The newest member of the crime fighting team at the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office has a real nose for sniffing out bad guys. Literally. The new deputy’s name is Eddy, a German Shepherd/Belgian Malinois dog that joined the department in March after undergoing three months of rigorous training with Deputy Todd Thompson.
But school will never really let out for 19-month-old Eddy, who will constantly be sharpening his skills under the watchful eye of Thompson.
It hasn’t taken Eddy long to prove his value to the department, according to Sheriff Scott Chitwood.
“I’ve always said a dog is worth their weight in gold because they can go into a place and search it in five minutes,” the sheriff said, “whereas it might take 10 officers 30 minutes to do it.
Dogs have a keen sense of smell for tracking drugs primarily – well, they’re irreplaceable, absolutely.”
Thompson notes that Eddy remains “a work in progress,” but he’s already seen enough to know that his new K9 partner can help take a bite out of crime.
In fact, Thompson can point to several impressive examples already. There was the time, for instance, when Lt. Clay Pangle observed a car with two suspicious occupants stop outside a local store.
“The lieutenant tells one of them he needs to talk to him a minute, and then the guy says he left his gas lid open on his truck. He heard the gas lid close,” Thompson said, “and the lieutenant, being in law enforcement as long as he has, was thinking the guy might have put something in the gas lid, the way he was acting, everybody was acting nervous, just given the situation.”
Pangle radioed for Thompson to bring Eddy to the scene.
“While we were headed that way,” Thompson said, “Pangle asked them a battery of questions. Are there any drugs or anything in the vehicle we need to know about?”
“Naw.”
“Well, do you mind if we search it since there’s nothing in here, do you mind if I search it just to make sure?”
“They didn’t want us searching,” Thompson said, “and told Pangle, ‘No, the last time y’all searched our vehicle, y’all tore it to pieces. No, you’re not searching the vehicle.’”
That’s when Eddy arrived on the scene.
“While the lieutenant is still running the license and the tags and checking to make sure items in the vehicle aren’t stolen,” Thompson said, “I run my dog around the vehicle, and he alerts and indicates on the gas lid. I put Eddy back up because he’s already done what he needed to do. I went back and opened the gas lid, and there was some methamphetamine the guy had stuffed in there.”
Eddy’s nose saved having to tear the car apart by other deputies, and his alerts have been upheld in the court system as providing probable cause for searches.
“He can just circle a car and if he doesn’t hit on it, OK,” Thompson said. “But if he does hit on it, there’s probable cause right there. That’s been upheld in the court system. He can circle a car in 25 seconds, and it may take an officer literally a good hour. If we start taking seats out and stuff like that, that can run into an hour or two.”
A real nose for odor
A little background on the way drug dogs work: Just because Eddy alerts on a vehicle doesn’t necessarily mean that the deputies will find drugs when they search it. His nose is so sensitive that it can detect the lingering odor of drugs that were present at one time but are no longer there.
“If I run him around the vehicle, he might alert on it,” Thompson said, “and he’s saying, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s odor, there’s dope in this car,’ and we might search it and not find anything. Well, that don’t mean he’s wrong, that just means either there has been something in there or there is something in there – maybe I just missed it when I searched the car. Eddy doesn’t alert on the substance, just the odor of the drugs.”
Eddy is genetically predisposed to have a keen sense of smell, but it’s up to Thompson to help him refine that skill so that it can be used to thwart criminal activity.
While Eddy may have earned a “diploma” after 11 weeks of extensive training at a K9 training facility in Alabama, he’s not through with his education.
Every Wednesday, for instance, Thompson travels to the Chattanooga Police Department, which has had a K9 program for years and allows the Whitfield deputy to spend time there with Eddy.
“Since I’m the only K9 officer in our county, if I have a problem, I can’t go to anybody locally and ask for help,” Thompson said. “It really helps having that ally, having those guys to lean on up there, and they’ve just pulled me in and welcomed me in.”
Thompson also works one-on-one each day with Eddy, who even goes home with him at night.
“I work with him all day,” Thompson said. “I walk him, I do exercises with him, I let him have bathroom breaks, I interact with him every day. I try not to have a day where all he does is just sit in the back of my Tahoe. I try to get him out and work with him. I’m continually working with him on stuff. This is an ongoing process. This is something I have to do with him for the rest of his life.”
