Pets on Parade salutes dogs of war

That’s how U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. John Dolezal simply summed up the value of war dogs on Sunday when the four-legged veterans were honored for their service at the 15th annual Pets on Parade Awards Luncheon at the Doral Desert Princess Resort. On average, war dogs each save an estimated 500 lives per year, Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit said in presenting the “Saving American Lives” trophy to Marine Corps Maj. Kim Keefer, commanding officer of the Twentynine Palms Provost Marshal’s Office. “We work our dogs very hard. We demand a lot of them,” said Dolezal, a four-year veteran who has served three of those years stationed at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms where he is partnered with “CChaz.” “The things we can train a dog to do is just amazing,” he said. The dogs — generally German and Czech heritage shepherds and Belgian Malinois — begin training at about a year old for a variety of uses, including sniffing out bombs. Their sense of smell far exceeds a human’s, making dogs ideal for finding explosives or narcotics, and search and rescue. Dogs are reported to have 10 to 20 times the number of receptors in their nose than humans do, and the olfactory part of their brain — devoted to smell — is much larger, giving them the ability to detect faint odors and to discriminate between very slight differences in chemical composition, according to the U.S. War Dogs Association website. Specialized search dogs, used for sniffing out explosives, are trained to work off leash by voice and hand commands, said Cpl. Jared Sellers, who has been working with the military canines for four years. The dogs carry radios on their harnesses and on average work 100 meters away from their handler, but can go as far as 300 meters — or 328 yards, Sellers said. Without the dogs, there would be more human casualties, he said. “It’s nice to see (the dogs) be appreciated and get recognition. They deserve it,” Dolezal said.