You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Through Line, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Through Line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ihart podcast update this week on your free IHart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, Erasure and genocide. Table for Two, Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Howdy, everyone. It's Chuck here on Saturday. I thought I would brighten everybody's day with this selection from June 13th, 2017, How the Beagle Brigade Works. Oh, boy, just get ready for a cute overload. Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Closark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry, Jerome Rollins over there. So this is stuff you should know, the Beagle Brigade edition.

Yes. Another... I guess we covered drug sniffers?

Yeah.

But not... Or did we do Seeing Eye Dogs as well?

We did. Remember, because Seeing Eye Dogs is actually a brand name. It's one of those...

Like a bandaid?

Yeah, or Kleenex or something. That was a great one.

Yeah. I mean, is this the last job that dogs have?

We didn't cover dogs that serve as pack animals yet.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Like herders.

Yeah.

That'd be good.

Or lumberjack dogs.

Oh, that's true. That's right. Or dogs that are Sioux chefs.

Right. So, yeah, we've got a Big long sweet coming.

I thought it was done. Sorry.

No. But this one might be the most adorable of all of them.

Yeah. And this one was... I was always confused. I always thought the beagles at the airport because as you will learn, Atlanta. They're trained here outside of Atlanta. But I thought that the beagles were... I just thought they were drug sniffers or bomb sniffers or everything sniffers.

Oh, really? Did you? Oh, I see. You could have a big old suitcase full of cocaine and walk right past that dog and be like,.

Well, that's good to know.

Sure. For the next time you're smuggling cocaine in a suitcase. Yeah. Once you make a pest of beagle, you're home free.

But don't have a head of lettuce.

No, because those beagles will pounce on your neck and chew your throat out. That's what they're trained to do.

Don't have a whole hog. Can you believe that story?

Totally.

So this This one was, I think it was in Atlanta, at Hartsfield Jackson Airport. There was a woman traveling from Peru to the United States with a roast pig, an entire roast pig, in her bag. It was very sweet. She was just trying to bring home a holiday meal for her family.

It was Thanksgiving, I think, right? Yeah.

She smuggled in a roast pig. It wasn't a little It was big.

Well, they have pigs tend to be. I mean, it didn't say a suckling pig. A pig, I assumed it was a big old pig.

It was a picture of it.

Oh, yeah, that's right. It was a good-size pig.

Yeah, the guy Rob Brizly, a public affairs officer said, The right steps had to be taken to confiscate and destroy the item, and then the sentence, Stop. But I imagine he said, With our mouths.

Right. With extreme vengeance.

Anyway, That's just one example.

Yeah, we should probably say exactly what we're talking about for those people who haven't been to an international airport in the United States. But there is a group of working dogs that are exclusively beagles, hence the name the Beagle Brigade, from what I understand. Although I did see reference that they do use labs sometimes, but I'm pretty sure it's almost exclusively Beagles, if not exclusively Beagles. And these dogs have a job. They're actually federal agents with That's the USDA, the Department of Agriculture.

Not the FDA.No..

Or not the DEA either. But they're federal agents, and their whole job is to sniff out agricultural products. The whole point of all of this is that the US has a pretty extensive agriculture infrastructure, right? Yeah. If something comes through, say that's a A pest, right? Like a bug that eats... What do we grow here? Cotton. A cotton weevle. Yeah. But from another country, right? So a non-native pest or a non-native plant or a deceased bat.

Okay.

It could wreak havoc, not just on our agriculture system, but if the wrong thing comes through. There's procedures in place for food to come in the United States. You're not supposed to carry it in your luggage because it has to be inspected. It has to come from a trusted source. We have to know that it doesn't have something like hoof and mouth disease or Ebola or something like that, right?

Yeah. I mean, it says in here in our own article that it's a $1 trillion industry, our own agricultural product industry. Right. And that's import, export, eating it, producing it. And invasive species can be It says about $136 billion in agricultural lost revenue. Is that annually?

I believe so.

Man. I mean, that's a lot of economy at stake here, so they take it very seriously.

Right. So there's this group. So the USDA, the Department of Agriculture here in the US, has a subgroup called APHIS, which is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. And they're the ones who are tasked with basically creating this virtual border, this virtual barrier to stuff coming in the US to protect agriculture in the US, right?

Yeah. Like the notorious Romanian cotton weavel.