More than just genes
While Eddy definitely has the genes that give him an excellent sense of smell, that doesn’t mean he just turned on a switch and started tracking down drugs. His training in Alabama actually began with teaching Eddy to associate the smell of drugs with a chew toy he enjoys playing with.
“We started out with a plastic pipe that we’d stuff the odor of the narcotics down in the pipe,” Thompson said. “At first we’d play a simple toss and retrieve with the dog. You throw the toy and he’d go get it and bring it back, and you’d play with him and get it from him and throw it again. Well, during that game of fetch, the dog was associating the toy that he was going and getting with the smell of dope.”
Thompson said researchers believe dogs can differentiate at least four or five odors with one sniff, even when the smells are mixed together.
“Say there’s a trash can that’s got tobacco spit in it, and it’s got a Doritos bag in it and a chicken bone in it and a YooHoo can in it,” he said. “A dog can theoretically be trained to smell that chicken bone through all the other smells, or he can go up and take a smell and tell there’s Doritos in there.”
During his training, Eddy had to search vehicles that had multiple odors, making him work harder to locate the drugs hidden inside, just the way it is in the real world.
“Just like if he was to come up and smell my desk,” Thompson said, “just look at all the stuff that he would have to differentiate. I mean, he’s got this Payday bar here, and he’s even gonna smell these pens and smell this lotion and smell stuff that we can’t smell, but he’s also gonna smell that cocaine if it was in that bag back there. He’s fascinating, really.”
Eddy has been trained to associate the odor of narcotics with getting to play with his favorite chew toy, an orange rubber cone.
“We gave that toy meaning,” Thompson said, “and how we gave that toy meaning is because he loves playing with it. I could take him outside at my house, and I could play fetch with him literally till his heart exploded because he’s got that drive and that characteristic that the other dogs at my house just don’t have, that your dogs don’t have.”
In fact, Thompson has been told that only one out of 100 dogs is good enough to be a narcotics dog. But it takes training to bring out that rare talent.
“When you first start training him by sticking that dope odor into those toys,” Thompson said, “you let him look at it and then throw it in the tall grass so he’s got to hunt and look for it by sight and by smell. He’s smelling the dope odor inside that toy, but he’s also associating that toy with play, fun, with getting to bond with Dad, getting to spend time with Dad, getting to do what he loves as a young pup.”
Eventually, Thompson would take the toy and show it to Eddy, then hide it somewhere else to make him search for it. “Well, when he starts scratching or indicates that the toy is right there, maybe behind this door, I’m gonna open up this door and give him the toy. He starts hunting for the toy. Slowly we take the toy out of play and start hiding the dope, so when I get him out of the vehicle to do a search of a school or a room or a car, he thinks he’s looking for his toy. He thinks his toy is somewhere in that car to find, so when he sits down and he’s staring at that front fender because he got a good whiff of that odor coming that car, he thinks, well, that’s my toy right there. Then I either have somebody come in behind me and him, or I do a sleight of hand and I’ve got the toy in my back pocket and I throw it in play, so he thinks in his mind, oh, it just appeared from nowhere – it came from the car, I smell it, and there it is.”
Thanks to this game of hide and seek, Eddy has learned to help his partner find marijuana, cocaine, heroin or other illegal drugs.
“He’s helping me find all these drugs by him thinking that when he gets out of his crate, he’s gonna find his toy,” Thompson said, “so that’s why before I get him back into the vehicle after he’s searched, I let him see his toy and then I throw it back into the search area. That way, when I put him back in the vehicle and close the door, in his mind, he always thinks his toy is out there waiting to be found. So the next time I get him out of the car to search, he always thinks, last time I saw it, Dad threw it back out there where I was at. So in his mind, he thinks the toy is always out there to find. I can get him out of this cage right now and ask him three words and he understands, and he’ll start searching for his toy. The three words I ask him are ‘Where’s the gift?’ ”
Excited to be a deputy
Eddy takes his job seriously, just like any lawman.
“He cues off me, cues off everything I do,” Thompson said. “If I’m all excited and I’m driving real fast and I’ve got my sirens on, he gets amped up, just like we do, just like a human. He starts pacing back and forth because what is he fixing to do? Is he fixing to go chase after somebody? Is he fixing to get to play with his toy? Is he fixing to do a track through the woods to try to find somebody? What’s he fixing to do? And he’s getting all excited about that. I can undo my radio and say, ‘435 Whitfield,’ and as soon as I click that radio off, he gets excited – what’s Dad doing? Every time I pull a car over, he gets excited. So he knows the game now; he’s figuring the game out.”
