Syracuse.com - The nose knows: DEC dog helps conservation officers solve cases

[HuntingNY-News]

Today, six of the nine DEC regions in the state have K9 units, which consist of one dog and one handler. The dogs are trained to locate venison, along with other types of meat such as black bear and wild turkey. Some are even trained to sniff for trout and perch and bass.

Michelle Gabel/The Post-StandardBrett Armstrong, state environmental conservation officer, poses outside the DEC building on Erie Boulevard with Nitro, a German shepherd that helps investigate hunting accidents. By Melissa Faith Siegel

Contributing writer

Back in early November 2010, a man called state environmental conservation officer Brett Armstrong, saying he suspected his neighbor had shot and killed a deer with a gun during bow season.

Armstrong took his K9 dog, Nitro, to the suspect’s property in the town of Greene in Chenango County. The German shepherd found the 10-point buck that had been killed illegally. It was in a barn, covered by a blue tarp in a mound of hay.

“Never would have made that case without the dog,” Armstrong said. “I had absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a deer had been taken, but his nose detecting the odor in the air two barns away was enough to get us to where the evidence was.”

Armstrong and Nitro are part of the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s K9 unit, which was first started in 1978 with a dog named Paws and his handler, Richard Matzell. Today, six of the nine DEC regions in the state have K9 units, which consist of one dog and one handler. The dogs are trained to locate venison, along with other types of meat such as black bear and wild turkey.

Some are even trained to sniff for trout and perch, along with largemouth and smallmouth bass.

Unlike with police dogs that sniff out drugs — where everything they find is illegal — meat and fish can be legally possessed. So once the dog has found something, it is up to the handler to determine whether any illegal activity has occurred.

The dogs are also trained to find the smell of burned gunpowder, which is evidence of a gunshot. This helps the officer determine where a gun was fired from and in what direction, which in turn helps in the reconstruction of hunting-related shooting incidents. Such incidents involve hunters causing damage to another person or property.

The third use for the dogs is locating missing persons, or possible criminals who are trying to escape. However, many times there is no material available that has the scent of the person on it, or if there is, it has been contaminated. The dogs are trained to track the freshest human scent or track in an area where the person was known to have been.

The dogs are also taught how to help apprehend criminals and how to protect their handlers. They’ll bite, if necessary. Armstrong said he knows of only two bites that have taken place in the program in its 34 years.

“A lot of people think that police dogs are vicious. They’re not,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong first applied to be a handler in 2004 and then got Nitro from the Czech Republic when the dog was a year and a day old. Most of the K9 dogs are from Europe rather than the United States because American dogs are bred more for show.

Armstrong said the K9 program specifically looks for dogs that are between one and two years old. With dogs younger than a year old it is hard to tell if they will have the temperament for the job, while those older than two have fewer usable years left in them. It is also key that the dogs are social, neither too aggressive nor timid, and have “a high ball drive,” which means they love to play.

“We kind of use the ball as their currency,” Armstrong explained. “If they want that ball, they’ll do anything for it, and we can utilize that in many different ways in order to trick the dog into thinking that work is actually just fun play.”

Once a handler gets assigned a dog, the two go through 16 weeks of basic training before they meet the qualifications to be certified for field work. They then must continue training for a minimum of 16 hours per month, in addition to taking a three-day annual recertification test.

“I spend more time with my dog than I do my wife,” Armstrong said, and laughed.

The training begins with basic obedience, which is teaching the dog to sit, stay, heel and lie down on command. From there the dogs learn the various forms of detection.

“You can fool my eyes, you can fool my brain, you can fool my ears, but you can’t fool the dog’s nose,” Armstrong said.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog