Guess what will what's that? Mang So, I wanted to talk about this politician I think we can both get behind. And his name is Duke Rick, and he's from this town in Cormorant, Minnesota. And Duke was elected mayor in a landslide because the town doesn't want to be represented by anyone who's super political. And this is about the point I should tell you that Duke Rick is actually a dog. In fact, he's the first dog mayor of Cormorant.
And he's this big, beautiful great Pyrenees. You know, I'm really curious about Duke's agenda, but I have to ask, like, what does he do as mayor? I mean, as you guess, it's mostly ceremonial. There's this deputy who seems to do most of the real work. But Duke can often be found sitting in a bar where people feed him steak and occasionally buy him swigs of beer. This is what it says online. He also enjoys hanging out on the streets where he's constantly approached by his adoring fans. And
of course he attends all the city council meetings. But he's just this great ambassador for the town. Wow, And so does he have any competition or what? He's actually won three elections in a row now, and they were all of these massive landslides. But you know, there actually was one other candidate on the ballot. It's his girlfriend, Lassie.
So she only got a few votes in the last election, but maybe she'll take over when he's tired running for office and be sort of the town's first female dog mayor. What you're hearing about Duke made me wonder what are some other important famous first in doggy history. And that's what today's episode is all about. So let's dive in. Y Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my
good friend Man gues Ticketer. And on the other side of the soundproof glass sitting with is that a It's a Jacktarius? That what it is? Yeah? On his lap right there, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I do wish that all of our listeners could see this because it is really pretty adorable scene. Yeah. I mean, this little guy keeps putting his paws up on the soundboard and he's got this I know it sounds weird to say this, but like this really focused look. It
seems like he actually knows what he's doing. So I laughed when Tristan told me he wanted to train the first dog to record a podcast. But I think they might pull it off, which is, I guess all the more impressive when you find out that they just met yesterday. Oh this is not even Tristan's dog. No, it's kind of a business partnership apparently. Okay, all right, well, well, we do have a ton of heartwarming stories to share
on today's show, which is all about famous first for dogs. Now, you know, we humans tend to hog the spotlight when it comes to making history, which I guess there's no surprise, as we're the ones writing it all down. But for today, we thought we'd switched up a little bit and give man's best friend a chance to finally step out of
the shadows and really take their bow. So, you know, from the first dog to catch a frisbee to the first dog to drive a car, we're going to dig into the stories of some of history's most remarkable canines. That's right, And since our recent President's episode is still fresh on my mind, I thought we could start with the very first dogs to hold the title of first Dog. Now, just about every US president has had a pet of some sort, but dogs have always been the most popular
by far. In fact, sixty eight percent of our presidents have owned a dog while in office, and our very first president was no exception. George Washington was a huge dog lover. He owned fifty different dogs during his lifetime, including seventeen who kept him company during his two terms.
And since Washington was an avid hunter, most of those dogs were American fox Hounds, a breed he's actually credited with founding seventeen dogs, And it makes you wonder like whether he even bothered naming these dogs, and he did, so we all know Washington was a great president, but he was an even better dog dog namers. So I'm gonna list out some of these names. He called them taster, Drunkard, tipsy, tippler.
I'm I'm sensing a bit of a pattern here, So so I feel like either Washington was a lush or maybe the dogs were. Yeah, but there were seventeen of them, so you know, he couldn't keep up this drinking language forever. So some other names included Mopsie, Forrester Captain Rover Vulcan makes them an early treky I, guess, and even sweet
lips sweet lips. Okay, well, all right, so those were the first first dogs, but they actually weren't the first ones to live in the White House, right, Like, I know, Washington picked the spot where the White House would be built, but he never actually got to live there. Absolutely true that that particular honor went to these two mixed breed pups that moved in with John Adams and his wife Abigail. And while the dogs might have lacked the pedigree of
Washington's hounds, they also had some pretty colorful names. They were known as Juno and Satan. Kind of weird to think that Satan was like napping at the White House in the earliest years. But all right, so we've covered the first first dogs, but what about the first dogs period, like first dogs overall? So how do you even figure that out? Well, there's definitely a lot of disagreement on the specifics of this, but it is worth looking at
what the history books mainly say. So some say prehistoric humans began domesticating wolves around ten or maybe fifteen thousand years ago, and you've got others who maintain it was even longer ago, like maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. And of course the region where this took place is just as much in question. You've got Europe, you've got the Middle East, you've got East Asia being you know,
part of some of the most popular theories. And actually they aren't even sure if it was humans who tamed these wolves and bred them into the you know, kind of the good pups that we know today. Instead, some researchers think that wolves domesticated themselves, which might sound weird, but if you think about it, you know this could have happened by them just scavenging the kills left by human hunts, or by hanging around the campfire until someone
literally threw out a bone. I mean, that's crazy to think about. But I'm guessing there's no one dog we can hand the title to right for first dog. Ever, Well, I mean, I think you're right, not in not in terms of like first dog in general, but there is a pup that I want to nominate for the title of first pet dog. So in nineteen fourteen, there were some workers that uncovered a grave in Germany, and that grave contained the ancient remains of a man, a woman,
and a little dog. And these remains actually date back to the Paleolithic era, so we're talking maybe like fourteen thousand years ago, and so that makes them the oldest known grave where humans and dogs were buried together. Okay, so this is kind of splitting hairs on the definition of pet but I'm pretty sure our ancestors only kept dogs for utility, right, Like, like they weren't carrying them around in purses as some sort of accessory. And I'm
guessing it was more of like a mutually beneficial work relationship. Well, I mean, that's deaf only been the thinking in the past, but looking at this grave in Germany had actually suggests that there might have been more to it than than
just practicality. Actually, just this year, there were researchers that we're looking at this and they brought in this veterin area to come in and examine the remains, and what they found was that this dog had had problems with its teeth and and from that they were able to conclude that the puppy actually died from canine distemper virus, which you know this this only allowed him to live
until about ten weeks after he had contracted the disease. So, I mean, I guess that's sad, But what does that prove? According to that research team, there's actually no way the dog could have survived even that long with such a life threatening illness unless it was really really cared for by these humans. And so this is actually how nat GEO sums up the team's findings. They said, this puppy represents the earliest known evidence of dogs being regarded and
treated as pets. The carrot received while it was ill and of no use to people, appears to have and driven by compassion or empathy. In other words, an emotional bond that is pretty sweet actually like and it isn't something I'd expect to say after hearing about like a fourteen thousand year old dead puppy, but it does make
you feel for it. And there's actually another archaeological find I want to talk about, and that's the first dogs to have ever had their image preserved, or the first dog to be the subject of our however you want to put it, what do you mean, like in cave paintings or something, So it's actually cave carvings. And I didn't realize these were things. But they were found last year at two different sites in Saudi Arabia, and they're thought to be the oldest depictions of dogs on record.
