German Shepherd dog

naw......i'd believe the dog.  i'm going to venture a bet that they will collect dna from the trunk of the car belonging to the missing girl.  i'm also betting there's drugs involved and possibly other criminal charges.  poor kid!  that is just horrible.

pjp

If the Media can be believed in this situation, hair, believed to be that of the missing girl was found in the truck. The dog most likely would not have hit on the hair strands, so there would need to be additional "dna".

I'd trust the dog.

Nancy-  What is the ideal age to start a dog for this type of work?  Is it best to start a pup or one that is a little more mature?

18 mos to 2 is fine. If you have a puppy you can start even when they are very young but I have not trained a puppy for cadaver so I have no experience there.

I started my current dog at 2 [when I got him] because my dog before him [now a pet] wound up developing HD.  She was doing trailing though, not cadaver. Most police departments start with a young green dog known to have no health issues and good x-rays hips, elbows, back]  and I understand why.  I will probably go that way from here on out . Grim is my third dog and the first one to certify. Toby washed out due to weak nerves and Cyra due to her hips. I did not want to risk having another dog 'wash out' third time around.

Figure 1-2 years of training - then a lifetime of it. You really need someone to help if you have not done detection work. Someone who has worked a passive alert dog.  I have been repeatedly told it is more like working a bomb dog than a narc dog due to prolonged periods of searching and because most searching does not result in a find. [So you need to know you dog wil work for several hours].  If you don't have a team nearby and LE is willing to work with you, then a combination of training with a detection dog handler and going to cadaver semiars should help.

If I had a puppy I would start with them - you need to get with someone who has hands-on experience in regards to the how to.  The cadaver dog handbook is good but I know some of the methods of early trainig have evolved since then away from starting with the blocks, and going to more active approaches [e.g., throwing materials in PVC tubes, tennis balls]. I have no experience starting a young puppy.

It is a real worthwhile investment of time to make sure your dog is confident under all kinds of circumstances and can climb on anything, crawl through anything, etc.  Don't overlook the social graces with people and other dogs, you can work a dog aggressive dog that is under control but it is a LOT easier to work with a dog who is aloof but has no issues around other dogs. Make sure the dog is fine around livestock and fowl and game (ignores them), is comfortable  in the woods and in buidlings, etc. - nothing should spook them.  You don't need strict formal obedience but the dog has to be under your control with a good recall. Make sure the dog is comfortable loading into strange vehiclles with strangers and strange dogs.  Basically you want a dog where when work starts, the concerns of the world disappear.  Do drive building [but the way I understand - drive is genetic, you can bring it out but you can't put it in].  Get some peices of PVC pipe - 1.5 inch is fine, get your dog ok with retrieving that.

Need to be honest with yourself about drives.  Some people can and have trained dogs who are food motivated but it is 50 times easier to train a ball motivated dog because the dog needs to be rewarded at source and it is pretty easy to throw a ball there.  If you have a food dog and go to seminars, your dog will always work last because people don't want food contaminating their problems. 

When we got my current dog, one of the many selection tests the officer who helped me evaluate him did was to throw a metal pipe for the dog to retrieve. He wanted to see the dogs desire to chase and retrieve the object was higher than the dog's natural distaste for metal.  You also need to consider that the dog will be working in some pretty nasty places  - since we started doing this I have been in some real rough neighborhoods [always with the police, but it sure makes me respect what they have to go through on a daily basis]

Need to work with folks who have legal access to training materials.  You really can't do this well with things like hair and pseudoscent. That can be a real challenge.  We face a continual challenge of being able to access larg

Nancy

I train for SAR,  This is just a question, Can a Certified SAR dog be retrained to work as a Cadaver Dog?

it doesnt take a true k9 experienced trainer even 1 yr to get a cadaver dog to do his work....  can hardly imagine the price tag on that dog.    maybe a volunteer, ok, but where are you going to get the cadaver smell from for training?   surprisingly i found that on the net one day, yuk. 

dogs dont develop HD, they are born with it.  Anything after that is due to injury or erosion (age) and most times mis interpreted by our vets

all the best, its a very much needed training, but test the pup, as some dogs will not like that smell.

The 1- 2year statement I made was for someone training their first dog and not going through the same intensive training full time LE do.  I realize you can go through this much more quickly if you have experience.  Getting certified and being an experienced operational dog are two different things. There is no way in traing you can simulate some of the types of problems you will encounter.

I don't know what the heck you can find on the internet that is not bones or pseudo. 

True about gentics and HD, but most don't know until the dog is a bit older that they have it, else we would be not waiting for 2 year to OFA our dogs.

