After being thoroughly trained in the detection of narcotics, Rex, a Czechoslovakian-born-and bred Shepherd, now 2, had to be retired from the Concord Police Department.
Even though he was still young and very highly skilled, the only place for Rex to go was down. That is, until he was offered to C.P.D. captain Monty Henderson and his wife, Nicole.
“We had met the dog a month before they decided to flush him from the program, and Monty said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a dog like that?’ ” recalls Nicole Henderson.
“But what would we do with it?” her husband asked.
Nicole struggled, wondering how she could occupy the days of a drug-sniffing pooch. She thought it might be a good idea to let the department send Rex back to his trainer. But when Monty called to tell her the dog was on his way out, she insisted, “Tell them we’ll bring the dog home. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him.”
Nicole remembers noticing Rex “needed a little TLC.”
“So we brought him home and started giving him the love and affection he needed,” she says.
Again, Monty asked, “Do you know what you want to do with him?” His wife still was not sure but knew she would soon have an idea.
And she did, one day while she was out working with their lawn care company.
“Why let the dog’s training be completely wasted?” Nicole thought. Rex wouldn’t be an ordinary house dog. Instead, she would take advantage of the skills he already had, add to them and still use him for detection. But instead of sending him out with the police department, she would allow school administrators, employers, parents and guardians to call Rex into their schools, businesses and homes to confirm or dismiss suspicions of drug abuse among their students, employees and children. The service would be absolutely confidential — information would never be disclosed to the media or law enforcement unless requested — and available at any time.
“I told (Monty), his head started spinning and he said, ‘That’s a great idea, but what about any laws that might prevent you from doing this?’ ”
She immediately got on the phone with the attorney general’s office and found out that the service would be completely legitimate and legal, as long as her husband, as a police officer, did not get involved in the business.
That’s all Nicole needed to hear. She met with an attorney to have papers drawn up. By Aug. 18, she had built Rex and herself a business called the “D.O.G. (Dogs on Guard) House.”
Rex is trained to detect a list of drugs ranging from heroin to marijuana, crack, LSD and methamphetamines, and he is constantly being trained to recognize more “designer” drugs such as Ecstacy. While with the police department, he was trained with the actual drugs but is now trained with pseudo-narcotics created by a chemical company.
Nicole said that, although Rex is a top-notch detective, any dog with a good “ball drive” could do the job.
“Rex knows when he finds his dope, he’ll get his tennis ball,” she explained. “During his training, they would set the ball with the drugs they wanted him to learn so when he’d find that scent, he’d find that ball. And he’ll do anything — he would go through a wall — to get to that ball. It’s sort of a reward, his way of finding love. Some dogs have it, some don’t.”
That’s the best thing about Rex, Monty Henderson says.
“Usually our guys are very methodical in their searches … but this dog, from the get-go, you can put him in a room and tell him to find the dope and he’ll just zero in on it. She doesn’t have to do much to prompt him,”he says.
Rex has been trained to sniff out drugs in such obscure places as car tires, light fixtures and heating and cooling vents, so finding something in a desk drawer or locker would be no problem for him.
“We’ve got file cabinets up and down one hall in the police department where K-9 officers made four hides,”Monty says. “In the middle of that is the evidence room where officers store stuff at night in lockers, so we pulled that door up. But he could smell it from outside, he hit on the door.”
“Parents might have a fear, saying, ‘That’s awfully drastic, to so that to my kid,’ ” he says. “But when you know what kind of drugs are out there and you know how dangerous they can be and how it can affect them long-term, wouldn’t a parent want to let the child know that they do have control, they do care about them, they don’t want drugs in the house? And this way it’s not the police coming in the door saying, ‘Your child is dead’ or ‘Your child is in trouble’ or ‘We found drugs in the kid’s locker at school.’ It helps the parent know what’s going on at home.”
Some parents have called, researching the service, and commented, “Iwish there was something like this 10 years ago.”
Nicole has opened a proposal to the state school system to allow her to come in, unannounced, on a regular basis to do sweeps of the school grounds.
“The police departments usually provide dogs for the schools if they want to do the searches. The problem is, they’re few and far between,”she says. “So kids figure they can get away with it, that it’s not going to be a big deal because the police can’t get there all the time because they’re usually busy doing other stuff.”
Nicole suggested that if the school system arranges for service with the D.O.G. House for a year, on a monthly contractual base, she would conduct searches up to three times a week, being able to accommodate up to seven schools in the area. Searches would alternate between lockers and parking lots and be targeted to staff as well as students. The searches would be random, with no one being advised ahead of time except the principal.
“If we hit them at home and on the school system level, the kids understand the adults aren’t going to put up with it,”she says. “They understand that we don’t want the drugs around, and we don’t want them screwing up their lives. We’re here to help them and, though they may not see that now, they may see it later.”
Her business is highly delicate, and herself on the up-and-up, Henderson keeps a record of all the searches Rex has done, as well as the training sessions.
“That way, if we ever have to go to court and a kid or an employee of a company says, ‘There’s no way that this is true, somebody planted the stuff,’ there are no discrepancies,” Nicole explains. “(The judge) can see the dog trained with large amounts, small amounts, in car tires, house vents, furniture, light fixtures, inside the light switches, everywhere.”
She stresses that the service is completely legal, and she neither makes arrests nor seizes drugs.
“This is a way to gain some control,” she says. “We’re trying to help the parents and the school systems cut down on embarrassing situations, letting them get a grip and do it the right way.”
If drugs are found in a student’s possession, Henderson will even talk to the parents and suggest other programs that are available to help.
“There are programs out there, but there’s really nobody doing enough. It’s like they’re saying, ‘We’re here and this is what we do,’ but you don’t see anybody extending a hand and being adamant about it.”
There are similar services throughout the country — “Drug Detection Dogs”in California, “Canine Detector Services”in New Jersey, “Long Island K-9 Services”in New York, “Canine Intercept”in Louisiana and Mississippi. Nicole would like for people in North Carolina to inquire about franchising.
“If someone is interested in franchising, they would have to go through the same training as the dog,”she explains. “The dog will go through 80 hours of training, so the two of them work together to become a narcotics team, or if they want a bomb dog or an arson dog, we can do any type of training.”
Rex is not trained in arson or bomb detection, to avoid confusion between the chemical smells, but he is trained in finding missing people, another service the D.O.G. House offers.
“He’s absolutely amazing,”Nicole says. “I’m sure the police department was sorry to let him go.”
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