster to catch up. As he got closer, he saw that it was an old man and that he wasn't dancing, but instead he was reaching down to the sand, picking up something and very gently throwing it into the ocean.

As he got closer he called out, "Good morning! What are you doing?" The old man paused, looked up and replied, "Throwing starfish into the ocean. The sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don't throw them in they'll die."

"But," said the young man, "Don't you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish all along it, what you're doing can't possibly make a difference!"

The old man listened politely, then bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the sea. As he watched the small splash he said, "It made a difference for that one."

So now, as the season of Yule, 2008 approaches, I'll end with a photo of Diana , me, and our pack, taken on the thirty-first day of October this year, on the occasion of our wedding. Right to left: Gunner, Diana, Dusty, me, and Milo. Click on the picture to view it full size.
Compliments of the season to you and yours.

Ticks: Threat or Menace?

Anybody who follows the news out of Lunenburg County has no doubt heard about the travails of Marni Gent and her efforts to publicize the exceptionally high concentration of Lyme disease infected deer ticks in and around her community on Silver Point Road. For those of you who either don't live in these parts, or are too poor to pay attention, we'll try to bring you up to speed.

Diana and I first learned of the Lyme risk in and around the Town of Lunenburg over two years ago during a routine visit to our vet, Dr. Barry Falkenham at Seaside Animal Hospital. At that time he told us that pretty much any deer tick found inside of Lunenburg, and east through Garden Lots, Heckman's Island, Blue Rocks, and the Stonehursts could be expected to be Lyme positive. This really didn't surprise us considering the size of the deer herd that even back then was living within the inhabited zone that made them immune to any sort of hunting activity.

This past summer, mostly thanks to Marni Gent, there has been an increasing awareness of the issue leading to a recent public meeting on the subject hosted by the Town of Lunenburg and involving representatives of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.

In the middle of it all, on 8 July 2008, the Halifax Chronicle Herald published an article that, with no offense intended to the reporter who wrote it, presented information on ticks and Lyme disease that is so incredibly inaccurate it defies belief considering the credentials of the sources cited. We are quoting the article in its entirety here since it is no longer accessible for free on the Halifax Herald website. Certain passages have been highlighted in red as we single them out as deserving of further attention.
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Tick talk Experts argue smothering versus pulling
By BEVERLEY WARE
South Shore Bureau
Chronicle Herald, Tue. Jul 8 - 5:33 AM