Right. Exactly. The most insidious of all. Specifically at international airports, working in conjunction with the Customs Bureau, CPB, Customs No, CBP, Customs and Border Patrol. You've got these cute, adorable little beagles who are trained to sniff this stuff out from people who are trying to smuggle whole pigs into the country when they're not supposed to.

God bless that lady. I felt bad for her. You know? Yeah. I mean, I get it. Sure. But you know the time and money.

I mean, there's no way. There's no way she did not cry. Oh, sure. When the agriculture inspector took her whole pig. She's to feed to her family.

What a waste of food.

She works so hard on that, Chuck. I know.

It might have been her favorite family pig that she was waiting.

It was Babe. Babe gave his life.

You want to talk a little bit about the history here? Because it did not... Agriculture dogs or agricultural detection did not start in the US. It actually started in Mexico.

Yeah.

I guess was probably the early '70s?

I could not find when it started, but yeah, we know it's definitely prior to the '70s because based on this, I guess it was a USDA training manual that was referencing it. It picks up then in the late '70s that the USDA started this.

Yeah, and then up until 1983, we used big dogs. Typically, and I think we covered this in a lot of the There are drug sniffers, German shepherds, and labs are certainly good. Labs aren't so intimidating, but German shepherds can be, even though I love them and I grew up with them. Sure. A lot of people, the sight of a German shepherd coming at them in an airport is a little scary.

Yeah. I mean, some people have cynophobia, which is a fear of dogs, specifically, in which case even the smallest dog is going to scare you. But even people who don't have an actual phobia of dogs are going to be scared of certain breeds, and that definitely includes German shepher for sure.

So it started in Mexico, and then finally, in 1984, the USDA started at LAX, which is probably a pretty good airport to pick for a pilot program, not an airplane pilot program, although I'm sure they had those.

Did you hear about the king of the Netherlands?

Uh-uh.

They found out that he has been secretly undercover Moonlighting as a KLM airline pilot for fun once a week for the last 20 something years.

And has been flying?

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He's been undercover, lying, not as the king of the Netherlands, just trying to have a life of his own.

I thought you meant like Leo DiCaprio didn't catch me if you can. He just pretended to be a pilot. Oh, no. To get faves and fake checks.

You're a king. You can't be pilot.

Wow. Did he come clean or was he outed?

I guess he was outed. He said from time to time somebody would recognize him, but he'd just have them kidnapped.

Yeah, kidnapped and killed.

Rendered extraordinarily. Good to be the king.

Wow, that's pretty crazy. Yeah. Well, good for him. Yeah. They should just let him fly.

I think so.

They're going to work it out?

Probably. I hope so. If not, that guy's one outlet has been taken away from him.

Well, so his pilot program is maybe failing, but the pilot program in 1984, LAX, worked great. This was a big deal at the time, too. It was a big change from any detection programs that they had at the time. I don't know why it took that long, because dogs are obviously well-known sniffers to the tune of... I mean, compared to humans, how many millions of olfactory the dogs have. I know it varies.

So somewhere in the middle is the doxon. I didn't see the beagle specifically, but supposedly beagles are about average as far as scenting goes, which is surprising to me. But the doxon has 125 million olfactory receptors.

Amazing.

And humans have 5 million on average.

And I know the dogs, even the size of their nose can make a difference. So I was a little surprised they picked beagles. But one of the big reasons is, A, the Navy Maybe he had used them previously to great success. B, like you said, they're little, they're cute, so they're not going to scare anyone at the airport. And they're agile because they're small, and they can jump around on a conveyor belt like nobody's business to find that Romanian cotton weevil.

Sometimes they'll find just enough fruit that they'll make a little headdress out of it, like Carmen Miranda. Nothing cuter than seeing a beagle in one of those.

Well, the other cool thing about the dogs and their sniffing abilities is you can't disguise something. If you have, of course, I was about to say drugs again. But if you have, let's say you want to sneak in that cotton weevle and you think, I'm going to hide in a can of coffee. Actually, that might be... You might not be able to bring in coffee either now that I think about it. I was just trying to think of something with a strong odor.

A A bottle of perfume.

Okay. The dog will be able to pick that out of that perfume. It will be able to almost geo-locate it because they don't get confused like we do.

Yeah. You know how a dog can... When you watch a dog on a scent, it's just sniffing back and forth in the air as it moves.

Oh, yeah.

