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Dog's play
K-9 units capitalize on their animals' noses and drive for the prize
Friday, Oct. 9, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by REID SILVERMAN
Officer Tim Pheabus with a Southern Maryland Maryland Natural Resources Police K-9 Unit follows Ruddy, his canine partner, last Wednesday morning as they and other K-9 units from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware conducted quarterly training at Greenwell State Park.
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The man with a gun had parked his truck. Glancing around a few times, he lifted up the gun, aimed and took a few shots at an animal in the distance. Spooked for some reason, he ditched the weapon near a cornfield and escaped into the woods at Greenwell State Park in Hollywood last Wednesday morning.
The game had begun.
Moments later, a Maryland Natural Resources Police vehicle, with its lights flashing red and blue, pulled up next to the cornfield. Two officers got out. And then, to locate the suspected poacher, the officers let out their secret weapon in poaching cases, search and rescue calls, wildlife detection and other tasks.
Ruddy, a specially trained, 3-year-old Labrador retriever jumped out of the SUV.
Her tail was wagging. She was ready to work.
But it wasn't really work this time. The poaching simulation was part of a quarterly four-day K-9 Maryland Natural Resources Police training session, held for the first time at Greenwell last week. To the 10 dogs – seven from Maryland, two from Pennsylvania and one from Delaware – this serious work is viewed as play, even when it's not a training exercise.
Ruddy's handler, Officer Tim Pheabus, put a harness on the dog, one of the signals that a job is about to begin, according to Cpl. April Sharpeta of the natural resources police, who gave a play-by-play description of what was happening during the poaching simulation.
Picking up the scent track left just moments earlier by the now out-of-sight poacher, Ruddy, head down, pulled Pheabus along the track with only slight variations from the path the poacher took and quickly located the gun — important in poaching cases because hunters/poachers can claim to be hikers if there is no gun — and then made a beeline for the poacher watching from the woods.
"Good girl!" Pheabus said, and then to the poacher, "Come out with your hands up!"
In this case, however, the would-be poacher was Officer Casey Zolper of the Delaware Fish and Game Department.
Pheabus removed the harness from Ruddy and initiated a game of fetch with the ecstatic dog.
"They definitely walk differently after they've found somebody. It's not uncommon for them to gloat," Sharpeta said.
The game of fetch is part of what the dogs work for, she said. "All our dogs work for praise or reward," she said. For some dogs, it is a game of fetch, for others, once they have completed a task, they get a game of tug-of-war with their handler. Totally worth it."
"It's a game for them. It's a big game," said Sgt. Arthur Windemuth, public information officer for the Maryland Natural Resources Police office of the superintendent.
After the morning was spent tracking poachers, the dogs and their handlers practiced maritime searches in the water near Greenwell's kayak launch, simulating a search for a drowning victim. The next simulation focused on the recovery of illegal game. "This is the kind of situation we run into," Sharpeta said.
Ruddy is the canine assigned to Southern Maryland, where she keeps busy primarily with fishing checks, hunting checks and rescues on the water. The dogs are also called to help other agencies in the state such as the Maryland State Police. In this capacity, the natural resources police dogs have worked cases for homicide victims and missing persons.
The dogs are all Labrador retrievers, except for one that is a Lab mix. Labs work well because they are bred to thrive in the places where hunting occurs and they are not an aggressive breed, making them particularly appropriate for the search for a lost child, officers said.
The dogs are prized for their sense of smell, which is about 40 times better than a human's, said Officer Curt Dieterle, who works with a black Lab, named Blu.
The dogs can follow a scent track that is 10 hours old. They can discriminate between two people walking together, able to stick with the focus person's track even if the people start walking in opposite directions. They can find even tiny items that had been handled by a subject like a bullet casing or a driver's license.
"These are resources that completely help us do our job," said Sgt. Lisa Nyland, who started the K-9 program with the Maryland Natural Resources Police and who works with dogs on the Eastern Shore. The dogs help the officers do their work faster and better, she said.
The use of canines with the natural resources police in the state began officially in 1994, started with a $2,500 donation. For the first year, Nyland paid all the bills. After that, funding was obtained through donations or through other programs. "Last year, we got our own budget specifically earmarked for canine … the first time," she said.
Nyland said her most memorable assignment was as part of the search team that helped identify victims of the 9-11 attack on the Pentagon. The human remains were so small and so mixed with building materials that search dogs were necessary, she said. "Without the dogs, they said nothing would have been found," she said, adding that 185 out the 189 victims were identified because of dogs working on the site. "It was an honor to be there and do that."