The province is giving out wrong information on how to get ticks off your body, says a Halifax-based parasitologist. The Department of Health Protection and Promotion puts out a brochure that says to grasp the tick with tweezers and gently pull it straight out. Edith Angelopoulos cringed when she read that piece of advice. "You cannot pull them out," she said. The only way to get them off is to cut off their air supply. Ms. Angelopoulos taught parasitology at Dalhousie University for 30 years. She said ticks have a proboscis that digs into the skin so that it can attach itself. The tick also has spines pointed back from its body and its head has little pumps that pump an anti-coagulant into its host. "You start to pull it out and you can’t pull it out because of the spines, so its head usually breaks off. Its head stays in and keeps contracting, pumping that anti-coagulant." The leftover head can cause nasty health problems for the host, including tumours, growths and infections, she said. The host’s body may react to the foreign body and build a defence around it. "I saw a person who had a tumour removed one year after the tick had been pulled out." There is only one proper way to get rid of a tick. "You need to stop it from getting air. You find a tick and all you need to do is to cover the area thoroughly with a greasy substance like butter or lard or Vaseline." That plugs the holes through which the tick breathes, it contracts the tiny spines and you can easily pull the tick off. Once the tick’s head has broken off, Ms. Angelopoulos said the only way to remove it is with microsurgery. Health promotion spokesman Brett Loney said the province stands by the advice it is giving out. "We’ve told people to pull them off with tweezers. That’s what we’ve always told people to do," and he said that’s based on advice from the medical community, the medical health officer, Department of Natural Resources insect specialists and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The agency’s national microbiology lab in Winnipeg tests the ticks for Lyme disease. Robbin Lindsay is the agency’s specialist in ticks and Lyme disease. He is away and could not be reached for comment Monday but he did give a media interview last week. Agency spokeswoman Jana Lerner said he said "use tweezers to carefully grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible and pull slowly upward, avoiding twisting or crushing the tick." He also said not to smother the tick, she said. "Absolutely wrong," Ms. Angelopoulpos said. "I stand by what I said." She said the only other alternative to applying a greasy substance is to wait until the tick has had its fill of blood, and it will simply drop off, but she said that could take some time. Ticks first came to Nova Scotia in the 1940s, Ms. Angelopoulos said, when a farmer imported sheep into Yarmouth. By the 1980s, ticks were discovered in Kejimkujik National Park. Today, they are across the province. "And the biggest carriers are dogs." Marni Gent’s two dogs have Lyme disease. They contracted it near their home in Garden Lots. Ms. Gent put banners up on Canada Day on the old schoolhouse she and her husband own proclaiming the tiny community just outside Lunenburg as ground zero for Lyme disease. Five of the 12 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in Nova Scotia are in Garden Lots. The banners were vandalized overnight July 1 and Ms. Gent thinks it’s because someone was upset by the use of the term "ground zero". She put the signs back up but discovered Saturday morning that someone had spray-painted obscene images over them. RCMP Cpl. Rob Lewis said police are investigating the vandalism. Ms. Gent said she is disturbed someone would deface the banners. She said she will change "ground zero" to "hot spot" and repair the rest of the banner with green and white paint. The sign is staying, and she hopes the attention given to the vandalism won’t detract from her true concern - the prevalence of Lyme disease-carrying ticks in her community.
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Diana and I spend a lot of time in the woods, often with our dogs. Ticks are a common issue. Contrary to the information contained in the article in question, they CAN be easily and quickly removed with ALMOST ZERO risk of breaking off the head or mouth parts. We do it all the time, as do vets when they find ticks on pets during an examination.

We will leave it up to our readers to decide for themselves why a parasitologist who taught the subject at Dalhousie University for 30 years apparently knows little to nothing about ticks and their anatomy, but here is the truth as it applies to the claims made in the article:

1. Yes, a tick can be removed by coating it in a substance like baby oil or vaseline causing it to release on its own but we have personally seen ticks expire from suffocation WITHOUT releasing on several occasions. In addition, the possible side effects of placing protracted stress on a parasite that is basically a tiny cesspool with an open pipeline into the bloodstream of you or someone that matters to you have yet to be identified.
2. Grasping a tick with tweezers and pulling it straight off the host's skin will remove a small chunk of flesh if done carefully but runs the serious risk of breaking off the head, and the lesion left behind after even a successful removal of this type can easily become infected, particularly if you're in the field when the procedure is performed. This technique also exposes the risk of squeezing the tick's body like it was a miniature, disgusting tube of toothpaste - "... a tiny cesspool with an open pipeline into the bloodstream...", remember?
3. The claim by Ms. Angelopoulos that, "Once the tick’s head has broken off ... the only way to remove it is with microsurgery," is patently ridiculous. It's effectively a complicated splinter and can be dealt with as such.
4. Ms. Angelopoulos is further credited with having provided the advice that, "'... the only other alternative to applying a greasy substance is to wait until the tick has had its fill of blood, and it will simply drop off,' but she said that could take some time." While it is true that a tick must detach itself to get on with life, simply waiting it out is not much of an option for people and their pets. First, left alone it can take days for a tick to remove itself after which there's a tick at large in your house, your bed, your child's bed, you get the idea. Second, and more importantly, research results vary but the generally held wisdom is that a tick infected with Lyme disease needs to be attached for between 24 and 36 hours to infect its host. At the very least it can safely be asserted that every moment a tick is attached increases the likelihood that the host will be infected by some micro-organism that the tick is carrying. While we're sure that Ms. Angelopoulos wasn't advocating letting ticks remove themselves as a viable option for those afflicted, identifying it as the "only other alternative" to suffocation is, in our experience and opinion, complete and utter tripe.
5. A tick's mouth parts will release if you work WITH them instead of AGAINST them. Unlike most blood sucking invertebrates, a tick isn't equipped to eat and run. That means it has to remain attached to its host quite a spell before it has ingested a sufficient blood meal during which time it will be at risk of being dislodged as the host goes about its business. To accomplish this, the tick's mouth parts are equipped with backward pointing projections that are designed to rise and grip the wound channel made during the bite process if any traction is applied that might pull it out (see photo of a tick's magnified proboscis at right). Correctly gripping the tick's head with a small pair of curved forceps or with a "Tick Twister", available at the Bridgwater Surgain, Seaside Animal Hospital, and soon from us here at Golden Mountain Dog Solutions, then ROTATING the tick will prevent the spines from gripping and permit the tick to be removed without pulling.
6. Contrary to what Ms. Angelopoulos says in the article, the biggest carriers of ticks are not dogs. For this to be true, Nova Scotia would have to be overrun with vast packs of them. Dogs can come back from walks in the field with ticks on them of course, but in actuality, as it progesses through its life cycle, the deer tick finds its hosts among the wild (also much larger and more accessible) populations of field mice, birds, and of course white tailed deer.
   

