How much do you trust it to work?

‘You just have to show them who’s boss,’ said my mother firmly, stepping towards the van parked next to our garage. This was late November, 1991.

‘I’m the boss!’ she shouted at the occupant, who immediately hit the side of the van with a massive thump and an even bigger volley of barks, causing the van to sway and rock. We both took a hasty step backwards. The policeman with us chuckled and said a quiet command to the dog inside as he unlocked the van door. The dog instantly calmed down and leapt gracefully from the van when the door opened, sitting neatly at its trainer’s feet and awaiting further instruction.

They were in our back garden to test out one of Douglas’s ideas: a training sleeve for police dogs. At the time, when training a police dog (which takes years) to chase down and catch a perpetrator, the trainer would wrap their arm in strips of leather and then train the dog to chase them down and bite them on the arm to detain them as they would a real life criminal until their colleague could handcuff the person and take them away. Police dogs are big, their bites are potentially very painful, especially when they are learning to moderate their grip, and the leather straps would get heavy with saliva, leaving the trainer with a soggy, bruised arm, not to mention other bruises as they are knocked to the ground by over-enthusiastic trainee dogs. Douglas, a dog lover, had seen this training process in action and thought that he could do better. He designed a metal cone, shaped to cover the elbow, with an opening at each end that could be slipped onto the forearm like a sleeve, covered it in foam and a washable fabric case (to stop the dog’s teeth from breaking on the metal) and attached lengths of rope along the cover to give the dog something to grip.

This should both protect the arm and not hurt the dog, and be light enough that you could wear it for hours at a time without getting tired. The cover could be removed and washed to stop it from getting smelly. All very well in theory, but there comes a moment in every period of research and development when someone has to test it out. To begin with you can simulate testing conditions, replicating the crushing and tearing effects of a dog’s mouth with tools that you can control and using a dummy for the arm, but at some point, you have to put your trust in the idea and the craftsmanship and decide that you’re going to let a large dog loose on a real person wearing the sleeve to find out what would happen. And someone has to put their hand up and face a dog rushing towards them with an unknown contraption on their arm.

This was the day. Three policemen and one dog turned up, and, after some jostling amongst themselves, one man put himself forward for the first try. Meet Gary Evans (I’d love to talk to him about this now) and his canine colleague, testing the training sleeve in our back garden, November 1991.

We were relieved to find that the sleeve worked perfectly (but probably not as relieved as Gary). It worked so well that the Metropolitan police bought at least 54 sets for its dog handling team to train with, a good amount of work for our small workshop team. There they are below getting ready to be sent off. They formed part of a larger suite of armour for dog handlers that Douglas developed – I’ll write more about that next time.

P.S. Mum let Gary put the dog back into the van without saying another word to it. We knew who was boss.

Tags: design, dogs, Inventions, police