An indescribable bond
Published 11:14 am Thursday, February 26, 2015
The joy and heartache of canine handling
Trooper Joel Service, of the Michigan State Police, believes he has the greatest job in the world.
As a canine handler with the Niles Post, he gets to track down bad guys using man’s best friend.
“I love dogs. To me they are the perfect creature. It is indescribable the bond that you have with your work dog,” he said. “When you are looking for someone who could be armed or dangerous, there is that element of we have to look out for each other. I think that strengthens the bond over and above what a pet owner would experience. You are relying on that dog for your life for the most part.”
During the 18 years he has been a canine handler, Service and the five dogs he has partnered with have helped close many cases.
The thrill of the hunt and the bond with the dog are the two things he loves the most.
“When you track somebody down and catch them — and it doesn’t happen as much as you’d like — but when you have someone at the end of that track, it is a huge adrenaline rush,” he said. “It is fun to be out there with the dogs, to watch them work.”
For all the joy he has gained from the job, Service experienced the negative side of working with canines early on.
His first dog, Aiko, was killed while tracking a robbery suspect in Flint in 1998. Aiko remains the only MSP canine officer to be killed in the line of duty.
It was Service’s second year on the job.
“We were on a track and the guy was hiding in the brush and we were looking for him,” Service said. “The dog found him before we realized he was there and he shot my dog in the neck and killed him. He died probably a minute or two later.”
While the experience was difficult, Service said he never questioned remaining a canine handler.
“It was rough, it really was. I had just gotten this dog I love and we were finding a lot of people in Flint and having good success and boom — he was gone,” he said. “I look at it from the other side that he did his job — like it or not — which was to take a bullet for his handler. If it had been me or another police officer out there, they wouldn’t be going home to their families. We just had a little baby at the time, so it could’ve had a lot worse effect than it did.”
A good sense of smell
Service currently has two dogs: A tracking dog named Pitch and an arson dog named Ki.
They stay at his home in St. Joseph but are kept isolated from his family, kenneled in a separate area.
Service used a sports analogy to explain the MSP’s policy for this practice.
“When they are at home they are on the bench and not in the game. When they are with us out on the road that’s when we want them to be ready to go and hyped up and wanting to work,” he said. “Another good example is getting paid. When we are going to work we are going to get a paycheck. When the dogs go to work they are going to work for that ball or that toy or that chance to play. If they get that at home for free, why would they want to do any work for it? It is just something to increase that work drive and make it a little stronger.”
MSP canines go through 14 weeks of training before they are ready for assignment.
In looking for a good candidate, Service said they need a healthy dog with a friendly personality and a strong drive to play.
The more a dog likes to play, Service explained, the easier it is to train because it will do just about anything to get that ball.
“You play with them after they successfully track during training,” he said. “That builds the desire for the job to want to track.”
Ki is one of only three MSP arson dogs in the state. The others are in St. Ignace and Bay City.
Ki is trained to sniff out petroleum-based products like gasoline, diesel fuel or charcoal lighter fluid. If Ki detects an accelerant at the scene of a fire, an arson investigator can search that area for evidence.
Pitch, on the other hand, is trained solely to track suspects using a sense of smell more than 40 times greater than that of a human being.
“They can put their nose to the ground and smell where someone has walked. That’s tracking right there,” Service said.
How does a dog do this?
Service explained that when someone walks through a yard, their footsteps disturb the vegetation, releasing an odor slightly different from vegetation that is untouched.
“It’s like when you mow grass — you smell it. That’s disturbed vegetation,” he said.
A dog can detect that tiny difference in smells and deduce where a person has been. Dogs also detect skin rafts, or the scent-carrying skin cells that people are constantly shedding, to help track suspects.
“They are doing something that we, as humans, can’t,” Service said. “They help us find people that otherwise wouldn’t have been found.”
Retirement
Canine officers typically work between 8 and 10 years. They are owned by the state, but handlers, like Service, act as their primary caregivers.
Handlers often adopt their dogs once they retire, which is understandable, since the officers spend so much time with their dog every day over the course of several years.
“There are many days when I’ve spent more time with the dogs than I did my family,” Service said.
If a handler doesn’t keep his or her dog, the MSP finds them a suitable home.
“There’s usually no shortage of people willing to adopt a police dog,” Service said.
Service’s last tracking dog, Dodger, is currently living in St. Joseph with the Service family.
Dodger began working in 2006 and retired in 2013 after what Service described as a very successful career.
“Dodger was a great tracking dog,” he said.
The Services also have a rescue dog at home, bringing their total to four when counting the two canine officers.
“It can get to be a bit much some days,” Service said.