They date back eight or maybe even nine thousand years. And what's wild about this is that it would mean that humans were training and controlling dogs even before we started farming. Alright, so I guess it's my turn to to play devil's advocate here, because I mean, what makes you so sure that these carvings actually showed domesticated dogs? I mean like they could have just been wild dogs that were in the air area, or honestly, maybe even not dogs. Yeah. Well that's the thing. Like the dogs
and the carvings, they're actually on leashes. And the images show human hunters with packs of dogs tethered to their waist, leaving their hands free to shoot arrows at prey. And and we know these are dogs because they have the characteristics of dog breeds found in the region today. That means like short snouts, pricked ears, curly tails. And if that wasn't enough proof, the same series of carvings also depict wolves, hyenas, lions, and horses, and they look completely
different from these leash dogs. Wow. All right, Well, I guess that's a pretty good evidence. But I'm gonna give that one too, you know, and unless there are older carvings that come to light at some point, I feel like you're probably right that these are the first dogs to have their their likeness is preserved. I guess. Well,
I mean there's another first here. These hunting scenes are also the earliest known evidence of dog leashes, so technically they might be the first dogs to ever wear leashes as well. I mean that seems like a little bit of a stretch to use that one is like a big first, and I guess that is is pretty interesting, but you may be just showing off a little bit. All right. Well, well, speaking of ruins, there's another pouch in line with that theme, and that's the world's first
archaeology dog. If you're gonna stretch one, I'm going to stretch one. So I know what archaeology digs are, But what are archaeology dogs are? Are they for like hunting pottery? Well, actually that could be an application down the line, but for now, an archaeology dog is one that can locate human bones that are hundreds of years old, and the first dog to be trained to do this. Is this Australian black lab mix and her name is Mighelou. And the way that came about this is that her trainer
a guy named Gary Jackson. He was trying to think of a new application for dogs amazing sense of smell, and so you know, keep in mind dogs have somewhere around two hundred million more old factory receptors than we do, so scientists have been using them as field assistance for
years now. So I had actually read a little bit about conservation dogs, which are these dogs trained to track all sorts of tough to spot while species and they track everything from like tiny toads, lizards, invasive plants, even gorillas which can be people shy apparently, but uh, some marine biologists and this is the craziest one of them all. Have you even started using dogs to track whales by the scent of their droppings? Isn't that amazing? Yeah, it's
amazing they could even pick up on that. But or go back to to miglu just for a second, because the closest thing to what she does would probably be like like those cadaver dogs that law enforcement used to find those decomposing bodies. But of course that doesn't work for archaeology because the remains you're dealing with their long past that decomposition stage. So it's it's not that that's what they're smelling out like they're they're not trained to
sniff out rot. They're actually trained to smell human bones. So they just gave her a bunch of old bones to smell, and we're like, I don't know, like, now go find more like this. That That is exactly what they say. That is the training manual. World. Actually, what they did was they got permission from these Aboriginal tribal elders to train you know, this dog to smell these ancestral bones. And they did this with this museum collection and actually found this interview where he goes into detail
about how this works. So here's what he says. We recreated an Aboriginal graveyard and also scattered some animal bones there. What we saw was that the dog was able to find a buried bone from about ten feet away, even if it's as small as a fingernail. We would just take a cotton ball and touch the bone and then touch that to the rock and she could still find the smell. The big test was at an Aboriginal burial ground in South Australia where a six hundred year old
grave have been found. A few years ago. We were given about an acre to search. Museum officials and tribal elders were there and they knew where the graves were, but not us. Within two minutes, Migaloo was circling this one spot and it was exactly where the dog was and it was a six hundred year old grave. I mean, that's stunning. It really is fascinating that that dogs can
do that. And you can almost think, like how much easier would be to get a grave site protected from development if you had a dog that could show you where the bones word and just I don't know, like a few minutes. It's pretty remarkable of the applications. And also like if you can find bones that easily, then pottery doesn't feel that far away, or or even things like dinosaur bones or other kinds of fossils, right, definitely, I mean I think all of those are our possibilities.