Nancy totally covered all the important stuff here- but Agar - did the article say who the handler or team was and what their certification background was?

Probable cause searches suck in general for that reason. But - there should be some forensic evidence left if the suggestion is that the girl decomposed in the trunk. We have worked blood droplet cases - but there are blood droplets that the dogs find, therefore, you have proof the dog was right. 

Do they think the girl decomposed in the trunk? I know dogs can work residual scent (meaning a scent source was in a place and then removed) but I would be really surprised to see a dog trained to a level that a body could be in a trunk for a very short time right after death (not beginning to decompose yet) and the dog, a month later with the degrading sun, be able to hit the residual scent.  I am not even sure that can be done (or you could ever reach a level of proficiency making it worthwhile). 

If the girl decomposed in the trunk - I would think they could get decomp fluid. Particularly if the smell was what caused a dog to get called. 

I hate dumbass people who kill children. 

Incidentally - we would not use a cross trained dog for something like this. Our cross trained dogs are mainly live, with the idea that they know about cadaver if the person expired. Our cadaver dogs are single purpose.

Kerschberger - my group is all volunteers and we have brain, fresh bone, tissue, blood and all kinds of these available to train on. It just takes years of developing relationships. We don't use pseudo all. 

Shannon B

auntievenom- I'm not sure who did the search with the cadaver dogs, they gave the name of the officer from the sheriff's dept. but I can't remember now who it was.  There were 2 different dogs used from 2 different counties.  Initially they dug up an area near the little girls playhouse in the grandparents yard, the dogs both hit on that same area.  Then the search led to the mother's abandoned car and those same 2 dogs hit on the trunk of the car that also had a "stain" picked up under the black light, some strands of hair believed to be the same color and length of the little girls, some dirt in the trunk and a very foul odor that investigator's are adament was decomoposition.  Their theory which makes perfect sense to me is that the body decompossed at the location of the house and then that body was moved to the trunk of the car to be dispossed of somewhere else. 

The grandfather of the missing little girl is a retired sheriff and the grandmother is a nurse.  With both their given backgrounds one would think they'd know the smell of human decomposition???  However the grandmother's explaination for the foul smell is that BOTH dogs are "confussed", they are wrong because the smell was from a pizza that was left inside the car for 15 days before it was removed and that is what the odor is not a human dead body.

Personally my thought is the grandparents are trying to help cover up for their daughter because that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard that the cadaver dog was "confussed with a rotted pizza" lol  I think at this point officers should just turn their focus on this being a "recovery" rather than a "return".  Hopefully more search crews will volunteer to bring more dogs and start searching other locations that they feel the mother may have buried the body.  I put my faith on the dogs telling what REALLY happend to this child.

I have a REAL problem with stories like this.  People doing horrible things to innocent little kids.  How could you hurt a precious child let alone kill your own baby???  It's beyond psychotic IMO.

 We frequently do that - call in a separate dog with separate training/ certs/ etc if for no other reason than piece of mind that the dog that is being worked isn't the ONLY reason the cops fixate on something. 

If they had alerts from dogs trained with different methods in different counties - I'd probably believe the dogs. 

I finally found the articles (I haven't been looking THAT hard, admittedly) and yeah - it doesn't look great for this poor little girl. 

Nancy- your post cracks me up  - I have been on the phone with a team mate, while I am looking around an area that has been released trying to figure out where the body was, hiking around with a shovel, creeping myself out.... we do really weird stuff in the name of helping people. 

This is a very interesting post and thanks for putting it here. Good to know how these dogs really work. Articles just dont tell the whole view but from you ladies , its a good explanation.

That's my Cinco aus dem Traumblick... I donated him to Tracy when she lost her Logan 3 years ago.. a woman lost control of her car and hit him while they were searching I believe, he was killed instantly. I found out she was looking and called her about Cinco who was 4 months old at the time (and crytporchid).. a little young she thought but he tested very well (of course, I knew he was brilliant at 7 weeks!) and then she brought out cadaver scent and he had a normal immediate reaction  (AAAAGH! OMG WHAT IS THAT?) and then within minutes he was playing with the container.....

Not all dogs do that though... I recently placed my Jabina Falco son and gave Tracy first shot at him, since his sister is doing very well.. he wanted nothing to do with any part of that.. not food, not any toy, nothing.. just not his thing

I know of all his certifications and accomplishments and still thought the CNN interview wasn't so much... cool dog, though even if I do say so myself. It's rewarding to know he is so valuable to the real world...