Fire Dog

By Jere Hough Meteorologist / Feature Reporter

Teaching is a challenging profession, but there's at least one teacher around who never fails to hold the students' interest. Fire Dog

Published: Tue, November 11, 2008 - 3:03 pm Last Updated: Tue, November 11, 2008 - 6:07 pm

Jere Hough

Andy the Dalmation is a life saver even though the gentle animal has never rescued anyone...but he has shown how to crawl under smoke to thousands of area youngsters. He's also good at demonstrating stop, drop, and roll: that's what kids should do if their clothes catch on fire.
Kent Landsberg, Mobile Fire Rescue, uses Andy to help him teach fire safety.
"Anytime you have something that's unusual to look at, it peaks the interest of children," he says, "whether it be a puppet or a bird or a dog, it's something that they're going to focus on and make it much easier for them to remember and more interesting for them to learn."
Landsberg raised Andy from a pup and trained him to teach fire safety. They regularly do forty shows a week during the school year.
The fireman smiles and says, "He's been petted by literally tens of thousands of children."
Andy groans a lot, especially when being petted. Landsberg says that those groans are his way of talking.
And he may be saying that he's tired. The dog is not as agile as he used to be.
Landsberg observes, "He has a hard time getting down, you can see."
And so Andy is leaving public life.
Meteorolgist Jere Hough pets the dog and points out, "Andy's had a thirteen year teaching career, but in dog years that's ninety-one years. It is time to retire."
Mobile Fire Rescue's first teaching dog was Sparky, Andy's father. But Andy will not be replaced with another dog. A cockatoo will take over his duties.