Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
Pregnant Dog That Was Shot 17 Times Is Now A Therapy Dog
A dog is making great strides after being shot 17 times and being abandoned on the streets. She is now working as a therapy dog.
Maggie was discovered in Lebanon. She is five years old and had her eyes shot out and then ear cut off, along with a broken jaw.
When they found the dog, she was pregnant and tied to a box by herself.
Fortunately, that isn’t where the story ends. An animal charity named Wild at Heart Foundation heard about her story and she was taken into a home in Brighton by an animal lover, Kasey.
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
Maggie is now working as a therapy dog and has amassed a significant Instagram following.
Kasey spoke with The Argus and said: “This person in Lebanon posted asking for help and a woman in London saw the post and got help.
“Wild At Heart said they would take her in, even though it’s quite hard to get pets out of Lebanon.
“My mum saw Maggie’s post and said we had to foster her.
“I got home and saw the picture and agreed.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
Although Maggie has made great strides it hasn’t all been a walk in the park. A six-month online campaign was started in order to get her out of Lebanon and find her a home in Sussex.
More than 80,000 people are now following her on Instagram and she even visits hospitals, care homes, and universities to try to spread a message of positivity.
In order to be a therapy dog, Maggie takes exams and she did quite well. Her owner then went on Instagram to share the news with others.
Kasey wrote: “Yesterday me and Maggie went to meet with her assessor, @maherandhounddogtraining she flaunted her stuff and gave it her best go and she PASSED.
“Maggie is now a registered therapy dog with @underdog_international.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
She continued: “She and I will speak to schools and work hands-on with youngsters.
“I know what happened to Maggie was horrendous but if her story can educate and inspire others to do good then at least we can do our part to make this world a little brighter.”
Despite her health problems, Maggie is still just like a normal dog.
Her owner continued: “She’s just brilliant. She’s so energetic and bubbly. She walks off the lead and follows me around.
“She must have been in agony with all she’s been through, but she never hurt anyone and she’s so loving.
“She’s got a great life and she wants so much out of it… I just want people to see that she’s living life.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
It seems as if Maggie has a lot to give.
https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/maggie-therapy-dog/?utm_source=fp-fp&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=maggie-therapy-dog&utm_term=5570698&fbclid=IwAR3y-iuWdCCS2vuytQKU6RmlXWgU7rtNR4W8LKdJofx0-3kr1iInEM-4weA
What the hell is wrong with some people??????
A dog is making great strides after being shot 17 times and being abandoned on the streets. She is now working as a therapy dog.
Maggie was discovered in Lebanon. She is five years old and had her eyes shot out and then ear cut off, along with a broken jaw.
When they found the dog, she was pregnant and tied to a box by herself.
Fortunately, that isn’t where the story ends. An animal charity named Wild at Heart Foundation heard about her story and she was taken into a home in Brighton by an animal lover, Kasey.
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
Maggie is now working as a therapy dog and has amassed a significant Instagram following.
Kasey spoke with The Argus and said: “This person in Lebanon posted asking for help and a woman in London saw the post and got help.
“Wild At Heart said they would take her in, even though it’s quite hard to get pets out of Lebanon.
“My mum saw Maggie’s post and said we had to foster her.
“I got home and saw the picture and agreed.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
Although Maggie has made great strides it hasn’t all been a walk in the park. A six-month online campaign was started in order to get her out of Lebanon and find her a home in Sussex.
More than 80,000 people are now following her on Instagram and she even visits hospitals, care homes, and universities to try to spread a message of positivity.
In order to be a therapy dog, Maggie takes exams and she did quite well. Her owner then went on Instagram to share the news with others.
Kasey wrote: “Yesterday me and Maggie went to meet with her assessor, @maherandhounddogtraining she flaunted her stuff and gave it her best go and she PASSED.
“Maggie is now a registered therapy dog with @underdog_international.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
She continued: “She and I will speak to schools and work hands-on with youngsters.
“I know what happened to Maggie was horrendous but if her story can educate and inspire others to do good then at least we can do our part to make this world a little brighter.”
Despite her health problems, Maggie is still just like a normal dog.
Her owner continued: “She’s just brilliant. She’s so energetic and bubbly. She walks off the lead and follows me around.
“She must have been in agony with all she’s been through, but she never hurt anyone and she’s so loving.
“She’s got a great life and she wants so much out of it… I just want people to see that she’s living life.”
PHOTO: MAGGIE THE WONDER DOG / INSTAGRAM
It seems as if Maggie has a lot to give.
https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/maggie-therapy-dog/?utm_source=fp-fp&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=maggie-therapy-dog&utm_term=5570698&fbclid=IwAR3y-iuWdCCS2vuytQKU6RmlXWgU7rtNR4W8LKdJofx0-3kr1iInEM-4weA
What the hell is wrong with some people??????
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
The people who did this should be very, very slowly killed, and yes - I would. Free of charge of course.
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
It makes me sick to my stomach to think such evil people get to breathe, thank goodness for the decent people who helped Maggie.
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
The phrase " they behaved like animals " annoys me intensely
WRONG , animals behave much better than humans .
WRONG , animals behave much better than humans .
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Veterinarian Has A Comfort Dog Assistant To Soothe Sick, Scared Pets
https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/veterinarian-comfort-dog/?utm_source=ars-arsfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=veterinarian-comfort-dog&utm_term=9314430&fbclid=IwAR062X6mHhyT2DwbLd-n79ASl1WWoF4YCKQGXh_salKL2kh-VowIZ8cWqHs
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https://www.policeprofessional.com/news/exceptional-police-sniffer-dog-remembered/
Mij, an English Springer Spaniel, joined Nottinghamshire Police as a puppy and served for more than nine years with the force.
In that time he sniffed out many thousands of pounds’ worth of drugs, took guns and ammunition of the streets, and even helped to police the 2012 London Olympics.
After enjoying a happy retirement with new owners, Mij died on Tuesday (October 5) at the age of 17-and-a-half.
His former handler, retired Police Constable Stu Hazard, said: “Like a lot of Spaniels Mij was absolutely crazy. He really wasn’t the most obedient dog at all – but he was absolutely stunning at what he was trained to do, which was to sniff out drugs, cash, firearms and ammunition.
“Over the years we spent together he sniffed out probably hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drugs – in cars, in houses and even in dark fields. He was that good as a sniffer dog that it was pretty much impossible to hide anything from him.
