DVD Sniffer Dogs Versus the Pirates

Almost as soon as a roll of film first whirred through a camera, dogs have played their part in the movies. There was a remake of perennial favorite Lassie this year, Toto has been delighting fans ever since The Wizard Of Oz was released nearly 70 years ago, and numerous other movies have made use of our canine friends, both as heroes and villains (or good dogs and bad dogs).

Now two more dogs have been specially trained for a role in one of the biggest war stories the movie studios have ever been involved with - against DVD pirates. In Hollywood recently, the Motion Picture Association of America - the organization that regulates the movie industry and awards viewing certificates - revealed their latest weapons in the fight: a pair of playful, 2-year-old black Labrador retrievers named Lucky and Flo.

Lucky and Flo’s skills are unique: they are the only dogs in the world that can smell DVDs. The smell probably comes from the resins and polycarbonates used in their production and the dogs are determined to find them, wherever they are – they can’t tell which are pirated of course, but they can certainly find ones that have been hidden.

Neil Powell from Newcastle, County Down is the man who trained Lucky and Flo, and just after returning from Hong Kong, where Lucky and Flo were demonstrating their talents on the latest leg of their “K-9 Pirate Smackdown” Tour, he explained how he ended up working with search dogs, and how he manages to train them to find the good, the bad and the ugly:

“I’ve been around dogs all my life – I trained my first one when I was 9 – but my interest really began over 30 years ago, when I spent almost every weekend for a year with a Police Dog handler. He was one of the best and I learnt about technique, learning to read the dog, and building up your own responses to each dog.”

After that he started training dogs for Mountain Rescue, and he has a clear memory of the moment he knew when he was going to spend his life working with dogs – at the December 1988 plane crash in Lockerbie, Scotland: