Molly’s kind of new at her job: in fact, she’s still in training, but her supervisor, Darrell Mikesh, said she’s showing promise. She started recently and, once trained, will replace an older worker getting ready to retire from the Albemarle County Police Department.
Molly’s first assignment is to learn to chase her trainer over increasing distances. This isn’t hard for Molly. She’s a bloodhound, being trained for a variety of situations where it’s urgent to find someone. She won’t apprehend a fugitive or take down a violent criminal. Bloodhounds are not protective or aggressive, so that’s an assignment for a different kind of police dog. “She’ll be trained to track and to expect a reward,” said Sergeant Casey Flippin. Most likely, the reward will be a Vienna sausage. In some cases, a patrol dog—the department uses Malinois, or Belgian shepherds—will work together with a bloodhound to follow and apprehend a suspect.
There are other rewards besides the little sausages that motivate bloodhounds, including affection from their handler, and the joy of doing what they were born to do. Bloodhounds love to track and are happiest when they’re put on a scent. Their traditional place in detective work is legendary, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. Once Molly gets the chase part down, Mikesh will get progressively farther away, and then will start hiding from the puppy at 10 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards and eventually a mile or more away, completely out of the dog’s line of sight. Early discipline and training for this little puppy are important. Following a scent is so motivating even for young bloodhounds that it can override other important lessons, like walking calmly on a leash, or returning to its owner.
Mikesh and Flippin explained that we humans––as well as other animals––each have our own smell, partly from what we eat, partly from lotions and soaps, but mainly from the specific smell of our skin, a smell that’s not apparent to us or other less-gifted creatures. The 50,000 or so skin cells that we shed every second are not like anyone else’s and easy for a bloodhound’s sensitive nose to differentiate.
Molly’s nose will be her main guide, but she’ll also be trained to notice visual signs that indicate that she’s on the right path, like slight disturbances in the ground. Even there, she’ll smell them as well as see them. Bloodhounds, with 300 times the smell power of humans (most dogs are a mere 100 times better than us), can detect the smell of a stalk of grass that’s trampled or broken as opposed to one that’s intact.
The officers involved in Molly’s selection were guided by an expert in canine behavior when Bella, the bloodhound presently on duty, was scheduled for retirement. They said that, while every bloodhound has a super-sensitive nose, not every dog is independent enough for police work. The dogs need to be secure enough to start out on a path away from their handler, recognizing that the officer will be right behind them.
There are many local examples of situations where a dog that’s trained to follow but not to apprehend might be the best choice. One recent mission for Bella, the veteran bloodhound, was to find a person who had disappeared, someone whose family thought might be suicidal. Once Bella became familiar with the scent from the driver’s abandoned vehicle, she was able to locate the missing person and allow the officers to offer help.
Hot weather poses a few logistical problems for the Albemarle County Police dog handlers. They don’t want to endanger the health of their dogs by letting them get too hot, but they also recognize the danger of working with the dog out in the field if they’ve never become acclimated to heat or cold. For this reason, Flippin said, each of the five dogs employed by the county ride with their handlers in specially-equipped cars. “If the car reaches a certain temperature, alarms go off and fans go on.” This high-tech solution allows the officers to bring the dogs inside into air conditioning if needed. But they’re seldom alone. Most of the time they’re riding or walking with their handlers, and they always return home with them at night.
The bloodhounds as well as the Malinois employed by county law enforcement don’t need a retirement plan. Both breeds are loyal and affectionate, and when their working years are over, they simply become pets. “In our department, the officer they’ve worked with is allowed to keep them,” Flippin said. “So far, 100% of our dogs have remained with their handlers.”