“People would try to hide drugs in all sorts of places – in car door panels, inside gearstick housing, in plug sockets and under floorboards, but Mij would find them every single time.
“I remember one search we did at a garage where somebody had tried to hide a bag of drugs in a big tub of coffee. They clearly assume that the smell of the coffee would mask the smell of the drugs, but the thing with police dogs is they are trained only to sniff out a limited number of scents and they really aren’t interest in anything else. They also do it all for a tennis ball.
“Another time I remember we chased a lad in Southwell on suspicion of drugs offences. When we caught up with him he had nothing on him, but we were pretty sure he’d thrown something on the ground nearby . However it was pitch black and we had absolutely no hope of finding it ourselves. Mij sniffed out a bag of drugs almost as soon as he was let off the lead.
“I would really go so far as to say that if there was anything at all for Mij to find he would find it.”
Mij’s exploits – and his bond with PC Hazard – were featured in several television documentaries – at least one of which must have been seen by an unlucky Nottingham drug dealer.
PC Hazard explained: “This car had been pulled over in Wollaton Street, Nottingham, and the officers were holding four lads inside as me and Mij arrived at the scene. I remember the driver looking at as both, shaking his head and saying that he’d seen us on TV.
“He knew instantly he was in trouble so when I asked him if he had any drugs in the car he just came straight out with it and showed us a bag cocaine hidden in the footwell. He knew he had nowhere to go and just came out with it. I remember thinking that was a real compliment for Mij.”
The dog’s reputation, however, was well earned. Other significant finds over the years included a gun used in an armed robbery that had been buried in a garden, and two live rounds of ammunition found under a paving slab and a wheelie bin.
His career, however, was not entirely without risk and the work could occasionally throw up some unexpected challenges – including a giant snake.
PC Hazard added: “We were searching this lad’s house and I had just asked him all the usual questions we’d ask – including whether he had any other pets in the house. He said no so I let Mij off the lead and into the living room.
“At that point he stopped and went down on his front paws as if he was meeting another dog to play. I was still wondering what he was up to when I saw a 6ft python come slithering towards us. I was terrified and got us out of there as quickly as a I could.
“When I asked the guy why he hadn’t mentioned the snake he said he had forgotten to mention it – although I really have no idea how you forget the fact you have a 6ft snake in your house. I know I won’t forget it and I am pretty sure Mij didn’t either!”
For many years of this service Mij worked alongside PC Hazard’s former general purpose police dog Razor, which passed way earlier in the year.
PC Hazard added: “I used to see Mij regularly right up to the end his life. He really was a special dog and I was very sad to hear of his death. But I also felt a huge amount of pride at things we had done together.”
Police Professional | ‘Exceptional’ police sniffer dog remembered Mij, and English Springer Spaniel, joined Nottinghamshire Police as a puppy and served for more than nine years with the force. In that time he sniffed out many thousands of pounds’ worth of drugs, took guns and ammunition of the streets, and even helped to police the 2012 London Olympics. After ... www.policeprofessional.com |
In that time he sniffed out many thousands of pounds’ worth of drugs, took guns and ammunition of the streets, and even helped to police the 2012 London Olympics.
After enjoying a happy retirement with new owners, Mij died on Tuesday (October 5) at the age of 17-and-a-half.
His former handler, retired Police Constable Stu Hazard, said: “Like a lot of Spaniels Mij was absolutely crazy. He really wasn’t the most obedient dog at all – but he was absolutely stunning at what he was trained to do, which was to sniff out drugs, cash, firearms and ammunition.
“Over the years we spent together he sniffed out probably hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drugs – in cars, in houses and even in dark fields. He was that good as a sniffer dog that it was pretty much impossible to hide anything from him.
“People would try to hide drugs in all sorts of places – in car door panels, inside gearstick housing, in plug sockets and under floorboards, but Mij would find them every single time.
“I remember one search we did at a garage where somebody had tried to hide a bag of drugs in a big tub of coffee. They clearly assume that the smell of the coffee would mask the smell of the drugs, but the thing with police dogs is they are trained only to sniff out a limited number of scents and they really aren’t interest in anything else. They also do it all for a tennis ball.
“Another time I remember we chased a lad in Southwell on suspicion of drugs offences. When we caught up with him he had nothing on him, but we were pretty sure he’d thrown something on the ground nearby . However it was pitch black and we had absolutely no hope of finding it ourselves. Mij sniffed out a bag of drugs almost as soon as he was let off the lead.
“I would really go so far as to say that if there was anything at all for Mij to find he would find it.”
Mij’s exploits – and his bond with PC Hazard – were featured in several television documentaries – at least one of which must have been seen by an unlucky Nottingham drug dealer.
PC Hazard explained: “This car had been pulled over in Wollaton Street, Nottingham, and the officers were holding four lads inside as me and Mij arrived at the scene. I remember the driver looking at as both, shaking his head and saying that he’d seen us on TV.
“He knew instantly he was in trouble so when I asked him if he had any drugs in the car he just came straight out with it and showed us a bag cocaine hidden in the footwell. He knew he had nowhere to go and just came out with it. I remember thinking that was a real compliment for Mij.”
The dog’s reputation, however, was well earned. Other significant finds over the years included a gun used in an armed robbery that had been buried in a garden, and two live rounds of ammunition found under a paving slab and a wheelie bin.
His career, however, was not entirely without risk and the work could occasionally throw up some unexpected challenges – including a giant snake.
PC Hazard added: “We were searching this lad’s house and I had just asked him all the usual questions we’d ask – including whether he had any other pets in the house. He said no so I let Mij off the lead and into the living room.
“At that point he stopped and went down on his front paws as if he was meeting another dog to play. I was still wondering what he was up to when I saw a 6ft python come slithering towards us. I was terrified and got us out of there as quickly as a I could.
“When I asked the guy why he hadn’t mentioned the snake he said he had forgotten to mention it – although I really have no idea how you forget the fact you have a 6ft snake in your house. I know I won’t forget it and I am pretty sure Mij didn’t either!”
For many years of this service Mij worked alongside PC Hazard’s former general purpose police dog Razor, which passed way earlier in the year.
PC Hazard added: “I used to see Mij regularly right up to the end his life. He really was a special dog and I was very sad to hear of his death. But I also felt a huge amount of pride at things we had done together.”
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What a handsome fella , bloke's not bad either !
I had a German shepherd years ago , amazing dogs .
I had a German shepherd years ago , amazing dogs .
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1514244/teamdogs-lake-district-dogs-saved
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1524035/Teamdogs-rescue-dog-loyal
Don't ya just love the loyalty of a dog
Lake District dogs heroically saved stricken owner after suspected seizure | UK | News | Express.co.uk Lake District dogs heroically saved stricken owner, 71, after suspected seizure Two incredible dogs have been praised after raising the alarm when their owner collapsed in the Lake District. www.express.co.uk |
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1524035/Teamdogs-rescue-dog-loyal
Dog video: Loyal rescue dog waits all day for owner in adorable clip | UK | News | Express.co.uk The adorable clip has more than 11 million views on TikTok, with one commenter dubbing it the “best thing I’ve ever seen!”. Others said that the video was a testament to the amazing bond ... www.express.co.uk |
Don't ya just love the loyalty of a dog
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It looks like I feel this morning.
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
Sniffer dogs deployed to crack down on Commons cocaine use
Evidence of class A drugs have been discovered across the parliamentary estate, it has emerged.
by Henry Goodwin 2021-12-05 11:34in Politics
Sniffer dogs could soon be deployed in parliament under plans for a drugs crackdown.
The Speaker has vowed to call in the police amid evidence that cocaine and other illegal substances are being used on the parliamentary estate.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle said he would investigate Westminster’s drug culture after traces of cocaine were found in a number of places accessible only to people with parliamentary passes.
Charles Walker, a Tory MP who chairs the administration committee, told the Sunday Times that the issue would be discussed by a House of Commons commission next week.
“The House of Commons has a long history of using sniffer dogs to detect explosives,” he said. “It may be that we now need to broaden the range of sniffer dogs . . . to include those which can detect drugs.”
‘There is a drug problem’
Commons staffers were reportedly alerted last month to the smell of cannabis in the space between Portcullis House and 1 Parliament Street, after it emerged that two drug dealers were arrested – and 13 people detained for possession on the estate – in the space of a year.The newspaper reports that casual cocaine use is common among a group of MPs. Detection wipes found evidence of the drug in 11 out of 12 locations tested in the building.
Cocaine was discovered in the toilets next to the private offices of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, as well as in an accessible lavatory next to the office of Nick Thomas-Symonds, the former shadow home secretary.
Hoyle said: “It’s not just drink we’ve got to catch out, there is a drug problem.”
One source told the Sunday Times: “I have seen an MP openly snorting cocaine at a party. There were journalists present and I warned them that what they were doing was extremely dangerous and they could be exposed but they seemed to get off on the power trip.”
Another source added: “MPs tend to be more careful than staff and will go back to their office to do it rather than doing it in any of the public spaces, but I have heard of one staffer who walked in on their MP doing a late-night line at their desk.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Commons leader, said: “The palace of Westminster ought to be the bastion of lawfulness. There are a lot of police on the parliamentary estate who should enforce the law using all the tools at their disposal to stop drug dealing and drug abuse within the palace.”
Crackdown
It comes as Johnson prepares to launch a 10-year plan to tackle illegal drug-related crime which will include removing passports and driving licences from offenders, it has been reported.The crackdown will also include football-style travel bans, harsher sentences for drug dealers and measures to break up County Lines gangs.
The Sun reported Boris Johnson will outline “record” funding for addiction treatment and recovery services, with more money promised for the 50 local authorities with the worst drug issues including Middlesbrough, Blackpool and Liverpool.
“We need to look at new ways of penalising them. Things that will actually interfere with their lives,” Johnson told the paper.
“So we will look at taking away their passports and driving licences.
“We’re keeping nothing off the table,” he added.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/sniffer-dogs-deployed-to-crack-down-on-commons-cocaine-use-303830/?fbclid=IwAR1dW2tJTmCitS3T0uQAp-mLlZsT9ZxO2ODBJ7PwlvZRMidasYH9fnUBFr8
The MET police aren't going to like that much are they?
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No, they're not. They might have to look for evidence.
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
Get rid of the MPs and leave the dogs in charge , they'd do a much better job !
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/digi-dogs-police-sniffer-dogs-cybercrime-lnmbz5k5c
How a new squad of elite sniffer dogs are catching cybercriminals
Police dogs are hunting high-tech crime with their superior snouts. James Palmer meets the hounds and puppies in training
CHARLIE SURBEY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
James Palmer
Sunday December 12 2021, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
Jake the black labrador is sniffing his way around a doorframe excitedly, his tail drumming a radiator. Something has caught his attention. For a moment he stops and rests his nose on the frame. “It’s here,” he’s saying. “Found it.” Stuffed behind the woodwork, sticking out by a millimetre, is a microSD card, a tiny digital storage device that someone — usually a crook, but in this case an instructor at the Metropolitan Police’s dog training centre in Keston, southeast London — has attempted to hide.
“Good boy, Jake!” says PC Chris Duffee, Jake’s handler, clicking a training clicker — an instant Pavlovian signal that lets Jake know he has done his job — and dropping a tennis ball as a reward. Three-year-old Jake will do anything for a tennis ball, and as one of the Met’s four digital media detection dogs — a small but growing pack of hounds trained to unearth the tech used in crime — he knows exactly what he needs to do to be given one. Next, he sniffs out a USB stick that has been wedged under a table. Click goes the clicker; down goes the ball again. Whenever Jake makes a “find”, he gets his reward. It’s all a game to him. But to the police it’s a deadly serious business.
PC Chris Duffee indicates an area for Jake to search
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
With cybercrime soaring, criminals becoming more tech literate, and the size of their devices and memory cards shrinking, making them easier to hide, police forces have turned to the olfactory superpowers of dogs to hunt for evidence. Whether it’s a Sim card from a drug gang’s burner phone, a key fob for a getaway car, a terrorist’s mobile phone, a laptop in a fraud case or a paedophile’s hidden USB stick, Jake and his fellow “digi-dogs” can sniff it out.
“On every digital storage device there is a chemical that has a very specific scent,” explains the instructor, PC Brett French, one of three dog handlers who have been spearheading the Met’s digi-dog training scheme in conjunction with scientists from King’s College London since 2018. “These dogs can detect as little as 0.01 of a gram of it.” Dogs’ noses, French tells me, are packed with about 300 million olfactory receptors, compared with a paltry six million in ours.
