For a few high-profile acts about to hit the road during this unpredictable Omicron touring season, the must-have accessories aren’t just N95 masks and hand sanitizer. These accessories include several German Shepherds and possibly a few Belgian Malinois or Labrador retrievers.
To ensure that Covid doesn’t prematurely shut down their tours, Eric Church and Tool — and Metallica and the Black Keys before them — have recruited dogs specially trained to sniff for traces of the virus in members of their crew, entourage or anyone else who gets backstage.
“So far, knock on wood, the dogs have been knocking it out of the park,”John Peets from Q Prime, the management firm that represents Church/Metallica, said this. “We haven’t had a dog miss anybody.”
The dogs were used on Church’s fall U.S. tour and were hired by Metallica for fall shows in Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta and also at their 40th anniversary gigs in San Francisco last month. Church will kick off the 2022 leg in Lincoln, Nebraska today. He will be joined by four German Shepherds (Alex Huggie Lord and Timmy). Tool will have a new team of dogs for its run in Eugene next week. Q Prime reps several country acts including Ashley McBryde, Brothers Osborne, and Brothers Osborne. They plan to bring the dogs on their next tours.
The dogs in rotation — 12 are currently in service, with seven or eight more in training — are overseen by the Ohio-based Bio-Detection K9. Jerry Johnson, the company president, was an Air Force vet who worked with dog teams in Afghanistan and Iraq during the 2000s. After about six weeks of training, the canines are taught to sniff people’s hands and feet. They will sit down if they find the virus.
“People say, ‘What’s that dog doing?’”Johnson tells Rolling Stone. “It surprises them and they’re pessimistic, but if you understand the instincts of a dog’s behavior, it makes a lot of sense. Dogs sniff each other to see if that other dog has a virus. We’re training them to look for something they’d be interested in anyway.”
Johnson isn’t allowed to discuss details of exactly who or how many people have been flagged by the dogs at the concerts. However, it seems that the process works. In the fall, at least two workers were spotted by the dogs on the Church tour. “Everyone at the loading dock gets sniffed,” Church’s production manager Malcolm Weldon says. “We’ve had them get a couple of local guys who thought they were negative. Then those guys went and had a PCR test and it came back that they were positive.”
NASCAR was among Bio-Detection K9’s first clients, but the dogs came to Q Prime’s attention when Peets heard writer Malcolm Gladwell talking about them on a podcast. The dogs are important to Peets. “cheaper than testing everybody, and way faster and friendlier.”Bio-Detection K9 states that the average dog test cost is $2 per person. Johnson says that dog tests are usually limited to 200 people an hour. They are done at different venues multiple times per day, starting in the morning and ending with soundcheck. Johnson adds that they also include family members and backstage guests.
However, both the acts as well as the animals have had to adapt to the Omicron variant. On Church’s tour, the dogs will now be sniffing people’s masks (not hands or feet) to detect that variant. “The new variation is different,”Johnson states. “It localizes in the bronchial passageways. So the dogs weren’t nearly as accurate the way we had been searching. We had to change it up.”
The only downside, Peets says, is that the musicians aren’t able to get too close to man’s best covid finder. “They don’t like the dogs to get too friendly with people,”He said, “because it throws them off their game. These guys are in high demand.”