What it's doing is it's basically the same thing with our vision, right? The information is getting from one nostril and the other nostril. It's brain is putting together to create basically a 3D map of where that smell is coming from, just like the information from one eye compared to the information coming into our other eye, gives us an idea of depth or perspective, that thing. It's basically the same thing, but with their olfactory sense. Put on top of that is the fact that they can distinguish sense. This article, this USD The E. A. Manual said, when you walk into a kitchen and you smell chili, you smell chili. Chili is cooking. Put it all together, it's chili. That's what you smell, is the sum of all the parts. Yeah.

If you're good, you might be able to pick out a thing or two.

Maybe. Do I detect some cumin? But a dog will walk in there and smell every single one of the ingredients separately. Right. Which is why you can't just take something and to overpower the smell of it with something else. The dog will smell the thing that you're using to try to overpower it with, but it'll also smell the other scent. Apparently, they can smell. This thing says they can smell table salt in a dilution of one part to 10 million parts.

That's amazing.

Isn't that crazy?

That is crazy. That's also why if you've ever taken your dog to a really new environment that they've never been to, like the beach, for instance, when I I think a couple of years ago, we did a beach vacation and took our dogs, and they were going crazy. We walked them down to the beach, and it was just nose in the air because there's always a good breeze, or usually a good breeze on the beach. I can imagine they were smelling these just hundreds and hundreds of things that they'd never smelled before. It's pretty neat to see, and you wonder what's going on in that lunk head of theirs. Or in my case, one lunk head and one smart one.

I've seen before that when a dog is sniffing at a tree, what you're watching them do is sniff the tree itself, but also every single insect in that tree, every bird in that tree, everything that's in that tree right then, that dog is smelling that.

Yeah, and I think it definitely varies because obviously, some dogs are better hunting dogs and such. My new dog, Nico, we think may be part plot hound.

What's that?

Just like a hound.

Okay.

You can look up plot hound and it looks like my dog. Okay. All right. But like a mix of a plot hound. But I think that they're really good scent dogs, too, because she, more so than other dogs I've had, is really driven by her nose. When you let her out, she's got her nose to the ground for quite a while.

I was reading today about scent tracking, and apparently, it's something like some people like to do agility stuff with their dog or other people do like, obedience competitions and stuff. And then other people, and apparently this also is a really good thing to do if you found your dog is no good at obedience. They might actually love scent tracking because unlike the obedient stuff or the agility stuff, when you're scent tracking, the dog is totally in charge. You're basically following the dog, but you're doing it together, especially during training as well.

Well, they'd say if your dog has behavioral problems, and a lot of times that means they have a job that they're not allowed to do.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

If you have a herding dog that doesn't have a herd, then that might be a big pain in your butt until you can find a way to let them, I don't know, they can not necessarily work part-time as a herder, but do something that acts as a herder.

Might as well make some money off of it.

You want to take a little break? Mm-hmm. All right, we're going to take a break and get back to the right after this.

You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Through Line, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Iheart Podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tong Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

My best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father.

Is that true? That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for the living system.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like My focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So, how did we do today? We did good.

The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, Chuck, so we're back. So we were talking basically about dogs in general. But since 1984, the USDA has been training beagles for its Beagle Brigade, which is this front line covering America America's agricultural infrastructure.

That is correct.

I was very heartened to learn from researching this that the Beagle Brigade, specifically with the USDA, all of them come from shelters. They're all shelter animals.

Yeah. You know what? It makes sense. At first, I just thought it was out of the kindness of their heart that they wouldn't support the dog buying industry. But a lot of times, they just get problem dogs, these beagles that are so up in the business in your pantry or your refrigerator or sniffing out your shoes so they can chew them up. People will... Well, I have opinions on this, but people will turn that dog back in or whatever to be adopted, hopefully, from a no kill shelter. At the very least.

Right. That's a big point that this USDA spokesperson makes in the House of Works article is a lot of people are saying, I'm not I'll be sure how I feel about this. You guys are using these dogs as tools, basically. I don't know. I don't think dogs should be used that way. The USDA's response is, well, a lot of these dogs would basically be put down if it weren't for us. They would be euthanized because they're too hyper to live with a family. But that's exactly the temperament we need for what we're having them do. Actually, it's win-win for everybody.

Well, yeah. And as much as I love my dogs laying around in bed with me, a happy dog, it's a dog that's working and exercising. And then at the end of the night, they get to relax. But It's easy to, and we covered some of this in seeing eye dogs and stuff. It's easy to be like, Oh, man, that dog doesn't get to have fun all day. That's just not true at all. These dogs have a purpose, and they're good at what they do. So don't think of it as using this this dog as a tool in a bad way.