Jake finds a USB stick
TOM BARNES
A year ago, shortly after completing a ten-week training course at Keston, Duffee and Jake joined French and his digi-dog, a cocker spaniel called Rhubarb, on their first raid and got an instant “result”. Their search of a property in Perivale, west London, led to the conviction of a known high-risk sex offender. Police had suspected that Nicky Mitchell, 38, might be concealing more digital devices than his sexual harm prevention order allowed. The order — issued to him after he was found to have indecent images of children while working as an au pair in America — contained several prohibitions, one of which was that he must declare any internet-enabled devices to his offender manager. Jake and Rhubarb sniffed out nine prohibited devices at his home, including a mobile phone, a camcorder, a hard drive and three USB sticks. Mitchell pleaded guilty to repeatedly breaching his order at Isleworth crown court last December. He is due to be sentenced this week.
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“We’ve had a lot of successes,” Duffee says, patting Jake. “The best ones for us are those that are deliberately concealed.” On another raid he says, “Jake gave me an indication on an empty iPhone box. He was adamant there was something there. Initially I thought maybe he’s just picking up a residual trace of the phone. But it revealed a false bottom, and within that was a hidden phone. They’re making these finds all the time — it’s stuff that could easily be missed by officers in a search.”
One of the Met’s first digi-dogs, Bolly, a female springer spaniel, unearthed a car key hidden in a pile of boxes that turned out to be vital evidence in a brutal 2019 jewellery robbery. A gang of four men were subsequently found guilty of beating up and robbing a travelling salesman of £4.1 million of Le Vian jewellery in the car park of a shopping centre in Staines, Surrey. They were sentenced to 65 years combined jail time.
Digi-dogs have also been involved in an international swoop on suspected bitcoin thieves. “Our dogs can find crypto wallets,” Duffee says, referring to the thumb drives on which people keep their private keys to access and move cryptocurrencies. In June 2019 six people were arrested in co-ordinated raids in Bath, and in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as part of a cyberfraud investigation into the theft of more than £22 million worth of bitcoin from an estimated 4,000-plus victims worldwide. Digi-dogs from the Met and from Devon and Cornwall police were called in for the search.
“We’ve been working with all sorts of multi-agency partners and having some really good results,” Duffee says — some of them unexpected. He was involved with “a big joint operation with City of London police — they were looking into a huge organised drugs gang, so we went to search for their devices. The dogs led us to a certain area where there was a device, but also there was a million pounds worth of drugs just sat there in food-delivery bags.”
What kind of drugs?
“Everything you can think of.”
Think “police dog” and you probably envisage a German shepherd or a Belgian malinois — something big, toothy and fierce. Those are the general purpose (GP) dogs — “the bitey ones”, as one officer at Keston calls them (and later I will find out why). Sniffer dogs are usually labradors, springer spaniels or cocker spaniels — traditional gundog retriever breeds that have what PC French calls “a high drive for search”. The Met has about 120 sniffers, trained to detect either explosives, drugs, firearms, cash or forensic evidence. Forensic dogs, says Inspector Stephen Biles, the man in charge at Keston, can help solve “sexual assaults, stranger rapes — we can use them to track down traces of semen in parks”. Others can find murder victims. “They are trained on human remains, human scent. They were deployed to Grenfell and in recent murder cases. They are also trained on boats, so we can find bodies in water. When a body is decomposing in water, gas bubbles will come up and the dogs can detect that human scent. In a huge lake, the dogs can narrow the search down for a dive team.”
Digi-dog training was pioneered in the US, in Connecticut, in 2015 by an instructor called Trooper First Class Mike Real — something of a legend in police dog training circles. Real had got hold of some labradors who had flunked out of guide-dog school. They had been deemed unsuitable for accompanying blind people because they were too excitable, too food-obsessed and too energetic: bad traits for canine carers, but perfect for would-be police dogs. Real used food rewards to retrain the bad guide dogs to sniff out the chemical coating used on digital storage devices.
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His work caught the attention of the FBI — and of PC Graham Attwood, a police dog instructor at Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police. Attwood hooked up with Real and the FBI, then launched a pilot scheme in Exeter in 2016 using a labrador called Rob and a springer spaniel called Tweed. Rob and Tweed graduated in 2017 to become the UK’s first digi-dogs and the programme was rolled out nationwide.
Duffee’s digi-dog, Jake, was born and bred here at Keston. In a far corner of the leafy 15-acre site is a low-rise building with the signs “Puppy block” and “Breeding unit” on the gate. “This is the Hilton for puppies,” says Inspector Biles, a jovial Yorkshireman, as he opens a back door to reveal a brood of eight-week-old blond and black labrador puppies scampering around a pen decked out like a nursery school playground with plastic tunnels. They tumble and squeak, wagging their tiny tails furiously as the gaffer sits gently among them like a uniformed Doctor Dolittle. “Yes, I do have the best inspector’s job in the Met,” Biles says with a grin as a real-life episode of PAW Patrol plays out around him. Then comes the acrid smell of puppy pee. “Watch your step,” says the inspector, the idyll (and his uniform) mildly sullied.
Inspector Stephen Biles tends to new labrador puppies
TOM BARNES
This cute contingent don’t know it yet but three of them will go on to become digi-dogs, three will become drugs dogs and the seventh, the strongest female, will become a brood bitch — the matriarch of future paw patrols. The brood bitches aren’t operational police dogs — they live a civilian life with accredited breeders but are brought to Keston for mating when they’re in season. The breeder normally names the puppies, but for one recent German shepherd litter that honour was given to Sue Bushby, the partner of Matt Ratana, a New Zealand-born police sergeant who was shot dead in a Croydon custody centre last year. “Matt was a very good friend of mine,” Biles says. “Sue came up for a day with the Met commissioner and met all the pups and named them.”
We walk past empty rooms, one with “Ratana Litter” still written on the door. “For their first seven weeks the puppies live in these heated rooms with mum. We use CCTV so we don’t have to disturb them,” Biles says. “Our breeding programmes are careful to look for that high-drive dog. All the dogs we get are high-drive.”
What the police call “drive”, you and I might call overexuberance — that eager-to-please, in-your-face boisterous energy that some dogs possess. “We don’t want a dog who’s going to sit in front of the fire and go ‘Mmm, lovely day’. We want ones that, to a member of the public, might look a little bit manic, because we can train that — these dogs are constantly looking to work and they want to be rewarded. We use spaniels for that reason.”
PC Duffee’s other dog is a springer spaniel called Max, who was acquired by the force as he was deemed too jumpy around the animals on the farm where he worked as a gundog. Now Max has channelled his energy into a new purpose: bomb detector. He swept for explosives during the terror attacks at London Bridge in 2017 and at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018. “Harry and Meghan’s wedding — that was difficult,” Duffee says, “because I had to search the reception area and everything was laid out. Having excitable springers running around tables with expensive glassware is a bit of a challenge.”
Jake and Max are trained with a ball
TOM BARNES
Max also took part in the security sweep at Wimbledon this year, which Duffee describes as “high pressure”. “Not only have you got all the tennis stars but the event attracts a lot of high-profile people such as the Duchess of Cambridge — so we’ll search the royal box. That’s an interesting event for the dogs because there are a lot of tennis balls. They think it’s brilliant because they’ll come out of the bushes next to the courts with balls they’ve found all day long, thinking, ‘This is great. I haven’t had to do anything and I’ve already got my ball.’ ”
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It feels like the moment to mention to Duffee and Biles that I have a cavapoo — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel crossed with a miniature poodle — called Fudge, who is addicted to chasing tennis balls. “That’ll be the spaniel in him,” Biles says. Admittedly Fudge is more Fozzie Bear than Hot Fuzz, but he can be annoyingly exuberant: could he be transformed into a high-drive police dog? Biles says, diplomatically, that he hasn’t seen a cavapoo enter the force yet.
Deploying dogs in the fight against crime is nothing new. As far back as the 15th century, parish constables in England took their pet dogs with them on night patrols. Sniffer dogs were first used by Scotland Yard in 1888, when a pair of bloodhounds, Burgho and Barnaby, were trained in the unfruitful hunt for Jack the Ripper. It was an inauspicious start. The bloodhounds were lampooned in the press, with reports about them getting lost in the London fog and biting the police commissioner — tales that have since been dismissed as shaggy-dog stories.
The truth is their sniffer training set a precedent. The first official police dogs in Britain were introduced by the North Eastern Railway police to patrol the Hull docks in 1908, inspired by a fact-finding trip to Ghent in Belgium, because the Belgians were well ahead in the police dog game. Dogs weren’t officially brought in by Scotland Yard until 1938. Today, Britain’s various police forces employ more than 2,500 dogs, most of them general purpose Belgian malinois (“malis” as the police refer to them) or German shepherds. On the day of my visit to Keston, a fresh batch of malis are being put through their paces over an assault course, leaping through window frames and over hurdles, and finding balls in tunnels.
Pups are bred at the Met’s dog training centre in Keston, Kent
TOM BARNES
“We brought these dogs over from Holland,” Biles says, adding that Covid-19 has led to a shortage of suitable dogs. “Normally they would have been bred here. We usually breed between 50 and 100 dogs a year but we had to suspend our programme during lockdown. We couldn’t go to meet the breeders. Our priority is to get dogs on the street, so there are times when we go and buy dogs when they are 12 to 14 months old. When they get over here, they get allocated to a handler for two or three weeks so they develop that bond. Then they start their 12-week training course. These five dogs are in week two.”
Police officers who apply successfully to become dog handlers start out with general purpose dogs, which are trained to bark at and, if necessary, bite criminals, especially the armed ones. They can track or chase suspects who have fled a crime scene. They can also find items like dropped wallets or car keys chucked away by drunk drivers following a crash: they are trained to find the residual human scent on property.
All police dogs live with their handlers, who are given compounds (shed-like outhouses) to keep them in their gardens at home. This, Biles says, can prove a stumbling block to recruiting officers in London. “We had a big conversation recently around why recruitment is down — and the reason is so many people these days live in flats.”
Those who do have the space to keep a police dog at home, and whose applications are successful, go on to form deep bonds with their animals. One officer, PC Ben Hendley, tells me he had his first general purpose dog as a puppy. “She went through the training and was a lovely pet, but she couldn’t handle it as a working dog in the real world. She didn’t want to be a police dog, so she had to be rehomed.”
Police officers and their dogs on the hunt for explosives in Windsor ahead of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018
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His second dog was brought over as a puppy from Portugal and worked until he was six. “I lost him quite tragically back in January, very suddenly and quite unexpectedly,” Hendley says, still clearly mourning his old partner. “He had an intestinal torsion and the vet couldn’t save him.” A few months later he was paired with a rescue dog — a Dutch herder called Riley. But Riley, like Hendley’s first dog, didn’t take to fighting crime and was rehomed.
Hendley has two young children at home. How have his various canine colleagues made the transition from work mode, where they could be tasked with chasing a knife-wielding gangster, to being around small children? “They’re great. After work the dogs just switch off. It’s quite amazing, actually. They go to work, do the business, come home and switch off, just like we do.” And how do you switch them back on again? “They just know — the uniform goes on, they see the police cars and everything clicks into place.”
Occasionally, dogs will get hurt. In May, one of the Met’s malinois, Kaiser, was stabbed five times in the head and once just below the eye while trying to subdue a man in south London. Kaiser had been on patrol with his handler, PC Mark Woolcott, answering a call about an intruder in the back garden of a house in Orpington. The knife struck bone, narrowly avoiding serious injury. Despite this, Kaiser kept hold of the attacker until officers arrived to detain him. The man was held under the Mental Health Act. Kaiser made a full recovery and returned to work in August.
Kaiser, a Belgian malinois, was stabbed five times in May
MET POLICE
Watching a GP dog learn how to “switch on and off” is a remarkable thing. On a large field at Keston, PC James Carrigan has put on a protective sleeve in preparation for some bite-training with a “very sharp, very drivey” mali called Havoc. Havoc’s handler, Neil Bye, shouts at Carrigan: “Drop the weapon, mate! Last chance! Don’t run …” Havoc barks the kind of terrifying, deep-throated bark that would make any sane person not run. But Carrigan legs it, his padded arm held out, brandishing an imaginary weapon. So Bye unleashes Havoc, who goes from 0-30 miles per hour in a blink and dives at Carrigan, biting him hard on his outstretched arm in full flight. The force knocks the officer right off his feet, and man and beast scud into the grass — Havoc’s teeth still clamped firm. Bye runs in and apprehends his colleague (checking he’s OK in the process). “Good dog,” they both say, as Carrigan releases the sleeve and Havoc trots off with it in his mouth, wagging his tail.