Cinders - A Personal Retrospective by Randy L. Whynacht

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."
~ Will Rogers

As our blog profile information states, Golden Mountain Dog Solutions is named in memory of Cinders, valiant and trusty comrade, lost to us on 1 December 2006. In the truest sense, she was the catalyst for what would come to be a passion for Diana and me.

Cinders came to me in December 1994 at 6 weeks of age. She was a hybrid breed now known as a "Golden Mountain Dog", resulting from the blend of Bernese Mountain Dog and Golden Retriever. An exceptional puppy, she took abut 5 minutes to house train. She soon learned to identify her toys by name. If she watched me stash one I could take her away for hours and tell her to find it when we got back. She went straight for it every time.


As much as possible, I took her with me as I went about my business. She quickly absorbed what was expected of her and developed a professional persona that she turned on instantly whenever in the presence of a client or in the public eye. I began training her to search for and locate hidden objects and people as a way of stimulating her considerable canine intellect. She excelled at it.

When the snow wouldn't stop on St. Valentine's Day 1995, I cancelled my appointments and took Cinders for a walk. We were going to the post office but I changed my mind just before we left the driveway and took her to the Lunenburg Academy grounds to play ball instead.

Where the northern edge of the school grounds border the Hillcrest Cemetery there is a section of evergreen hedge. When we were done playing ball, I called Cinders to me and as she was flopped on her belly munching snow, I put her leash on her and told her to heel as I turned for home. The leash pulled tight and when I turned around to see why I found Cinders staring at the hedge line about 60 meters away. The gentle wind was carrying big wet snow flakes slowly toward us and she was intently sniffing the air. I scanned the hedge row and could see nothing amiss, but since she refused to move I dropped her leash and gave her the command, "Find it!".

Like a shot she was off. Reaching the hedge she scented along it until she came to a section that was trimmed in a high dome shape. Here she pushed her head into the brush, then suddenly backed up barking excitedly. The hedge came too close to the ground for me to see what she was alerting to so I led here around the other side in search of a better vantage.

Hidden under the hedge, sheltered from the better than 6 inches of snow that had fallen through the day, Cinders showed me an unconscious woman in her 20's who, we later learned, had slipped away from the Addiction Services wing of the Fishermen's Memorial Hospital, taken a near overdose of Valium, and then curled up under the hedge to hide from the world while nature took its course. The woman had been last seen at 11:30 AM; Cinders found her at 4:30 PM. The woman's mother told me the next day that doctors at the ER gave her daughter no better than 30 minutes more before she would have been hypothermic beyond help.

