Five years ago, I titled this column “Ramblings…” to allow me to rein in and out of subject matters. As long as I remotely tie my points together at the end, everything fits. I have a word of caution concerning today’s column: Avid readers should take a deep seat. Infrequent readers should grab the saddle horn, and newbies best grab it with both hands because today I am jumping around. Here we go.

Let’s conduct a little demonstration: Wherever you are sitting, be it the kitchen, barn or shop, take a bite size piece of steak and hide it on the floor. Now, call your dog into the room. Grab the horn, while I spin to the right.

In the late ‘70s my older brother, Dana, was the lone rider in our Lodge Grass, Little Horn, and Lake Creek cow camps. This meant Dana and his dog, Cody, spent hundreds of days each year trailing cattle up, down, and sideways around the Big Horn Mountains. Cody was a loyal hand and it mattered not whether it was day or night, hot or cold, wet or dry, he was always ready to go. A working dog’s devotion to duty is inspiring and Dana and Cody were inseparable.

When I married in 1979, Dana was my best man, and he loaned me marital advice he learned during his solitary hours as a bachelor chasing cows through the timber with his dog. “Training a wife is like training a dog. Love ‘em a little bit and beat the heck out of ‘em.” (Because was single he was an expert at matters which didn’t pertain to him.) Three years later Dana married Alice so was able to personally apply his marital wisdom. It’s working perfectly. After 27 years of marriage, when Alice, yells “Sit” you best not be trapped between Dana’s backside and the ground or you could get squashed. Alice and Dana prove both old cowboys and old cow dogs can learn new tricks with minimal training. Grab the horn again; we’re going to spin to the left.

How long did it take your dog to find that piece of steak you hid under the throw rug by your kitchen table? I’ll bet it was sniffed and snarfed before you reached the fifth paragraph of this column. Imagine what your old dog could do with professional training, and this brings me to my point: Heelers heel, retrievers retrieve, pointers point and border collies herd because of the instincts refined through hundreds of years of selective breeding. With training they can perform their duties flawlessly; a sight most Americans find inspiring to watch. As such, consider this: Because of their keen sense of smell, dogs can be trained to detect over 19,000 different combinations of explosives and are more reliable at finding bomb materials than all the techno gadgets ever produced. American forces use dogs extensively in Iraq. For $8,500 of training we can get a previously unemployed dog a job on the bomb-sniffing squad; not bad when compared to the expense of the ineffective TSA radiographic scanners costing $150,000 each.

Trained dogs walking on a leash through the hoards of passengers and luggage in America’s airports would be far more reliable and less offensive than whole body scanners or blue-gloved men probing your shorts for bombs. Think about this: Dogs can’t profile. Wherever and whoever smells like explosives, triggers a reaction. No more TSA targeting of silver-haired Nanas so as to give the desired demographic data on inspection reports. Dogs go directly to the bombs.

If Alice can get my brother to sit on command after only 27 years, we certainly could train a legion of explosive sniffing canines to address our security needs…if it was truly about security, but it’s not. It’s about conditioning. End of column…all nicely tied together like a package under the Christmas tree.