ARAPAHOE COUNTY, Colo. — Arapahoe County trained school therapy dogs to not only detect explosives but to find missing kids that may have wandered away from school.
Denver 7 spoke to Arapahoe County Deputy Sheriff John Gray on the process for training dogs to track missing children.
“Well, we went through a 16-week program where we learned to basically track people or missing kids,” Arapahoe County Deputy Sheriff John Gray said. “And we have three dogs that are trained in so it’s Rex, canine Bear and canine Riley.”
Three dogs are already scent trained. They track the ground for any disturbance and human odors, Gray said.
“Every surface is a little bit different. A lot of times, you know, the dogs can pick up on a whole combination of odors that they use to find whatever it is that they’re looking for,” Gray said. “So when you walk across a grassy field or a parking lot, right, you leave behind disturbance on the ground, as well as human odor. For kids, you know, that might be leaving a school or running away from home, because of that, they use all these different skills that they have to help them.”
Gray said, if the officers are tracking missing kids that have ran away, they can follow the footsteps, but if they lose them, they can count on the dogs to smell them — even on rainy or snowy days.
“Anything wet, so water snow tends to hold odor down. So it actually helps the dogs a little bit to be able to follow. It’s easier on us, too, right? Because then we have some visual indication where people went as well,” Gray said. ‘Sometimes it’s powerful for the dog to be able to tell us where we’re going, even when we don’t know.”
Denver 7 asked how important it is to have the canines working at the schools.
“For our team, for our three dogs, it’s super powerful that we can not only be at the schools, kind of helping kids, you know, affecting their mental health and their mood, but then we can also transition into so many different roles. So for us, just kind of working in the schools, I think that between being able to detect dangerous things like guns and explosives, and then being able to find maybe a student who has autism that wandered away from the school faster than we would be able to if we had a 40 minute time delay to wait for a dog from another agency. Is huge,” Gray said.
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