Later, as I reflected on the series of seemingly random events that had brought Cinders and me to the exact place and time necessary for a distant life saving scent to reach her nose, her absolute insistence that she needed to show me something, and my trust in her, I knew Cinders had a mission in life. I decided then that she was going to work for real.

Photo at left - Cinders on a 1997 training operation. The picture was taken at the moment of discovery by a casualty simulation "victim" hidden in a brush pile.

Cinders went on to be my partner, and a valued employee of Whynacht Security & Survival, working numerous operations throughout her career. People lost and hidden, lost pets, the secret pathways used by vermin to enter a client's house, she found them all. On top of that, she was my test dog for calibrating the animal immune security systems Whynacht Security & Survival is famous for.

Photo at right - The terrain didn't matter. Cinders was sure footed and fearless. So much so that I gave her the nickname "Power Puff Girl".



Photo at left - Always totally professional in the field, Cinders never forgot how to enjoy her down time.

When Diana first came into my life Cinders and I were still working together. Cinders was more than a little resentful at first but in the end, calmly and assertively, Diana won her over.

I ended up with not just one but TWO of the world's finest females. You can see from the picture on the left that Dusty agrees.

Thanks to Diana, Cinders made a painless transition from working girl to retired Grand Olde Dame, making every year of her retirement a golden one.

To a working dog, work is fun; but fun doesn't need to be work.

Nevertheless, work ages us all. In 2005 Cinders began to experience an increasing weakness in her hind end that the drugs she'd been on for years couldn't arrest. On walks with Dusty she would get tired increasingly quickly so Diana searched the internet, finding a stroller that could be modified to suit. We drove to Halifax to buy it and soon Cinders could walk until she was tired after which we'd plop her in her stroller to be driven in style !

On 1 December 2006 we made the decision all dog lovers dread. Many thanks to Dr. Barry Falkenham and his staff at the Seaside Animal Hospital for the professional and sensitive way they handled our need.

As a means of working through our grief, Diana and I worked two months on a labour of love. The result was a short film titled "A Tribute to Cinders".

On their death, persons of note are sometimes honoured with the flying of an aerial display called "the missing man flypast". It simultaneously symbolizes the departure of the fallen comrade and the continuance of life by those they've left behind. The picture to the right is a still from the film, a DeHavilland Tiger Moth modeled in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 that I repainted for the purpose.

Another still from the film, the picture to the left shows "Sassy Cinders" beginning the "Missing Man" manoeuvre, switching on the smoke and pulling up out of the formation ...

... Leaving the rest of us to soldier on.

So to conclude, we invite you to wrap up this retrospective on the life of an exceptional dog with a viewing of "A Tribute to Cinders". This is the version we uploaded to YouTube so the quality is not as good as the DVD, but it will serve. Just press the play button and be sure you have your sound on.

In Dog We Trust

The oldest known evidence of human domestication of dogs is approximately 14,000 years old. Only a jawbone with some teeth attached, it was found in the 1950's buried under the floor of a cave in the region we now call Iraq, and wasn't properly dated until 1974. In his excellent book The Intelligence of Dogs, Stanley Coren finishes the tale:

"... the importance and age of this fossil were not recognized at first. This is because the fossil was of a dog so similar to contemporary dogs that the archaeologists thought a modern dog must have wandered into the ancient cave site and died there."

It is safe to say that were you knapping your flint spear head by the fire in paleolithic times, the dog curled up next to you would be indistinguishable in appearance and behaviour from one you might meet on any street in the world.

History and myth world wide abounds with stories underlining the importance of the dog in human history. Referring once again to The Intelligence of Dogs, Stanley Coren reveals this:
"According to the Kato Indians of California, the god Nagaicho created the world. First he erected four great pillars at the corners of the sky to hold it up and to expose the earth. Then he began a casual stroll around this new world and proceeded to create the things to fill it. The myth specifies how man and woman were made of earth, how the creeks and rivers were made by Nagaicho's dragging feet, how each animal was made and placed in its proper spot in the world - each animal, that is, except the dog. Nowhere in the story is there any mention of Nagaicho, the creator, creating the dog. Rather, when Nagaicho first started on his walk, he took a dog with him: God already had a dog."