Just like his human counterparts, though, Eddy isn’t always focused entirely on the task at hand.
“There’s days when I’m like, what are you doing, man?” Thompson says with a smile. “What are you doing, Eddy? I mean there’s days when he just don’t want to do nothing. He’s like a human. I’m sure you have days when you’re like, man, I just don’t feel like doing nothing, I don’t feel like going to work. He’s the same way.”
As Thompson says, “it’s not like he just learns how to do something and then he’s done and I can just ride around with him and he’s just perfect all the time.”
But then there are many days when Eddy is spot on.
“There’s days when I’m like, Gollay, Eddy, that’s awesome! Good job, man!”
To help Eddy reach his full potential, Thompson sometimes has to expose the dog to things he doesn’t like.
“He didn’t like me picking him up at first, couldn’t stand it, acted weird about it,” Thompson said. “I pick him up all the time now. Like it or not, I just pick him up throughout the day. I just pick him up and walk around with him and my wife asks me, ‘why do you pick him up like that all the time?’ Because he don’t like it, so I’m gonna get him desensitized to it. Could there be a time when I might need to pick him up and throw him over a fence if we’re chasing somebody and he can’t jump over it? Maybe he can’t jump over a six-foot privacy fence so I throw him over. Or I might have to pick him up because he got shot or because he got stabbed and I have to carry him back to an ambulance that might be two miles away.”
The training aims to desensitize Eddy to uncomfortable situations that might arise during the call of duty.
“So I’m always working on either problems, fixing problems, enhancing problems,” Thompson said. “I’m always working on stuff with him because you know he’s not just a flawless creature – he’s a dog. A dog is a dog. They all said that when I went through school. A dog is a dog – you’ve got to remember that. You know, he might do something today that’s awesome, and the next day, you might ask him to do the same thing and he might make you look like an idiot. And that’s the one thing with this that I had to learn – how to set my ego aside.”
Community support ‘fantastic’
Before last school year was out, students, teachers, and staff at Northwest Whitfield High School took up money, raising $900 to buy Eddy a bullet-proof vest.
It’s a gesture the Sheriff’s Office really appreciated.
“This is wonderful,” Sheriff Chitwood said. “I think it shows that not only the school but the students highly support our efforts to have the K9. I mean, everybody’s just captivated by a dog, and to have one as highly trained as Eddy is, I think the kids enjoy him coming up here to visit. For Northwest to take this initiative to support this program for the sheriff’s office, this is a very, very nice donation. Very nice, most appreciated.”
While Eddy cost $15,500, including training for Deputy Thompson, the community has stepped forward to help with ongoing expenses.
“The community support has been fantastic,” Thompson said. “All his dog food’s donated by a local guy, Boyd Bramblett at 41 Feed and Seed, and the kids at Northwest raised the money for the vest.”
More than just a cool job
Thompson has been a deputy sheriff for 13 years but never imagined he would be leading a K9 unit, calling it a “very exciting, very rewarding” job.
“I’ve got two other dogs at my house, and I’ve always been good with animals,” he said. “I’ve done everything from beekeeping to having chickens at the house to well … I’ve just been an animal lover all my life.”
But the deputy is glad he didn’t get the job just because he loves animals.
“I’m glad I didn’t ask for this just because I thought it was cool to ride around with a dog because there’s a lot more involved with this than I ever thought possible,” he said. “I ride around with him all day long, I let him out to use the bathroom, I let him play, I let him stretch, I let him get out of the vehicle, I take him home, I bathe him, I feed him and give him exercise, I walk him around the neighborhood, I train with him every Wednesday.”
Thompson says the power of positive thinking plays a key role for Eddy’s success.
“A dog always has to win at any training scenario,” he said. “You try to set up the training to where it’s always set up for success for the dog because at the end of the day, I always want to put him up in my vehicle on a good note. I always want him to go to bed at night saying, ‘Boy, I did good today.’ ”
Eddy holds the chew toy that is his reward for finding drugs during a search.
photo by Mitch Talley