And you know, there's also the chance this technique could be used to crack cold cases that you know, police are still dealing of where maybe there was this you know, thought to be a body buried in a certain area, but they were never able to find it. But you know, whatever benefits we reap from this, we will all owe it to Migalo for for helping us get started with this type of work. The world's first archaeology dog. Well, we still have a bunch of dogs to talk about,
including seeing eye dogs. But before we get to those, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part time genius. So we're talking about the famous first of a few good dogs, all right, Mango. So we talked about Miguelo, who was the Australian black lab that's been helping archaeologists dig in all the right places. But I want to get back to the basics and and maybe talk about the kind of service or assistance dog that most of
us know best, and that's of course sky dogs. So for a long time now, these dogs have been helping blind and visually impaired people navigate the world much more independently than they would be otherwise. And so I want to talk a little bit about the history of their service. Well, one of the things that's interesting to me is that it really is hard to pinpoint when the first ever guide dog came. Like you said, it's been going on
for such a long time. And in fact, the earliest evidence of dogs guiding the blind dates all the way back to the first century a d. And there's this fresco in the ruins of this Roman town and it actually depicts a blind man being led by his dog. So you could say that's the first guide dog. But the truth is that assumes that the artist based it on real life subject and and that's kind of hard
to verify. Well, I mean, there is one thing that we can say, and that it wasn't until the eighteen hundreds that trained guide dogs became, you know, such an important part of the medical establishment. I was looking at this article on history dot com and here's how they put it. The earliest systemic instruction of guide dogs took
place at a Paris hospital for the blind. Within a few decades, the practice had spread to Austria, where a blind man named Josef Risinger he trained his spits and later a poodle so well that people actually began to suspect he was faking his disability. Then in the eighteen hundreds, another Austrian by the name of Johan Wilhelm Klein founded the Institute for Training of the Blind and Vienna as
a teacher there. His dogs of choice were poodles and shepherds, and well, you don't see too many guide poodles today. German shepherds are still a common choice for training. So I'm curious that, like, do you know when guide dogs first became a thing in the US, because I I feel like they aren't really mentioned in the early American history,
you know, in the colonies or whatever. Yeah, there was a little bit of this that I saw and doing some reading for this episode where you see it counts from the mid eighteen hundreds and these were dogs that were helping guide the blind. But it really wasn't until the late nineteen twenties that you started to see this practice gaining ground on you know, kind of on this
side of the Atlantic. But that change was largely thanks to a wealthy American woman named Dorothy Harrison Eustace, as well as a blind nineteen year old from Tennessee and his name was Maurice Frank. So we're talking about ninety seven here, when Eustace wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post and it was about her recent trip to a dog training clinic in Germany, and this is where doctors had been training guide dogs for use both by
veterans and civilians. And she herself had been living in Switzerland at the time and she was breeding and training these police dogs for the Swiss Army. But she'd never seen anything like this new German method for training dogs to act as guides for the blind, and so in her article she was praising this technique as as a way for the visually impaired too, as she says, once more take up their normal lives. So where does this
guy from Tennessee com in? So that's Mars Frank, and he hears about the article immediately writes a letter to Eustace asking her to quote train me and I will bring back my dog and show people here how a blind man can be absolutely on his own. So you fast forward to the next year and Frank spent some time with her in Switzerland and returns home with his very own guide dog, and this was, of course a German shepherd that he had named Buddy. And the press
in the States goes crazy about this story. And so it's the first case of a properly trained guide dog in the US and reporters are asking Frank, you know how having a guide has improved his life, and he decides to give them some pretty compelling proof and and shows and that with the help of Buddy, he can navigate across one of New York's most hazardous thoroughfares. This was a street known by locals as Death Avenue. It seems a pretty but it seems like there could be
other ways you might test this. But fortunately when he did it, they made it across without a scratch. And just a year after that, Frank and Eustace founded the first American guide dog school and they called it This Seeing Eye, and it's actually still going strong today. I mean, it's amazing to think about how relatively recent that was. I mean, you look at all the roles assistance dogs filled today, and it's not just helping people with vision loss,
but also hearing impairments, epilepsy, autism, PTSD. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, I mean, when you lay it all out there, it is actually pretty amazing the number of different ways dogs have been able to help people just over the past century or so. Yeah, I mean, they're getting the title of man's Best friend for a reason. Then, Actually, I've got a great example of this. It's this Yorkshire terrier named Smokey, and during World War Two she became the
world's first therapy dog. So this goes back to this American soldier named Bill Wynn, who adopted her after finding her in this abandoned foxhole in New Guinea. This so Smokey's first act of service was to save the lives of Wind and his entire squadron. Apparently, the soldiers needed to string this telephone wire through a seventy ft pipe underground so that these three different campsites could communicate with
one another. And the problem was that the pipe was only eight inches wide, so of course it was impossible for human to crawl through it, and instead dozens of men had to spend days digging a trench to get the wires underground, and all the while they were leaving themselves exposed to enemy attack. Or at least that was the plan, and that's how it would have gone had it not been for Smokey. So she was the scrawny dog, weighing about four pounds, standing just seven inches tall, and
she could actually fit into the pipe with ease. So with a little bit of luck and a little bit of patients when was able to tie the wire to Smokey and coax her through the pipe from above ground, and of course, the little pop got the job on. She was credited with saving the lives of some I think it's two fifty men and also forty planes that day.