Giardia and Hiking With Your Dog

In late July of 2001 Cinders and I were on a training exercise in a rugged region at the far northern end of Lunenburg County (the picture at left was taken that day). In the course of the trip Cinders stepped into what appeared to be a mass of wet dead leaves filling a crack in the granite outcropping we were traversing only to find out that it was actually a mass of dead leaves floating at the top of a very deep puddle of water filling a gap in the outcropping. She plunged in head first and I grabbed her harness in time to help her out before the rest of her went in.

Her entire front end was coated in a brown mess of rotted leaves that I took her to a nearby clear running stream to wash off. Soon, with Cinders restored to her former beauty, fresh smelling and no worse for wear, we continued on with what was a very enjoyable day.

That evening I noticed that Cinders was showing signs of a rapidly developing eye infection and was holding her head in a way that pointed to an ear infection on the same side of her head. Prepared for this sort of thing, I treated both and resolved to take her to our vet the next day. Later that evening she vomited back her entire meal and pretty much simultaneously developed explosive bouts of liquid diarrhea.

At the time I had six dogs of my own and four more were visiting from Florida with their owner who was trained as a veterinary technician. By the time I got Cinders to our vet the following morning she was dangerously dehydrated and several of the other dogs had also begun to show symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting, undoubtedly infected through use of the common water bowl.

Over the next five days there was little rest in my house. Stool samples were tested for all the normally encountered parasites and microbes, a couple of antibiotics were tried to little affect (except Cinders' eye and ear infections cleared), and each one of the eight dogs that had become ill was administered subcutaneous fluids every few hours to keep them hydrated. Without this latter procedure, administered by a qualified vet tech whom The Gods had decreed would "happen" to be visiting my house at the time, I have no doubt that some, if not all, of the affected dogs would have died.

After five days of little sleep, filled with treating sick dogs, cleaning up vomit and decontaminating a yard awash in liquid feces, I asked my vet if he had tested for giardia. He told me no, that there had never been any cases of giardiasis, the intestinal infection caused by the giardia parasite, documented in Nova Scotia. I presented him with a stool sample and asked him to humour me. The sample was couriered to PEI where, you guessed it, it tested positive for giardia cysts.

All the infected dogs were put on an antibiotic known to be specifically effective in the treatment of giardiasis and almost instantly showed improvement. The effect was like night and day. Diarrhea stopped so suddenly that my yellow Labrador retriever Sherlock got nicknamed "No Shit Sherlock" for a short time. In the end all was well.

The lesson here is that giardia is common THROUGHOUT North America including ALL parts of Canada. When hiking with your dog you should avoid letting them drink from or play in water that you wouldn't drink from or play in yourself. Easier said than done with real dogs in the real world I realize, but just be aware and if there is exposure you should note the location of the possible infection source as well as the time of exposure and watch over the next couple of days for any of the symptoms I described here. Giardiasis responds well to appropriate treatment so administering antibiotics prophyllactically isn't necessary, but PROMPT testing and treatment if they do appear IS.

Now get out there, pay attention, and play safe.

A Blast From the Past

The following article first appeared in the 27 January 1999 edition of the Lunenburg "Progress Enterprise" At the time this occurred, our Whynacht Security & Survival alarm monitoring station was the central dispatch centre for both the Lunenburg and District Fire Department and the Lunenburg - Mahone Bay Police Service. Randy personally processed this call and hastens to add that the reason he "... dispatched the fire department after receiving two calls about the dogs ...." as the article states is that the calls came in back to back and had to be answered before he could initiate any response.

We are happy to report that both dogs named in the article weren't at SHAID long before they were adopted. As of today's date, their litter mate Dusty (picture at left) is 11 years old and still going strong as the grand old man of our pack. How he got to be here is a story for another post.

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Firefighters Rescue Dogs

Theresa Hawkesworth
Lighthouse staff

LUNENBURG - Man was dog's best friend last week as Lunenburg firefighters rescued two puppies from the Back Harbour.

Now those dogs need another friend.

When "Pete" and "Martha" fell through the ice near Sawpit Wharf January 21, Lunenburg firefighters responded.

They arrived with the department's Rescue Alive board and managed to pull the dogs to safety.

After the dogs recovered at dispatcher Randy Whynacht's home, they were taken to the Shelter for Homeless Animals in Distress (S.H.A.I.D.). Now they need homes.

"They're very nice dogs. They're very adoptable dogs," said Mr. Whynacht, who owns one of their litter mates. His company, Whynacht Security, dispatched the fire department after receiving two calls about the dogs.

"We had no qualms about paging this out as a water rescue page. The fire department rolled on it as if it were you or me in the water. They got there, they deployed without hesitation. They grabbed those dogs and got them out of the water," he said. "It was really quite impressive."

When the fire department arrived, the dogs were surrounded by ice about 100 feet from shore. Whining and barking, one unsuccessfully attempted to climb onto the ice.

"In this scenario the dogs were in pretty rough shape," said Mr. Whynacht. "One of them had gone under for the second time. He was getting pretty weak and unable to hang on much longer."

Firefighter John Lohnes manned the department's Rescue Alive board. The ice was so thin, the board would not slide across the ice as intended.

"The Rescue Alive board is built in such a way that you can basically run across the ice between the rails, but yesterday the ice was so thin, we had to physically break through the ice and push our way out," said Lunenburg Fire Chief Terry Conrad. "The kind of ice that we encountered yesterday is probably the most dangerous and hardest to recover type of ice that there is."

Whistling to lure the dogs closer, Mr. Lohnes pulled them on board. It took only seconds for firefighters on shore to pull them to safety.

"The retrieval is very, very quick," he said.

The Lunenburg Fire Department bought Rescue Alive just over a year ago after receiving an anonymous donation. Though firefighters have trained and practiced with it, Pete and Martha were their first live victims.

"We always knew we had the possibility to use it to save lives. I guess I never, ever thought that we would be out rescuing dogs on it, but I guess if we can rescue a dog, that can give us no help at all, rescuing a human should be much easier," said Mr. Conrad.

Knowing he would probably end up with the dogs overnight, Mr. Whynacht also responded to the call. He and his wife, who have four dogs of their own, often hold lost or stray dogs found in the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay area until the owner calls or the dog control officer can transport them to S.H.A.I.D.

"I was just arriving when the second dog was being pulled out of the water," he said. "They had been in the water for awhile."

Siblings, the six- to eight-month-old dogs are thought to be a cross between Black Labrador Retriever and Border Collie. Mr. Whynacht thinks the male fell through the ice first.

"The female recovered very quickly. It only took about half an hour and she was up wagging her tail and running around," he said. "The other one we worked on for at least an hour and he was still shivering after that."

Mr. Whynacht called veterinarian Dr. David Evans to make sure he was treating the dogs properly. The male, spastic, uncoordinated and shivering, was suffering from hypothermia so he held him, covered him with blankets and used a blow dryer, at low heat, to dry his fur.

"And a lot of comforting. In about an hour's time he was able to have a little something to eat, a little something to drink and about an hour after that he was up wagging his tail."

"(The next morning) they were bright eyed and bushy tailed," said Mr. Whynacht.

Police and South Shore Emergency Medical Care also responded to the call.

Who Are We?

Randy L. Whynacht

President and Director of Operations for Whynacht Security & Survival, Randy has been a professional security consultant since 1981, and a survival/self-reliance instructor since 1983. Randy has been training and rehabilitating dogs since 1994.










Diana Kleszczynski

A native of Poland, Diana grew up in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. A professional consultant to Whynacht Security & Survival in surveillance technology and IT security since 2003, Diana has been training and rehabilitating dogs since 2002.






More detailed biographies are on the Whynacht Security & Survival website.

Working as a team., Diana and Randy give their clients the skills required to bring balance and joy back to the dog/human relationship.