Living heroes 7/9 olivia

   There are heroes that everyone remembers. Firefighters who lost their lives saving others. men fighting in the army for our country. But there are other heroes who slip under our radar. Quite literally in fact.
   In 9/11, 40,000 people helped with the clean up and immediate response, and got universally recognized for their efforts. Every year we see blog posts and newspaper articles about those people. But even those people had help. You see, just as the police use guard dogs, and blind people use guide dogs, the rescue people used the rescue and cadaver dogs. And people never gave these animals much recognition. 
   I never even knew that there were dogs used in the rescue attempts until this year, when I stumbled upon an article listing some unknown heroes and their accomplishments. The 9/11 dogs were on that list, and I decided to research them further. As it turns out, there was one dog force, called Operation Nobel Eagle.

This was in the care of Officer Jim Lugaila from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. He had been a dog handler since 1988, and had a lot of experience. He brought a workforce of cadaver dogs, who are trained to compare odors in order to find human remains, sometimes no larger than a dime. These dogs were implemented into teams that mostly worked eight- to ten-hour shifts, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. After the dogs were done searching, they would be watered down and taken to a park area where the handler and the dog could cool off.  The dogs were washed and visited by a vet tech for a medical exam. These dogs worked more than most of the humans. They were constantly out there, often going into more dangerous places than humans dared to tread. And because they were dogs they asked no recognition, and were overlooked in favor of the many human heroes in those rescue attempt.

So ya, these are one of my three heroes. They are dogs, I hope thats okay. But I truly believe they were heroes.