Oh wow, I mean, that is pretty incredible story. But I'm curious, like, if if Smokey was such a cool hand on the battlefield, how did that transition happen to
becoming a dog doing therapy type work. So pretty soon after when adopted her, he came down with dangae fever, which is horrible obviously, and he was sent to this army hospital and a couple of days later his friends came by his fellow soldiers and they brought Smokey to visit him, and the nurses were just in love with this little dog, like, you know, she's brave, she's tiny,
she's got a big personality. And so not only did they cuddle her, but they took her around to all the other wounded soldiers, and uh, you know, when when he was there, saw how Smokey really changed the mood in these rooms. These were these depressed and injured soldiers who took turns holding her and penning her, and it completely changed their outlook. So once when was well enough to leave, he started taking Smoky or on to visit
other wounded soldiers. He even taught Smokey some pretty impressive tricks to keep them entertained. While he was there. He taught her how to walk a tight rope, how to ride this handmade scooter, and even how to spell her own name. Wow, those are all impressive things. Although I'm curious, what do you mean spell her own name? I guess he'd call out the letters of her name one by one, and she would go and pick out these big cutouts of the letters with her mouth. So I guess she
was showing off in that way. That's pretty great, I mean, even though I can do that part about the spelling of the name. But but Smokey does sound like a pretty wonderful dog. He definitely, And and as word of her impact spread, you know, pretty soon all these other owners of dogs will bringing their dogs around his therapy dogs to recuperating soldiers. In fact, by seven, American civilians had donated around seven hundred dogs to military hospitals around
the country. I saw that standard just floored by it, you know, And and when and Smokey had a happy ending to after the war. They kept right on touring hospitals right up until Smokey retired at the age of twelve and nineteen fifty five. And then she lead a quieter, still peaceful life for two more years after that. All right, well, for this last sement, I feel like we should focus on a few dogs whose achievements were a little bit more down to earth. But before we do that, let's
take one more quick break. Al right, well, so let's talk about some dogs who have claims to fame that won't make us second guess our own life choices. You know, Pops Wup were the first to do you run of the mill, classic dog type stuff. All right, well, I've got one, So why don't we talk about the first dog to win Best in Show, which you know should make us feel okay because it's not really threatening to
us human types. And so surprisingly, this is actually something I don't think we covered when we did that episode on HOWD A Game of Dog Show. I don't know how we left this one off. But you know, as you might remember, Westminster Kennel Club held its first Dog Show way back in eighteen seventy seven, but strangely, the event didn't include a Best in Show until about forty years later in nineteen oh seven, and the first dog to win the award was this smooth coated Fox Terrier
named Warren Remedy. Such a great name, but don't let the name fool you. Warren Remedy was actually a female dog. So what was it about Warren that when the judge is over, I mean her looks mango? As one reporter wrote for The New York Tribune, quote, Warren Remedy is practically true to type. She is tan marked with strong head, keen expression, good outline and grand ribs. Yeah. I feel
like the grand ribs always do the trick. Yeah. It's definitely the mark of a champion, for sure, and there's no doubt that that's exactly what Warren was a three time champion in fact, because not only did she earn the first ever Best in Show awards, she went on to win the title in the next two Westminster shows as well, which of course makes her the oly three
time winner in the history of the competition. She is Westminster's most winning is dog, And you know, we think about how political the show has gotten in the years since then. I feel like it's unlikely that Warren's ever going to have anybody, you know, take that crown from her. Good for her. And and speaking of dog shows, do you know that they're actually the reason that dog biscuits went mainstream back in the late eighteen hundreds. I did not, And in fact, I don't think I've ever thought of
