Photograph by George Sakkestad
Deputy Greg Taylor of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Westside Substation recently acquired a new partner--a 19-month-old yellow Labrador retriever named Dusty, who can detect bombs.
Dusty more than a companion- this puppy can sniff out bombs
Deputy Taylor gets a new 4-legged partner
By Rebecca Ray
When Deputy Greg Taylor and his partner, Craig Sontra, got new positions as bomb technicians at the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, Taylor had no idea he would no longer work with Sontra, but with a dog.
However, Taylor was pleasantly surprised when he found out.
The sheriff's office bought two Labrador retrievers--one for Taylor and one for Sontra--with federal grant money to help detect bombs.
The dogs came from Whitmore-Tyson Imports Inc., located in Menlo Park, which trains dogs to protect law enforcement officers, attack bad guys and sniff out bombs and drugs.
Taylor now works out of the Westside Substation with a 19-month-old female yellow Lab named Dusty.
For Taylor, Dusty came at an opportune time. In December, his dog, Candy, a black Lab and pit bull mix, was put to sleep. Taylor and his wife, who live in San Jose, didn't expect to get another dog, since they both work outside the home during the day.
But because Dusty must accompany Taylor to work, he and his wife don't have that problem.
Although Dusty will only learn to detect bombs--she won't learn to detect narcotics or attack--she must accompany Taylor 24 hours a day so that they can arrive on the scene together in emergency situations. Much of the time, as Taylor attends to his other responsibilities--investigating traffic collisions and diagramming crime scenes--she stays in a kennel under his desk.
Taylor is on a waiting list to attend an FBI school, where he will learn how to disable explosive devices and get certified as a bomb technician.
But he and Dusty have already begun training.
Whitmore-Tyson acquired Dusty from Hightest, a company that trains retrievers for hunting competitions. In fact, her full first name, which Hightest gave her, is "Hightest Kickin' Up Dust."
Whitmore-Tyson finds available dogs, tests them for the qualities needed for bomb detection and trains them. Whitmore-Tyson taught Dusty how to do a search pattern--meander around while searching so that she covers a wide area--and understand what it means when people point different directions.
After she recovers from being spayed, Dusty will undergo training for an hour each day on searching out explosives and components.
At a four-week school on bomb detection for dogs and handlers, Dusty learned to detect 11 odors by the beginning of the third week and picked up one scent 11 cars away.
An instructor at the school said that dogs could be trained in a week. However, handlers take three weeks to train, Taylor said, because they must learn to trust their dogs. During one exercise, Dusty found a chemical in a smoke detector on a 10-foot-high ceiling. When she found it, she looked up at it and sniffed. Taylor, however, didn't understand that she had found the chemical, because he couldn't see it himself.
"You seldom heard 'bad dog' in class," Taylor said, "but you heard 'bad handler' lots of times."
Saratoga, California Since 1955