Right. Then on the other end of it, if the dog is brought into the program and they find out that the dog doesn't have what it takes, maybe it doesn't work very well amidst chaos that an airport always has, or perhaps the dog just seems unhappy, they say. If the dog seems unhappy, they'll retire it early. Yeah. At any rate, they have, apparently, a 100% record of adopting out their beagles. There's a waitlist right now. Oh, I'm sure. To adopt these beagles that have worked for several years or didn't work, didn't make it, but entered into the program. They don't return them to shelters. They don't euthanize them. They adopt them out. And apparently, the USDA has a 100% adoption record on that, which is pretty outstanding.

Yeah. And as with a lot of service dogs, their handler is given first right of refusal for adoption. I imagine a lot of times they do so.

Yeah, I would guess so, too. Because apparently, when the dog and the handler are paired up together as a team, they stay a team for the dog's whole career.

It's like Riggs and Murtaugh.

Right. Or Turner and Hooch.

Actually, it's not like Riggs and Murtaugh because they were paired at the very end of Danny Glover's career. That was a bad analogy.

Oh, that's right. That's true.

Because he's too old for that crap.

Yes.

That was a big line.

Yeah, it was a great line.

Isn't that a TV show now?

I don't think it is anymore.

Jerry's nodding, but that probably means you're both right. Short-lived.

I think so. I haven't seen any ads for it lately.

What a dumb idea. Hey, let's dust this thing off from 25 years ago.

They do that with everything, like Twin Peaks even. It's like, how? Come on. How are you going to pick that back up?

Let's just stop. Well, I don't mind that because that's just more greatness from David Lynch.

Is it any good? I've heard not necessarily.

I think it's great. I'm a fan of anything David Lynch does. It doesn't... Sure. I didn't expect it to be exactly what Twin Peaks was. It just feels like a new TV show from David Lynch to me.

Oh, got you. Really? Okay. I could be down with that.

All right, so let's get into this. You mentioned handlers.

We've been dancing around this the whole time.

You mentioned handlers. We said earlier, this takes place at a place called the National Detector Dog Training Center, the NDDTC, right here in lovely Noonan, Georgia. Is that West?

I think it's Southwest. Atlanta?

Southwest?

Just down 85 after it splits off as 75, 85.

My knowledge of my own home state is pretty poor. If I haven't camped there and it's outside of Atlanta, I probably don't know exactly where it is.

I'm pretty sure I'm right. Okay.

Southwest, then. Let's go with that. Okay. They start training, like with most service dogs, they do that initial testing to just see, are they healthy? Do they have the right temperament? How's their behavior? That initial screening is where the first lot gets weeded out. One of the biggest parts of that initial weeding out is They have to have a high food drive. That doesn't mean how hungry are they. That means your dog has just been fed, this little beagle has just eaten, but they still have a high desire to get to where the food is.

It's like, Bacon, bacon, bacon.

Basically, that's what you're looking for. You make a lot of noise, and you have crowds around, and you're testing their focus. This is all just, like I said, the initial screening to say, All right, little Henry the Beagle here has what it takes, we think. Yeah.

Well, yeah, that's just a start. Can he also learn to differentiate? That's the big one. That's the next big step, right? So I think there's a one or two week evaluation process. They also give the dog a full veterinary inspection. I believe they spay and/or neuter. I guess not and/or. Specifically not and/or in that case. Or. They spay or neuter the dog. A lot of times, the dogs come in not very good shape because they're shelter dogs. They probably weren't taken very good care of early in their life. So they may need some treatment or checkups or whatever. But then after that happens, the training actually starts. And the dogs are trained to send, I guess starting out from what I saw, five basic restricted sense.

Yeah, I didn't expect these. Would you have picked these five?

No, it's Rando.

Oh, is it?

No, it's random.

Oh, I thought there were five cents.

No, there are. I'm saying that's a pretty random assemblage.

Oh, okay. I got you.

Man, you'd think after nine years together.

But if you were to have picked five cents, I probably would have definitely picked beef, pork, and citrus. Those make sense.

I guess I would have picked monkey, bat, and Probably pig, too. Yeah. But I mean, those are in there. Well, the monkey and the bad aren't. But beef, pork, citrus, mango.

Yeah, that's where you threw me.

What was the other one?

Apple.

Apple? What's wrong with apple? I didn't even know they grew apples outside of the United States. Who's trying to smuggle an apple in the US?

I don't know.

We got the best ones here, buddy. Just leave them at home.

Yeah, I would love to know why those are the five basic scents. If someone has more information, because I could not find out.