dog biscuits going mainstream. You never heard of like putting your biscuits in beta, like, I don't think so. So the first dog biscuits were invented in eighteen sixty by this electrician named James Spratt, and prior to that, nobody had really thought of food specifically for dogs. People just fed dogs like the scraps and whatever was left over from their own meals, and that all changed thanks to Spratt. He created these meat fibrine dog cakes, that's what his
project was called. And uh, there was something he came up with after noticing the way dogs gobbled up hardtack, which is that stuff that sailors used to take with them. It's supposedly taste horrible. But we're to Spratt's new products spread and by the new York Times was actually heralding it as the quote principal food of dog shows. That's kind of a funny story about So where where are we going on? This? Is this the first dog to eat a dog biscuit? Pretty close? So sprats biscuits actually
had one shortcoming. Atlas Obscure says they were quote woefully square in shape. And this is a big, you know, difference from all the bone shaped biscuits are our dogs get today. Alright, So so I still don't know exactly where we're going to start. We're talking about the first dog to ever eat a bone shaped biscuit, exactly. It's a big deal and I feel like it should be celebrated.
But this is how it happened. So sometime in seven, an organic chemist and inventor named Carlton Ellis received a desperate plea for help from the local owner of a slaughterhouse. And the owner was looking for this profitable way to use all the waste milk his work produced, and he
had hoped Ellis could help him find one. So Ellis took on the task, and, likely inspired by Spratt's famous dog biscuits, he began experimenting with this biscuit of his own, one made from milk, malt, grain, and a few other ingredients. So he made a milk bone. Yeah, but not quite yet. So at first Ellis baked the biscuits into what he hoped would be this appealing round shape, but when he tested the biscuits with his own pop, the dog wanted nothing to do with him. So, as a professional chemist,
he was kind of baffled by this. Like he'd worked on all these landmark products, including margarine, polyester paint remover, and so he figured he should have been able to mix up an appetizing treat. So rather than change the ingredients,
he just changed the shape of the biscuits. And this is where he told Popular Science quote, I had some more biscuits baked from the same stock, but in the shape of a bone, and I found that my dog manifested a tremendous interest in the bone shaped biscuit, which is pretty great, But like, why would the dog care what shape the biscuit was? So I have no idea. But after he hit upon this pleasing shape, Ellis partnered with this company that started mass producing biscuits for him,
and they called him milk bone Biscuits. Which are famous now. Then he sold the brand into Biscuit. But right up until his death, Ellis couldn't quite put his finger on why his dog liked the bone shaped biscuits so much, and he actually once told this interviewer that his dog Hauld either simply liked the design better or else. Quote after shaping the biscuit in effort to cater to his taste, he felt duty bound to fool his master by simulating
an interest in it. Sure, that's exactly what it was, all right, Well, for this last one, I'm going to sort of bend the rules a little bit because honestly, I can't tell you who the first dog to catch a frisbee was because it was about twenty years between the products debut and the story that I wanted to share. But when it comes to the official sport of dog frisbee, there's no question that the first and best to ever
play was this pup named Ashley Whip It. So I think I read about this when we were doing research for our WAMMO episode. This is the dog with the awesome nickname, right, Oh, it's a terrific nickname. The nickname is the surest Jaws on all four paws and that was coined by a writer in Sports Illustrated. So you know, it seems like it's got to be true. But we need to back up for just a minute to nineteen four and this was when Ashley and his owner Alex
Stein actually stormed the offices of Wammo. So Stein and witness firsthand how talented his dog was at catching frisbee, and he wanted the toy company to bring Ashley on is maybe like a mascot or something, but unfortunately Whammo was not interested at this point. So Stein was trying to figure out what else to do so that the world could see how talented his dog was. So he comes up with this idea to storm the field at Dodger Stadium when the teams are you know, switching places
between innings. And so the game was about to resume after the eighth inning and Stein ran onto the field toss the frisbee forty yards out. Ashley then jumps this three foot wall with ease and snare this disc out of mid air. And actually, because the details of this are are pretty great, I do want to read this description. This was you know, from a friend Jake Rosen from
