A Good Man with a Dog by Roger Guay

Author:Roger Guay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2016-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Canine-Style CSI

One arena in which our dogs turned out to be very valuable was in searching for evidence. Imagine looking at a five-hundred-square-yard clear-cut and trying to find a shell casing from an illegal moose kill. It could take days to find, and, more often than not, it wouldn’t be found at all. Most metal detectors have only an eight- or nine-inch disk to search with, so covering an area of any size is hard to do. A trained K-9, on the other hand, will find the casing if they get to within twelve to twenty feet, and can do it while running. Dogs can also track the humans involved to reconstruct the scene as well as locate the evidence they left behind.

Training dogs to find evidence means training them to find anything with human scent, gun powder, brass, or any combination thereof. They all go into the same category. When I’m directing the dogs to look for evidence, that cue is “find gun.” On that command, the dogs will basically go and find combinations of, or singly, any of those items. This ability sometimes led to very important information in our poaching cases. If the dog can locate them for us, we can examine the casing and the projectile and match them to the gun that fired them. With more recent technology, we can also do forensics with shotguns, like matching the plastic cup that holds all the shot (called the wad) to the shotgun that fired it, because as it comes out the barrel, the barrel leaves marks on the wad.

I found that a shell was the best thing to start a pup on, because they naturally learn to find things you throw like balls and sticks and often use their nose when they can’t see it with their eyes. For example, that shell gets thrown and when the pup runs to it, you give them the ball. Gradually that gets expanded to teaching them to lay down to indicate their find, and then they get the ball. Teaching it in little increments, they make an easy transition to learning to indicate a find. Then I gradually shift to harder finds and soon they are good to go.

I would begin with human scent, because that was easiest for them. But since sometimes due to weather or the passage of time, human scent might be gone from the shell or other evidence, I had to teach them to look for the smell of brass. Still later, when we wanted them to look for those shotgun wads, I taught them to look for the scent of gunpowder. All under the command “gun.”

Over the years, with the help of my dogs, I have recovered hundreds of shell casings, shotgun wads, money, pagers, rifles, handguns, fly rod pieces, and glasses.

Reba, and later my second dog, Rader, worked wildlife investigations all over the state. Rader, whose official name was Fish and Game Rader, was Reba’s son and he grew up under mom’s enormous shadow.

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