I could not either. There's a real dearth of information on this stuff. I even emailed the Customs and Border Protection today because I could not, for the life of me, find the name of that first Beagle that started out at LAX in 1984. Cannot find it anywhere. Well, you're on a list now, buddy. I'm starting to suspect that somebody forgot to write it down. So no one knows.

You're being tracked now.

Probably. Oh, Oh, yeah. I've been looking up restricted items, agriculture, invasive species, stuff like that. I'm sure I'm on a list.

All right. So they teach them those. Well, this is toward the end is when they know this five basic sense. At first, they're just basically teaching them how to sniff through bags and suitcases and boxes and making sure they'll throw a goat's head in a suitcase and send it through in Noonan. You laugh, but one of them found a goat head not too long ago. I know. It happens. They just make sure they can do that. Then, of course, they have to differentiate. There's a lot of things that are scented like those things that are just fine, like an orange perfume.

Right. Well, that's another. That's got to be tough to learn for a dog, too, is the difference between orange scented stuff or things that are made with, say, orange essence, like a candy or a lip balm or something like that, and an actual orange. Because the lip balm, no problem. Actual orange, you got a problem.

That's right. And once they've done this, this is about a few months, probably 10 to 13 weeks. And This is... And they're being trained in regular how to pop that stuff and alert and sitting responses. All of this is one big learning period, and the handler is getting trained as well, obviously. That's right. But at the end of this is when they finally do graduate to those five basic sense. And I guess... See, what I don't get it from the basic sense is, is it from those scents that they can smell anything?

No, that's crazy. That's what I thought, too. That's what it implies. If you put together apple and pig and mango,Oh, that's good.you've got bat. You have a luau. That's not the case. Each thing has its own scent. I don't know if those are the most commonly smuggled cold ones, possibly.

Maybe.

Those are the ones they need to start out with. Maybe they're the easiest ones. I don't know. But if you put those things together, especially if a dog smells in layers and differentiates between sense, it's not going to smell the combined scent of those things. It's going to smell each thing. So I'm not sure why those are the five basic ones. Can't find out.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully this one was a stone wall. I mean, we're professional researchers here, and we really ran into a wall.

Yeah. Who would have known that the Beagle brigade is what would throw It would break us.

It would break us.

They've learned all these since. They've learned how to alert. They're getting treats. They're getting positive reinforcement along the way.

Yeah, that's a big one, too. The entire training is strictly positive reinforcement.

Yeah, they don't beat these dogs down if they're not smelling correctly.

They spend 10 grand a month on newspapers to roll up, teach these dogs lessons.

Puppy founder? Mm-hmm. That's awful. Once they've gone through all of that, everyone knows I'm joking, right?

Yeah. If you're new to the podcast, then don't just don't even bother emailing.

We're great animal lovers here. Once they've gone through this whole training process, they finally graduate. They get their little diploma, their little hat, and their little robe, and they graduate from Nunan, and they get to move to the big city with their handler.

Atlanta.

Or anywhere, any international airport. But Atlanta certainly has a large one.

For sure. And so once they get to their home base airport that they're going to be working at, they're still evaluated and trained for another, sometimes 10 to 13 weeks.

Yeah, training is ongoing from what I saw, too. Like the whole career. Yeah.

It's not like, Okay, stop learning, dog. You know too much. But I think the initial training period, their basic training still can go on for another 10 to 13 weeks after they get to the airport. Even once they get to the airport, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to stay in the program. Again, once they're finally introduced to the chaos of an international airport, that dog might just be like, This is not for me. Send me back to Noonan.

Yeah. You can try and duplicate that chaos in Noonan, but good luck.

You just can't. I mean, even you just can't. There's nothing like a busy airport. You can't recreate that. So some dogs are fine with it. Some dogs are not. But again, one of the main reasons why they're choosing beagles is because it is so chaotic. And these dogs are... Their whole thing is they're not there at a mail processing facility. They're not there at a border crossing. They're there at a busy airport, and they're meant to be able to weave in and out of the crowd while also being non-threatening and also being lovable, too. That's not by accident that they chose shows these incredibly adorable dogs. The USDA says that the Beagle Brigade is basically like a walking lovable advertisement for what they're trying to do, which is protect agriculture here in the US.

Yeah, they have a little vest that says Beagle Brigade.

Yeah.

And everyone ooos and oes, and some people, if you're not—this is probably how they do it. If you're not actively ooing and eyeing and you're standing there sweating heavily, then the dog keys in on you. So I'd be in big trouble.

