In 2014, Indiana firefighter Todd Jordan got a call from a distraught couple with a young dog. The couple’s nearly 2-year-old black Lab, Connor, was jumping up on countertops and eating all their food. He wouldn’t stop.
“[The woman] said, ‘I love the dog, but it’s just too out of control for us,'” Jordan recalls. He was used to getting these types of calls, having rescued multiple unwanted pups from the pound in order to train them to sniff out accelerants involved with arson. The woman asked if Jordan wanted a new dog for that purpose.
Jordan had another idea. A few months earlier, he had been talking to friends on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, who told him they were often frustrated when serving warrants on child-pornography charges. The officers said they sometimes missed thumb drives and micro SD cards—storage devices the size of a fingernail—that had been hidden in cracks in the walls. They asked if Jordan might be able to train a dog to find these things.
