Dog Blog Issue Thirteen

Feeling Validated

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks at K9MD with two of our younger dogs, Hero (bowel cancer) and Hogan (ovarian cancer), achieving top marks in their validation assessments. To acknowledge their achievements, there was celebratory cake for afternoon tea for the human trainers and fosterers, and an extra-fun game of tug for our gold-standard dogs.

If you follow our blogs regularly, you’ll have noticed the term ‘validation’ quite a bit. It’s important for K9MD because it demonstrates that our training methodologies work and most importantly are successful. Validation is a means of estimating the diagnostic test accuracy of the dogs, measured by sensitivity and specificity (see Dog Blog 10 for more on these) using randomised blind tests, which are overseen by an independent adjudicator to ensure impartiality. The astonishingly high marks K9MD dogs achieve in these tests holds hope for the future use of dogs in cancer diagnostics, and the confidence we can have in them to assist medical professionals and give an opportunity for earlier diagnosis.

The sharpest tools in the toolbox

Our dogs are amazing, but they weren’t born with the skill to alert to positive cancer samples. They have been carefully selected for breeding characteristics, then nurtured, imprinted with the appropriate cancer VOC’s, and trained to a very high standard by our highly-specialised team of trainers. Leading that team is Peter Hanlin, and we thought it was past time we heard his story as we continue our behind-the-scenes look at the K9MD team.

Peter joined K9MD in 2022 after a 27-year career as a police dog handler, actively involved in specialist work and deployment with the Armed Offenders Squad, as well as Search and Rescue. His extensive experience working with dogs, and later service in local government management, means he is able to lend valuable support, direction and guidance to the team.

Peter says he’s always been a dog person. “I got my first dog at the age of seven and since then I have handled more dogs than I can count. My hobby outdoor pursuit (hunting) has involved using dog power for over 40 years.”  He has two mixed-breed dogs at home, Lou a bully greyhound cross and Tui a Kelpy Collie cross. Both are very much working dogs and he doesn’t consider them as pets. The same applies to the K9MD canine team, they are working dogs recruited for a specific purpose.

Peter is responsible for organising the work day and making sure each day is a success for the team. He works with all of the dogs at some stage of their training. Initially on joining the team, he worked with Magic and Freida, and latterly he has been instrumental in starting our youngest dogs Hero, Hogan and Hunter on their training journey, introducing them to the scent room. And he’ll do the same with Skye when she starts training in earnest. Peter is highly skilled at taking the dogs through the imprinting stage, when they learn the odour of the cancer that we want them to identify - which scent gets them a treat, essentially.

While passionate about this work, Peter is pragmatic about his relationship with the dogs. “For me, our dogs are working dogs, tools to do an essential job. If they are working ok, then I am happy.”  He doesn’t have any one favourite but says, “Each dog's personality is different and it's the variety that draws me to each particular dog. I have just finished a validation with Hogan, his performance was excellent, and I am now handing him to a different trainer comfortable in the knowledge that he is at the top of his game.”

What Peter admires most about K9MD dogs is “Their commitment to the game, their work ethic and willingness to please their trainers.” It’s these characteristics that make them high achievers in their validation tests.

On the part he plays in developing an early-stage, non-invasive diagnostic test for cancer, Peter says, “K9MD gives me a reason to come to work each day, each day is different providing new challenges to work through and to celebrate new achievements.  I believe in Pauline’s vision and deeply want our successes to be recognised.  We are providing value and working towards saving lives, who wouldn’t want to be involved it that?”