from mental floss. And here's what Jake says. He says, with fifty thou people cheering in the stands and millions watching at home, Ashley and Stein effectively invented the phenomenon known as dog frisbee. The animals seemed to linger in the air like Jordan's off the rim. His massively muscled hind legs propelled him skyward, his body contorted like a salamander swimming upstream, jaws gripping the disk. The outfielders set
down on the grass and watched the nearly eight minute performance. Finally, Stein departed, jogging up the same stet of stairs. Security was waiting near the top. They zip tied his wrists and ushered him to a holding cell full of drunks and eight track cassette thieves. But that isn't the end of the story, right, No, it's definitely not. And things actually started to look up for Stein and Ashley almost immediately after this. In fact, even when they were still
in the holding tank. There at the stadium, the halftime coordinator for the l A Rams was there and he came to visit them. So he slipped his business card through the bars and invited the d o to appear at their next home game. Of course they decided to do this, and after that they made two appearances on merv Griffin and The Tonight Show. They went on to perform at the White House even during the Super Bowl, And of course all this got WHAMO to change their
tune on dog frisbee. And not only did they pay that two and fifty dollar fine Stein and Curd for trespassing on the baseball field, but they also co sponsored the first annual Fearless Fido Frisbee Fetching Fracas, which is just an amazing dog competition. But anyway, a year later, the World Frisbee Championships began hosting a dedicated canine division
and it's the still running Ashley Whippett Invitational. So I like that story a lot, and I think now that we've made it to the end of the episode, it actually means that Tristan and his dog associate just made history. Well not so fascinating. We've still got a fact off and you know, anything can happen during that. So let's let's hold type just a little bit longer. Ye all right, Well, I'll kick this off with the story about the first dog to receive a rank in the American military, and
I love this story. So we're going back to World War One and it was the hundred and second Infantries, twenty six Yankee Division, and they were in training at Yale and there was the stray dog that just shows up and starts hanging around. And the soldiers eventually start taking a liking to this dog, so they nickname him Stubby, and they teach him a few tricks, including how to salute with his paw, just putting it over his eye,
and this would eventually come in handy. So when it was time to ship out to France, they somehow managed to smuggle Stubby with them, and as you might imagine, the commanding officers were not thrilled when they discovered Stubby. Later on, but before they have a chance to discipline anybody, of course, the pup just pulls up his paw and does the little salute stun and they decided to let him stick around. I guess it's like a mascot for the group, but it's actually pretty amazing because he was
much more than a mascot. You know. They trained the dog to do so many different things. He learned to sniff out chemical agents, and he would come back and warn the soldiers, you know, when he would sniff these things out. He learned how to help find wounded soldiers so the paramedics could get to them. But you think about everything that he did for them. It was because of all these efforts that a hundred and second Infantry
actually promoted him to sergeant. And so by the end of his service, Stubby had served in seventeen battles over just an eighteen month period. That's pretty incredible. So I've been reading all these stories about dogs, you know, saving and helping people, but I really like the story about how dogs are also getting involved with saving lives of
other animals. And this is in South Africa. You know, poaching has been such a problem there for years, with things like elephant tuss or whatever, and and to combat this, they're now more than two d and ruleees in an anti poaching and Canine Training academy, and these pups are going to be trained and then mashed up with various
national parks. And the idea is that if there's this poacher, that spotted arranger would strap one of these pups onto their chest and then take a parachute on their back and then float down to the area as quickly as possible to stop the poacher. And the roll of the dogs is to sniff out the criminals and and try to catch them. And it's still early on in the program, so it's not really in full effect, but it sounds