What triggers the dog to let go? “The handler, with the command ‘leave’ or ‘loss’,” Biles says. “Part of the licence they are working towards, when we test them, is that in the bite scenario they have to leave on command. We can’t have a situation where a dog is just ragging their arm all over the place.” Obedience is paramount.
Carrigan gets up and dusts himself down, unfazed. A tall, well-built officer (his colleagues joke that he’s “the pin-up of the dog squad”), he’s used to diving around in the grass: as a teenager he used to play in goal for Hayes FC. He tells me he applied for the dog section “after seeing the amazing work our dogs do as a local officer on the street. I just fell in love with it.”
Havoc, a trainee general purpose malinois, leaps into action to bring down a fleeing PC James Carrigan in an exercise at Keston
TOM BARNES
His German shepherd has recently retired. “I did general purpose and firearms support with him — gun crime around London, detaining people with loaded firearms in the streets. He’s had some good results.” Did his dog ever get shot at? “He’s never had a gun fired at him, but he’s chased and detained people who’d already committed an offence with a firearm. To be the ones who get there first is scary enough, really, whether a gun is pointed at you or not.”
The GP dogs generally work until they are eight years old, and live to about 11. The spaniels work till around the age of ten and tend to live longer. They will invariably see out their retirement living with their handler’s family or another police family, with vet bills (often big ones for a retired police dog carrying a lifetime of wear and tear) paid for with the help of independent charities such as the Thin Blue Paw Foundation (thinbluepaw.org.uk), since old police dogs can often be uninsurable. Some retired dogs, particularly the labs and spaniels, become comfort dogs in the community.
As I leave Keston, one member of the dog squad tells me why he loves his job so much: “People have such an affinity with their pet dogs, don’t they?” I nod and am about to start wanging on about Fudge, when he says: “But there’s nothing better than training a dog to fulfil a good purpose. You’ve gone through this whole process of getting a pup at eight weeks old. And when you finally catch somebody, it’s just the best feeling ever.”
Fudge, we’ve got some training to do.
How a new squad of elite sniffer dogs are catching cybercriminals
Police dogs are hunting high-tech crime with their superior snouts. James Palmer meets the hounds and puppies in training
CHARLIE SURBEY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
James Palmer
Sunday December 12 2021, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
Jake the black labrador is sniffing his way around a doorframe excitedly, his tail drumming a radiator. Something has caught his attention. For a moment he stops and rests his nose on the frame. “It’s here,” he’s saying. “Found it.” Stuffed behind the woodwork, sticking out by a millimetre, is a microSD card, a tiny digital storage device that someone — usually a crook, but in this case an instructor at the Metropolitan Police’s dog training centre in Keston, southeast London — has attempted to hide.
“Good boy, Jake!” says PC Chris Duffee, Jake’s handler, clicking a training clicker — an instant Pavlovian signal that lets Jake know he has done his job — and dropping a tennis ball as a reward. Three-year-old Jake will do anything for a tennis ball, and as one of the Met’s four digital media detection dogs — a small but growing pack of hounds trained to unearth the tech used in crime — he knows exactly what he needs to do to be given one. Next, he sniffs out a USB stick that has been wedged under a table. Click goes the clicker; down goes the ball again. Whenever Jake makes a “find”, he gets his reward. It’s all a game to him. But to the police it’s a deadly serious business.
PC Chris Duffee indicates an area for Jake to search
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
With cybercrime soaring, criminals becoming more tech literate, and the size of their devices and memory cards shrinking, making them easier to hide, police forces have turned to the olfactory superpowers of dogs to hunt for evidence. Whether it’s a Sim card from a drug gang’s burner phone, a key fob for a getaway car, a terrorist’s mobile phone, a laptop in a fraud case or a paedophile’s hidden USB stick, Jake and his fellow “digi-dogs” can sniff it out.
“On every digital storage device there is a chemical that has a very specific scent,” explains the instructor, PC Brett French, one of three dog handlers who have been spearheading the Met’s digi-dog training scheme in conjunction with scientists from King’s College London since 2018. “These dogs can detect as little as 0.01 of a gram of it.” Dogs’ noses, French tells me, are packed with about 300 million olfactory receptors, compared with a paltry six million in ours.
Jake finds a USB stick
TOM BARNES
A year ago, shortly after completing a ten-week training course at Keston, Duffee and Jake joined French and his digi-dog, a cocker spaniel called Rhubarb, on their first raid and got an instant “result”. Their search of a property in Perivale, west London, led to the conviction of a known high-risk sex offender. Police had suspected that Nicky Mitchell, 38, might be concealing more digital devices than his sexual harm prevention order allowed. The order — issued to him after he was found to have indecent images of children while working as an au pair in America — contained several prohibitions, one of which was that he must declare any internet-enabled devices to his offender manager. Jake and Rhubarb sniffed out nine prohibited devices at his home, including a mobile phone, a camcorder, a hard drive and three USB sticks. Mitchell pleaded guilty to repeatedly breaching his order at Isleworth crown court last December. He is due to be sentenced this week.
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“We’ve had a lot of successes,” Duffee says, patting Jake. “The best ones for us are those that are deliberately concealed.” On another raid he says, “Jake gave me an indication on an empty iPhone box. He was adamant there was something there. Initially I thought maybe he’s just picking up a residual trace of the phone. But it revealed a false bottom, and within that was a hidden phone. They’re making these finds all the time — it’s stuff that could easily be missed by officers in a search.”
One of the Met’s first digi-dogs, Bolly, a female springer spaniel, unearthed a car key hidden in a pile of boxes that turned out to be vital evidence in a brutal 2019 jewellery robbery. A gang of four men were subsequently found guilty of beating up and robbing a travelling salesman of £4.1 million of Le Vian jewellery in the car park of a shopping centre in Staines, Surrey. They were sentenced to 65 years combined jail time.
Digi-dogs have also been involved in an international swoop on suspected bitcoin thieves. “Our dogs can find crypto wallets,” Duffee says, referring to the thumb drives on which people keep their private keys to access and move cryptocurrencies. In June 2019 six people were arrested in co-ordinated raids in Bath, and in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as part of a cyberfraud investigation into the theft of more than £22 million worth of bitcoin from an estimated 4,000-plus victims worldwide. Digi-dogs from the Met and from Devon and Cornwall police were called in for the search.