I don't know if you said it If you did, I didn't catch it. But the dogs are trained to walk up to locate a contraband item and sit at the bag.

Yeah. I thought they attacked the person first.

It's called the passive indicating. Yeah. But rather than... I saw in this article, it says they pored it. Everywhere else, I saw that they just sit and look at the person like, shame on you.

Yeah, exactly. It's a very passive, aggressive way to out for a goat's head in their suitcase.

Right.

Should we take a break?

Oh, yeah, man, you read my mind. All right.

We're going to do that, and we're going to finish up here with a big old brigade.

Stuff you shouldn't You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Through Line, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Through Line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Iheart Podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two, Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

In my best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father.

Is that true? That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for the limit, sir.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So, how did we do today? We did good.

The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so what happens at the end of a long day, Josh?

The dog. Most beagles enjoy a good pipe, maybe a scotch in an easy chair.

Perhaps a cigar.

Sure. They tend to watch CNN, although if you watch Fox News, and they fall asleep a little drunk. That's what they do every night. It's their routine, and that's what Beagle's like.

No, that's our routine at our clubhouse where we live. I know. Weirdly, and this surprised me, I guess it's not weird now that I've seen the explanation, but I was surprised to learn that they're kennel. I guess I thought they lived with their handler.

Yeah, because canine police dogs live with their handler. I thought it was weird, too.

But they're kennled. They have a facility near the airport. Some people have asked, Can I just keep this dog at night and then take them to work every morning? They say no. They said, This is actually best for everyone. They need their rest. I imagine they have a good play together. I doubt if they just drive them straight there and put them in the crate. It's probably a little social scene going on.

I hope so. I hope they don't get scoled for making eye contact with the other working dogs they live with.

No, they put in their eight hours. They come home, they probably play a bit, and then they're kennel overnight. They said that they need this rest time in order to do their job successfully. Like I said, a happy dog is a dog that feels good about its work.

You said, Chuck, some people ask if they can take them home. Sure. You should specify, that's not the agent asking. It's people at the airport.

I know.

Can I just take them home for the night and you guys can come get them tomorrow, or I'll even bring them back. I only live like 45 minutes away.

Yeah, sure. Just give me your cell phone number. That sounds great.

It does make sense that, yeah, they are left to just rest. I'm sure that they actually live at the airport, Which is funny. It's like that movie Terminal with Tom Hanks.

It says a nearby facility. You think it's actually there?

I'm sure.

Yeah.

Did you know that that movie Terminal with Tom Hanks is based on a real-life thing?

Yeah.

The guy was living there for a decade or something like that in Charles de Gaulle?

Yeah. Did you see that movie?

No, I just read the article the movie was based on.

Yeah, it's not very good, unfortunately.

I got that impression.

Yeah, it was a bummer.

Oh, really? It doesn't end well?

Well, no, it was just a bummer that it wasn't good because it was like Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Sure. I think my hopes were high. Yeah. But I didn't care for it.

No such luck, Charles.

The Beagle Brigade, it's a very closely guarded secret, just how many beagles are brigading. They can say, though, that there are 116 CBP agricultural canine teams with the dogs and the handlers, and that every international airport in the country has a Beagle Brigade there doing their job.

So they can tell you a lot.

Yeah. I mean, you want to tell some stories here?

Yes. There was this one dog called Murray.

Murray.

Murray was at a shelter in North Georgia, and apparently some dummies decided they wanted a hunting dog and didn't want to spend any money, but they wanted a dog tail and ears and everything, so they tried it themselves. And it didn't go very well for poor Murray. So they dropped him off at a shelter, probably knowing the state, they probably dropped him off on a dirt road and somebody else found him and took him to a shelter. And Murray was rescued by a group called Alcovee Pet Rescue. And I guess Alcovee has a direct pipeline to the Beagle Brigade handlers down in Nunan, said, Hey, we think we got one for you. This guy is so food-driven. It's crazy. It's got a lot of love. He just needs a little bit of attention. He's missing part of his ear, but we can get past that. At age two or three, he became an agent for the USDA at Atlanta Harfsfield Jackson International Airport.

That's great. The only way that story could have ended better is if those original people had part of their ear cut off by a dog.

Yeah.

What about Jasper?

Jasper, he worked at JFK, I think.

Yeah. This was late last year, Jasper retired after an eight-year career. During this career, Jasper seized over 17,000 items. The goat's head was Jasper, like I mentioned.

