The Importance Of Training Your Dog...

Be careful what you teach your dog to retrieve. You might not like what he brings you. You do, however, want to train your dog…just in case.

In this case, the training paid off.

According to the Associated Press, a 40-year-old German woman walking her dog last month on the outskirts of the town of Erkrath in western Germany's Neander Valley, when she let her enthusiastic companion off his leash near a stream to play.

It wasn’t long before the dog found something at the edge of the stream, and picked it up, and trotted back to the woman to show off his find. The woman immediately recognized that the dog had an old, rusted hand grenade in his mouth.

A little bit panicked, the woman wasn’t sure what to do. Then, before the dog could get too excited and start tossing the grenade around, she ordered the hound to drop the sixty-year-old explosive.

The dog obediently strolled back to the stream, and put the hand grenade back where he found it next to the stream.

After leashing Fido up again, the woman called police and let them know about the grenade. The German cops brought in a munitions expert, who identified the item as a still live American hand grenade from World War II, and then defused it before it could explode.

Germany is still littered with unexploded Allied munitions more than six decades after the war’s end, leading frequently to major evacuations when they are discovered in densely populated areas. There is no way of telling how much unexploded ordinance remains unrecovered and undiscovered.

And that is why it’s important to train your dog well. You never know when he’ll bring you a hand grenade.