“We’ve been working with all sorts of multi-agency partners and having some really good results,” Duffee says — some of them unexpected. He was involved with “a big joint operation with City of London police — they were looking into a huge organised drugs gang, so we went to search for their devices. The dogs led us to a certain area where there was a device, but also there was a million pounds worth of drugs just sat there in food-delivery bags.”
What kind of drugs?
“Everything you can think of.”
Think “police dog” and you probably envisage a German shepherd or a Belgian malinois — something big, toothy and fierce. Those are the general purpose (GP) dogs — “the bitey ones”, as one officer at Keston calls them (and later I will find out why). Sniffer dogs are usually labradors, springer spaniels or cocker spaniels — traditional gundog retriever breeds that have what PC French calls “a high drive for search”. The Met has about 120 sniffers, trained to detect either explosives, drugs, firearms, cash or forensic evidence. Forensic dogs, says Inspector Stephen Biles, the man in charge at Keston, can help solve “sexual assaults, stranger rapes — we can use them to track down traces of semen in parks”. Others can find murder victims. “They are trained on human remains, human scent. They were deployed to Grenfell and in recent murder cases. They are also trained on boats, so we can find bodies in water. When a body is decomposing in water, gas bubbles will come up and the dogs can detect that human scent. In a huge lake, the dogs can narrow the search down for a dive team.”
Digi-dog training was pioneered in the US, in Connecticut, in 2015 by an instructor called Trooper First Class Mike Real — something of a legend in police dog training circles. Real had got hold of some labradors who had flunked out of guide-dog school. They had been deemed unsuitable for accompanying blind people because they were too excitable, too food-obsessed and too energetic: bad traits for canine carers, but perfect for would-be police dogs. Real used food rewards to retrain the bad guide dogs to sniff out the chemical coating used on digital storage devices.
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His work caught the attention of the FBI — and of PC Graham Attwood, a police dog instructor at Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police. Attwood hooked up with Real and the FBI, then launched a pilot scheme in Exeter in 2016 using a labrador called Rob and a springer spaniel called Tweed. Rob and Tweed graduated in 2017 to become the UK’s first digi-dogs and the programme was rolled out nationwide.
Duffee’s digi-dog, Jake, was born and bred here at Keston. In a far corner of the leafy 15-acre site is a low-rise building with the signs “Puppy block” and “Breeding unit” on the gate. “This is the Hilton for puppies,” says Inspector Biles, a jovial Yorkshireman, as he opens a back door to reveal a brood of eight-week-old blond and black labrador puppies scampering around a pen decked out like a nursery school playground with plastic tunnels. They tumble and squeak, wagging their tiny tails furiously as the gaffer sits gently among them like a uniformed Doctor Dolittle. “Yes, I do have the best inspector’s job in the Met,” Biles says with a grin as a real-life episode of PAW Patrol plays out around him. Then comes the acrid smell of puppy pee. “Watch your step,” says the inspector, the idyll (and his uniform) mildly sullied.
Inspector Stephen Biles tends to new labrador puppies
TOM BARNES
This cute contingent don’t know it yet but three of them will go on to become digi-dogs, three will become drugs dogs and the seventh, the strongest female, will become a brood bitch — the matriarch of future paw patrols. The brood bitches aren’t operational police dogs — they live a civilian life with accredited breeders but are brought to Keston for mating when they’re in season. The breeder normally names the puppies, but for one recent German shepherd litter that honour was given to Sue Bushby, the partner of Matt Ratana, a New Zealand-born police sergeant who was shot dead in a Croydon custody centre last year. “Matt was a very good friend of mine,” Biles says. “Sue came up for a day with the Met commissioner and met all the pups and named them.”
We walk past empty rooms, one with “Ratana Litter” still written on the door. “For their first seven weeks the puppies live in these heated rooms with mum. We use CCTV so we don’t have to disturb them,” Biles says. “Our breeding programmes are careful to look for that high-drive dog. All the dogs we get are high-drive.”
What the police call “drive”, you and I might call overexuberance — that eager-to-please, in-your-face boisterous energy that some dogs possess. “We don’t want a dog who’s going to sit in front of the fire and go ‘Mmm, lovely day’. We want ones that, to a member of the public, might look a little bit manic, because we can train that — these dogs are constantly looking to work and they want to be rewarded. We use spaniels for that reason.”
PC Duffee’s other dog is a springer spaniel called Max, who was acquired by the force as he was deemed too jumpy around the animals on the farm where he worked as a gundog. Now Max has channelled his energy into a new purpose: bomb detector. He swept for explosives during the terror attacks at London Bridge in 2017 and at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018. “Harry and Meghan’s wedding — that was difficult,” Duffee says, “because I had to search the reception area and everything was laid out. Having excitable springers running around tables with expensive glassware is a bit of a challenge.”
Jake and Max are trained with a ball
TOM BARNES
Max also took part in the security sweep at Wimbledon this year, which Duffee describes as “high pressure”. “Not only have you got all the tennis stars but the event attracts a lot of high-profile people such as the Duchess of Cambridge — so we’ll search the royal box. That’s an interesting event for the dogs because there are a lot of tennis balls. They think it’s brilliant because they’ll come out of the bushes next to the courts with balls they’ve found all day long, thinking, ‘This is great. I haven’t had to do anything and I’ve already got my ball.’ ”
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It feels like the moment to mention to Duffee and Biles that I have a cavapoo — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel crossed with a miniature poodle — called Fudge, who is addicted to chasing tennis balls. “That’ll be the spaniel in him,” Biles says. Admittedly Fudge is more Fozzie Bear than Hot Fuzz, but he can be annoyingly exuberant: could he be transformed into a high-drive police dog? Biles says, diplomatically, that he hasn’t seen a cavapoo enter the force yet.
Deploying dogs in the fight against crime is nothing new. As far back as the 15th century, parish constables in England took their pet dogs with them on night patrols. Sniffer dogs were first used by Scotland Yard in 1888, when a pair of bloodhounds, Burgho and Barnaby, were trained in the unfruitful hunt for Jack the Ripper. It was an inauspicious start. The bloodhounds were lampooned in the press, with reports about them getting lost in the London fog and biting the police commissioner — tales that have since been dismissed as shaggy-dog stories.