Whale meat.

Yeah, whale meat, rhinoceros skin.

A cooked bat?

Really? Mm-hmm. What else? Anything else crazy like that?

No, not that I saw.

A lot of Romanian cotton weevals.

Right. His handler, Amanda Tipple or Tipple. Is it Thipple or Tripple? Tripple. She said that she was interviewed with Modern Farmer magazine, which I didn't realize existed until last week.

Now you have a subscription. Yeah.

They did an interview with and she was saying that he could very easily work longer. Sure. But that the mandatory age of retirement is eight because they want the dogs to have some years of just chilling out, not having to work, and that she's going to take him home. She's adopting him. That's great. Or she did adopt him. I think the article was from last year, and he was on the verge of retirement when they interviewed him. But he went, and apparently this is fairly normal, went from something like 15 to 30 hits, 20 to 30 hits a day.

Wow.

But had declined to about 10 to 15. Oh. Yeah, everybody was very disappointed in him.

Well, I mean, that's a good retirement age. If they're eight, like barring some very sad health concern, a dog that size can live to be 13, 14 years old. Right, sure. Based on many years ahead of them, hopefully. Yeah. In retirement.

Yeah. And once she takes When she comes home, she gets another dog that she's going to partner with. So I wonder how that'll go over. Will Jasper be like, I know where you've been today, and I just want to tell you again, I'm not happy with this.

Well, I bet Jasper and all retired dogs have to deal with that transition.

Yeah.

I imagine there's something the handlers have to do with them on a daily basis, probably a lot of long walks. I imagine the dog isn't just like, All right, and now I'm going to rest. They're used to that activity.

Well, yeah, I was wondering that as well. I wondered, too, if they get them when they're young, so they're super hyper, and then maybe by the time they're eight, they've mellowed a little bit. Sure. At least comparatively speaking. Yeah. I think a mellow beagle is still pretty hyper compared to a normal dog.

Yeah, I've never been around beagles, actually.

Oh, they'll pull.

Yeah?

Yeah, and they bay and everything. They're super cute, but they can be rambunctuous for sure.

Yeah, I've never known anyone with a Beagle, so I don't even know if I've ever touched a beagle. Now that I think about it?

No, but if you've been touched by Beagle. I have one of this. You'll never forget it, Chuck.

I have with this. A couple of stats for you. Last year alone in 2016, the brigade inspected 23 million passengers, 741,000 pieces of freight, and they alerted total in the United States to more than 1.77 million seizures of illegal materials. That's a lot. It's about, what, 7, 8% of people bringing stuff in that have been caught.

Yeah. I saw also that there's an even more specialized group of dogs that are typically Jack Russell terriers that work on Guam to root out specifically brown tree snakes. Yeah, that's crazy. Which are There's an invasive species that got introduced to Guam and have killed off a lot of Indigenous bird species. They're basically trying to protect Hawaii as much as they can.

I didn't know Hawaii didn't have snakes until this article.

Yeah, it's like Ireland over there.

Yeah, it It makes sense, of course, but I just figured... I mean, there's all kinds of invasive species, so I just thought that... I just figured snakes would be one of them.

Yeah, no. Hawaii takes their agriculture defense very seriously.

Yeah, it's a felony. The The snake thing is.

Yeah, well, they'll just beat you up before they even take you to jail. They catch you.

Well, I read an article because I was like, What? Is that real? Which is, I guess, of great comfort to backcountry exploring and explorers. If you're scared of snakes. But I read an article, and there were a couple of them found last year that people had managed to sneak in. And one was a boa constricter that was dead in the road, like five feet long. And the guy Oh, man. Saw it and said, there's a snake. And everyone in the car was like, there are no snakes in Hawaii. They're like, no, that's a snake.

He's like, oh, I'm just a total idiot, I guess.

I'm sure their legs under there. Just a big lizard.

I hate you guys.

Yeah, that was news to me. So very interesting.

Supposedly, the Everglades down in Florida have a huge problem with Burmese pythons and a couple of different kinds of pythons, and all of them were pets, and now they're just taking over and getting to be 20 feet long or just crazy, eating wild boors and things like that.

Because idiots get them and then they grow and they say, This snake is too big, and they just put it out in the swamp.

I just wanted a puppy snake.

Here's a good example, too. It's easy to... The goat head and the cooked pig gets a lot of attention. But usually this stuff is... It's not nefarious. It's like this one lady, in February of this year, actually, there was a beagle named Gadget that seized, and this is just one seizure from one person, a potted tamarin plant, two live trees, 42 packages of seeds, 20 pieces of palm tree plantings, chicory seed, rice, millet, and fresh garlic.

