CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- "Such! Such!," the man says to his dog, Nitro, as they walk through the woods. "Find it! Track!"
Nitro scurries up the leaf-covered hill at Coonskin Park, keeping his nose to the ground, following a scent no human can smell.
The man worries that the steady rainfall is going to wash away the trail, but the dog keeps pulling him steadily up the hill.
The team climbs up one last bank before Nitro starts barking. A man in a camouflage jacket walks around a corner.
"Good job, Nitro! Good boy!" Deputy C.M. Morgan says to his dog, patting him fiercely on the back as the other man walks toward the team, smiling.
"If this had been a real suspect, I would have to say 'releasing the K-9' three times before I let the dog go," Morgan said.
Luckily for Cpl. Eric Flowers, Morgan didn't let Nitro off his lead during the monthly Kanawha County Sheriff's Department K-9 training exercise at Coonskin Park.
Morgan, who has been working with Nitro for five years, said he was happy with the conditions, even though the temperature barely rose above 40 degrees and the rain was steady.
"It teaches the dogs how to deal with it," he said. "It's not always going to be perfect outside."
Morgan and Nitro are one of the seven K-9 teams for the sheriff's department, in addition to two dogs devoted solely to the bomb team. The unit may get a little bigger as three 6-month-old pups, Riley, Nala and Scout, will start training soon.
"It takes about 14 weeks to really train a dog if you do it all day, every day," said Lt. Bryan Robbins, commander of the K-9 unit. "But we can't just stay here and train the dogs. We've got to go out and do our jobs."
Because of that, he said, it will take about six months to train the German shepherd-Malinois mix pups. Each of the K-9 dogs is trained to be an expert in narcotic discovery, tracking and suspect apprehension.
As for the training itself, someone listening in might be a little lost -- because many the commands the dogs get are in German. Training the dogs in another language prevents other people from intervening with them.
"[Suspects] don't know what we're saying, so it's harder for them to try to control the dog," Robbins said.
Not everything is in German, though. "You'll hear the guys when they are doing narcotics, they say 'find the birdie' and that's their key that they are looking for narcotics scent," he said.
To teach a dog how to track a certain drug, handlers will permeate a towel or a toy with a drug, like marijuana. The dog eventually becomes conditioned to associate a certain smell with a toy and reward and will actively seek out the scent, said Sgt. Ron Mathis, who helps run the unit with his dog, Dea.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- "Such! Such!," the man says to his dog, Nitro, as they walk through the woods. "Find it! Track!"
Nitro scurries up the leaf-covered hill at Coonskin Park, keeping his nose to the ground, following a scent no human can smell.
The man worries that the steady rainfall is going to wash away the trail, but the dog keeps pulling him steadily up the hill.
The team climbs up one last bank before Nitro starts barking. A man in a camouflage jacket walks around a corner.
"Good job, Nitro! Good boy!" Deputy C.M. Morgan says to his dog, patting him fiercely on the back as the other man walks toward the team, smiling.
"If this had been a real suspect, I would have to say 'releasing the K-9' three times before I let the dog go," Morgan said.
Luckily for Cpl. Eric Flowers, Morgan didn't let Nitro off his lead during the monthly Kanawha County Sheriff's Department K-9 training exercise at Coonskin Park.
Morgan, who has been working with Nitro for five years, said he was happy with the conditions, even though the temperature barely rose above 40 degrees and the rain was steady.
"It teaches the dogs how to deal with it," he said. "It's not always going to be perfect outside."
Morgan and Nitro are one of the seven K-9 teams for the sheriff's department, in addition to two dogs devoted solely to the bomb team. The unit may get a little bigger as three 6-month-old pups, Riley, Nala and Scout, will start training soon.
"It takes about 14 weeks to really train a dog if you do it all day, every day," said Lt. Bryan Robbins, commander of the K-9 unit. "But we can't just stay here and train the dogs. We've got to go out and do our jobs."
Because of that, he said, it will take about six months to train the German shepherd-Malinois mix pups. Each of the K-9 dogs is trained to be an expert in narcotic discovery, tracking and suspect apprehension.
As for the training itself, someone listening in might be a little lost -- because many the commands the dogs get are in German. Training the dogs in another language prevents other people from intervening with them.
"[Suspects] don't know what we're saying, so it's harder for them to try to control the dog," Robbins said.
Not everything is in German, though. "You'll hear the guys when they are doing narcotics, they say 'find the birdie' and that's their key that they are looking for narcotics scent," he said.
To teach a dog how to track a certain drug, handlers will permeate a towel or a toy with a drug, like marijuana. The dog eventually becomes conditioned to associate a certain smell with a toy and reward and will actively seek out the scent, said Sgt. Ron Mathis, who helps run the unit with his dog, Dea.
"They all have their distinct odor. Some of them we can smell as humans, but to a dog it's overwhelming," Mathis said. "You can train a dog to find anything."
Or anyone. Suspect apprehension is one of the most practical uses for the dogs, but can also be the hardest.
"The most important part of apprehension work is getting your dog to release," Robbins said. "All these dogs will bite, there is no doubt about that. They all love to apprehend and take hold.
"It's the getting them to let go. That's the part you really have to work on with them over and over."
The relationship between handler and K-9 is something that takes months to hone, but is absolutely essential in order for the team to be successful.
The handler's ability to read their dog's cues could be the difference between correctly tracking someone's scent and losing the trail.
"A lot of times when mistakes are made, it's the handler's fault," Morgan said.
"They're an animal, so they're going to get distracted," Robbins said. "So it's the handler's job to learn how to read their dog."
During initial K-9 training, each team goes through the exercises together, ensuring that the deputies can pick up on not only their own dog's cues, but those of other dogs in the unit too.
"The thing about us working as a team is that we know each other's dogs," Morgan said. "We know what dog is strong in this, what dog is weak in that.... My dog may be a stronger tracker than another guy's dog, but his dog may be better at finding drugs.
"In a perfect world, when I really get called out to a bad guy who fled in the woods, I like to have another K-9 officer with me because he knows when my dog picks up his head and starts sniffing around, he knows 'Ah, that guy's around here,' so he starts looking and gets on guard."
Typically, a second officer stands about 20 yards back while the lead officer is tracking, to make sure that the dog doesn't get distracted by another human scent, Morgan said.
Although working with the dogs gives officers a unique opportunity, it doesn't come without a certain amount of danger. "If a guy's got a gun in the woods and we know he's got a gun, it's very dangerous for me to be out there with a flashlight bebopping," Morgan said.
Although the K-9s are officially trained once a month, the dogs -- which Robbins said are a particularly intelligent breed -- hone their skills every day, with the help of their handlers.
"They love to work. That's what they're here for," Robbins said.
Reach Kathryn Gregory at kathr...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5119.