pretty spectacular. That is pretty interesting. So I always wondered how dalmatians got associated with firehouses and decided to look into this a little bit, and and I was surprised to see that, you know, this one actually dates back much further than I would have thought. So we're going back to the early seventeen hundreds when Dalmatians were often
used to run alongside the carriages of English aristocrats. And you know, they tend to like running alongside horses anyway, But in doing this, they would protect the horses from other animals and keep them from getting spooked. And in fact, it even became kind of a status symbol to have
even more Dalmatians around your carriage. So you know, over time this carried over to accompanying the horse drawn wagons that would transport the firefighters, and again, in doing this they would help protect the horses and kind of keep them calm. As they were approaching the fire, because horses are often afraid of fire, and Dalmatians tend not to
be as afraid of anything for that matter. And so you know, the pups would stay back when they were off to fight the fire, and they would guard the wagon to make sure nobody stole equipment or anything else on the wagon, including the horses. It's so funny. I've always just kind of accepted that they're the mascot of these firehouses, but it's great to hear the backstory. So we've been reading a lot about self driving cars in recent years, but one thing I hadn't read about was
a dog driven car. And this is from an animal shelter in New Zealand. I came up with this idea to show how smart their dogs were by training to their pups, and the dog names are Porter and Monty, and they taught them to drive a Mini Cooper, specifically Mini Countrymen that was specially outfited for them. So the dogs learned to start the engines, then use the gas and brakes, and also steer and they actually became celebrities when one of their test drives was aired on TV
in New Zealand. Wow. Well, that's definitely amusing and impressive. But I have to say I'm gonna want to up you on this one, because while it is impressive to think of a dog driving a car, I feel like it's even more impressive to teach a dog how to pilot a plane. Maybe a little bit scary, but also impressive at the same time. And I don't know what it is about New Zealand training dogs to drive stuff,
but this actually comes from New Zealand as well. So there's an animal trainer and a zoologist named Mark Vett, and he taught this group of dogs to fly. And we're not just talking a few days of training. So for some reason this went on for months. I actually have no idea why they put this much into training
dogs to fly planes. But they were using in the indoor flights simulator, and in order to teach them how to pilot the plane, they'd use these different colored light signals, so they would use blue to indicate they should go left, they would use red for right, and white just meant to keep going straight. And I guess for the heck of it, they even taught them to do a figure eight, which is terrifying to try to be in a plane
where a dog is doing a figure eight. But you know, there's no word on a plan to actually do anything with this training. But it did kind of make me laugh to think about people one day getting on a plane and looking in the cockpit and seeing a K nine just like co piloting this plane and making the announcements, which would probably be just as clear as hearing a regular pilot's announcements over the intercomps. I love that those dogs on my co pilot shirt actually makes sense. Yeah, exactly,
that's what the whole point is. So I actually had a fact about a dog who pressed nine one one to save a life, But this idea of dogs doing loop to loops and figure eights in the sky, it's just so good that I think you have to take home with the trophy. Wow. Well, congratulations to Tristan's pup for for really getting us through this episode. Let's hope this one actually publishes, because we think he's the first canine to have pulled off a podcast recording. But I
guess we'll see now. I know we've forgotten probably several terrific facts about the history of dog first, so we love to hear those from you. As as we always do. You can email us part Time Genius and how Stuff Works dot com or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. But thanks so much for listening that all of our listeners could see this, because it's a pretty adorable scene. Yeah. I mean, this little guy keeps putting his paws up on the soundboard and he's got Chris and McNeil does
the editing thing, but like this really focused look. It seems like he actually Garry Roland does the exact producer thing m and Eves Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. Oh this is not even Tristan's dog? Do we do we forget Jason? Okay, all right, well