And a note from God.

I mean, that's a lot of stuff, but this is what happens. Like someone goes to another country and they want to bring back seeds to plant something. It's not like they're awful people, but they can innocently wreak havoc on agriculture here by doing so.

Right. So the process, from what I gather, is that you declare anything you have on you. And then if they can let you bring it through, then they'll let you bring it through. But if not, they'll just take it and be like, Sorry, we got to take this. Then they'll shoot it in front of you. If you If you don't declare it and they catch you with it, thanks to the Beagle Brigade, you can be fined up to something like $1,000 for your first offense. If it's clear you're a straight-up smuggler, you will probably go to jail.

Well, this person did declare that had all that stuff, chocolate and an apple. I guess she thought maybe if I declare something, I won't be as suspicious. I don't know.

Right. But if you're a CBP agent and you're When you're looking at that and you have the discretion of whether to arrest that person or not, you may very well be like, no, you were definitely trying to smuggle this stuff. So I'm going to make an example out of you, lady.

Yeah. And then Gadget's just sitting there judging.

Just like, What have I done? Yeah. And the lady, as they're hauling her off to jail, she's like, I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for you meddling dogs.

You got anything else?

I do. I have one more thing. I ran across this article. I think it was on Quartz. It said, Bushmeat. Illegal bushmeat could be the cause of the next big global pandemic. Oh, wow. There's apparently a major market for Bushmeat, which is any wild animal meat. Most people think of it as monkey or bat or something like that. Gross. Or bat or something like that. But it also is elk or caribou. Any illegal meat that's basically just being smuggled around. There's huge markets for it in New York, in London, in mainland Europe. And people just smuggle it in, and a lot of them make it through. And these things just get sold behind the counter at butcher shops in some cities. And all it's going to take is one of those things to have Ebola and maybe a mutant strain that is transmitted a little more easily than Ebola light or whatever we have now. And you got a pandemic on your hands. And we can say, thanks a lot. I hope How did you really enjoy that monkey leg that killed off three quarters of the population of humanity?

Gross. Just Bushmeat. That's all I got. Just push me. Those two words, I don't like it.

I know. I know. That's pretty rough. I guess you're done then, too, huh?

I'm done, sir.

Okay. Well, if you guys want to know more about Bushmeat or the Beagle Brigade or anything like that, type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks. Com. And since I said search bar, it's time for a listener Mail.

I'm going to call this one Sad Yet Happy email. Hey, guys. My name is Sam. I wanted to send you an email thanking you for your show. The podcast is actually a rediscovery for me. My dad used to play it back in 2009 when we would drive up to the mountain to go skiing. A very fond memories of laughing and nerding out with my dad and brothers after a great day on the slopes. Can't believe you guys are still going strong after eight plus years. There is a little more to my rediscovery of your show, though, that I wanted to share. It's been four and a half years since one of my brothers, who was an amazing skier, died tragically to suicide. Since I was in college at the time, I didn't have enough time to properly grieve. Recently, I've been mulling through many painful memories that I ignored in those first three years. However, your show unexpectedly brought back really happy ones. It has reminded me the fun adventure and learning our family enjoyed while listening to your show when we were skiing. I remember laughing with my family at your jokes, rolling my eyes when my brothers and dad would try to comment on your show to sound smart because it was so creepy.

One of your favorite episodes of ours was the one on cannibalism. Being a high schooler at the time, I also really liked the show on Flirting, so I thought I could put it into practice. Needless to say, it didn't really work.

What?

This month, I went home for a week to visit my parents, and I went skiing with my mom and dad for the first time since my brother died. It was very painful, but also unimaginably special. When my family and I are on the mountain, I feel like I can encounter my brother as he was when he was healthy and full of life. I could picture him diving down a slope that was way too steep with the most enormous grin on his eager face. All in all, it was a great day. I just want to say thank you for the hard work in providing interesting topics to fill my time, making me laugh, but also inadvertently helping me cherish a special time in my life.

Man, that was heavy.

That is from Sam, and she sends Sam, that is fantastic.

Very nice. Thank you very much for letting us know. We appreciate that. Our best to your whole family.

Absolutely.

If you want to get in touch with us like Sam did, you can send us an email, the Steph podcast at howstuff. Com. Stuffworks. Com. As always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow. Com.

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