By Clark Stork

RCMP K9 trainers entertain student crowd

Mar 25, 2018 | 1:35 PM

Students in Melfort learned more about the process it takes for a puppy to become a working police dog.

The city’s RCMP detachment hosted a day-long event with several speakers from a Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit (ICE) investigator, a presentation on fraud prevention plus an open meeting to discuss the force’s initiatives. The lightest topic on the agenda was a presentation provided by two officers who train puppies to become working RCMP dogs. Cst. Lorne Burles was one of the members who spoke to the Grade 7 to 9 students at the Kerry Vickar Centre. He said the process starts when the puppies turn seven weeks old.

“They get taken from their litter and undergo a basic temperament test,” Burles told northeastNOW. “Nothing is said to them, they just witness how the dog will handle. The dog then gets put through the paces in all areas of police dog work.”

Service dogs are trained in tracking, criminal apprehension, bomb and drug sniffing, and search and rescue missions. Only purebred German Shepherds are used by the force. According to the RCMP’s website, approximately 17 per cent of puppies scouted pass all the training and become working dogs. The average age a dog is when it enters the force is around 18-months. Burles said the members that train the puppies are volunteers within the force and don’t earn extra wages. He said seeing a dog make it all the way through is worth the hundreds of hours involved in the training.

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“Being able to see that finished product, when you go from a pup that literally knows nothing and you can get it to the point where it’s doing something, that bond you have with it, it’s a team you don’t get in a lot of police work,” he said.

The national training centre for RCMP dogs is in Innisfail, Alta., but members across the country train puppies before they are advanced at the centre.

clark.stork@jpbg.com

On Twitter: @ClarkStork