The truth is their sniffer training set a precedent. The first official police dogs in Britain were introduced by the North Eastern Railway police to patrol the Hull docks in 1908, inspired by a fact-finding trip to Ghent in Belgium, because the Belgians were well ahead in the police dog game. Dogs weren’t officially brought in by Scotland Yard until 1938. Today, Britain’s various police forces employ more than 2,500 dogs, most of them general purpose Belgian malinois (“malis” as the police refer to them) or German shepherds. On the day of my visit to Keston, a fresh batch of malis are being put through their paces over an assault course, leaping through window frames and over hurdles, and finding balls in tunnels.
Pups are bred at the Met’s dog training centre in Keston, Kent
TOM BARNES
“We brought these dogs over from Holland,” Biles says, adding that Covid-19 has led to a shortage of suitable dogs. “Normally they would have been bred here. We usually breed between 50 and 100 dogs a year but we had to suspend our programme during lockdown. We couldn’t go to meet the breeders. Our priority is to get dogs on the street, so there are times when we go and buy dogs when they are 12 to 14 months old. When they get over here, they get allocated to a handler for two or three weeks so they develop that bond. Then they start their 12-week training course. These five dogs are in week two.”
Police officers who apply successfully to become dog handlers start out with general purpose dogs, which are trained to bark at and, if necessary, bite criminals, especially the armed ones. They can track or chase suspects who have fled a crime scene. They can also find items like dropped wallets or car keys chucked away by drunk drivers following a crash: they are trained to find the residual human scent on property.
All police dogs live with their handlers, who are given compounds (shed-like outhouses) to keep them in their gardens at home. This, Biles says, can prove a stumbling block to recruiting officers in London. “We had a big conversation recently around why recruitment is down — and the reason is so many people these days live in flats.”
Those who do have the space to keep a police dog at home, and whose applications are successful, go on to form deep bonds with their animals. One officer, PC Ben Hendley, tells me he had his first general purpose dog as a puppy. “She went through the training and was a lovely pet, but she couldn’t handle it as a working dog in the real world. She didn’t want to be a police dog, so she had to be rehomed.”
Police officers and their dogs on the hunt for explosives in Windsor ahead of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018
PA
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His second dog was brought over as a puppy from Portugal and worked until he was six. “I lost him quite tragically back in January, very suddenly and quite unexpectedly,” Hendley says, still clearly mourning his old partner. “He had an intestinal torsion and the vet couldn’t save him.” A few months later he was paired with a rescue dog — a Dutch herder called Riley. But Riley, like Hendley’s first dog, didn’t take to fighting crime and was rehomed.
Hendley has two young children at home. How have his various canine colleagues made the transition from work mode, where they could be tasked with chasing a knife-wielding gangster, to being around small children? “They’re great. After work the dogs just switch off. It’s quite amazing, actually. They go to work, do the business, come home and switch off, just like we do.” And how do you switch them back on again? “They just know — the uniform goes on, they see the police cars and everything clicks into place.”
Occasionally, dogs will get hurt. In May, one of the Met’s malinois, Kaiser, was stabbed five times in the head and once just below the eye while trying to subdue a man in south London. Kaiser had been on patrol with his handler, PC Mark Woolcott, answering a call about an intruder in the back garden of a house in Orpington. The knife struck bone, narrowly avoiding serious injury. Despite this, Kaiser kept hold of the attacker until officers arrived to detain him. The man was held under the Mental Health Act. Kaiser made a full recovery and returned to work in August.
Kaiser, a Belgian malinois, was stabbed five times in May
MET POLICE
Watching a GP dog learn how to “switch on and off” is a remarkable thing. On a large field at Keston, PC James Carrigan has put on a protective sleeve in preparation for some bite-training with a “very sharp, very drivey” mali called Havoc. Havoc’s handler, Neil Bye, shouts at Carrigan: “Drop the weapon, mate! Last chance! Don’t run …” Havoc barks the kind of terrifying, deep-throated bark that would make any sane person not run. But Carrigan legs it, his padded arm held out, brandishing an imaginary weapon. So Bye unleashes Havoc, who goes from 0-30 miles per hour in a blink and dives at Carrigan, biting him hard on his outstretched arm in full flight. The force knocks the officer right off his feet, and man and beast scud into the grass — Havoc’s teeth still clamped firm. Bye runs in and apprehends his colleague (checking he’s OK in the process). “Good dog,” they both say, as Carrigan releases the sleeve and Havoc trots off with it in his mouth, wagging his tail.
What triggers the dog to let go? “The handler, with the command ‘leave’ or ‘loss’,” Biles says. “Part of the licence they are working towards, when we test them, is that in the bite scenario they have to leave on command. We can’t have a situation where a dog is just ragging their arm all over the place.” Obedience is paramount.
Carrigan gets up and dusts himself down, unfazed. A tall, well-built officer (his colleagues joke that he’s “the pin-up of the dog squad”), he’s used to diving around in the grass: as a teenager he used to play in goal for Hayes FC. He tells me he applied for the dog section “after seeing the amazing work our dogs do as a local officer on the street. I just fell in love with it.”
Havoc, a trainee general purpose malinois, leaps into action to bring down a fleeing PC James Carrigan in an exercise at Keston
TOM BARNES
His German shepherd has recently retired. “I did general purpose and firearms support with him — gun crime around London, detaining people with loaded firearms in the streets. He’s had some good results.” Did his dog ever get shot at? “He’s never had a gun fired at him, but he’s chased and detained people who’d already committed an offence with a firearm. To be the ones who get there first is scary enough, really, whether a gun is pointed at you or not.”
The GP dogs generally work until they are eight years old, and live to about 11. The spaniels work till around the age of ten and tend to live longer. They will invariably see out their retirement living with their handler’s family or another police family, with vet bills (often big ones for a retired police dog carrying a lifetime of wear and tear) paid for with the help of independent charities such as the Thin Blue Paw Foundation (thinbluepaw.org.uk), since old police dogs can often be uninsurable. Some retired dogs, particularly the labs and spaniels, become comfort dogs in the community.
As I leave Keston, one member of the dog squad tells me why he loves his job so much: “People have such an affinity with their pet dogs, don’t they?” I nod and am about to start wanging on about Fudge, when he says: “But there’s nothing better than training a dog to fulfil a good purpose. You’ve gone through this whole process of getting a pup at eight weeks old. And when you finally catch somebody, it’s just the best feeling ever.”
Fudge, we’ve got some training to do.
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Re: Those incredibly 'unreliable' DOGS............again!
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