It’s a busy morning at Sydney International Airport as the Customs officer reports for duty. After a stroll through the main office where his mates call out their good mornings, it’s time to hit the baggage-claim area, where he’ll patrol passengers arriving from overseas. On average, he’ll cover six flight arrivals a day, although he might also be called to check cargo containers or the mail centre. His natural talent means he is always in demand. Even the passengers break into grins as he weaves his way through the crowds at the baggage carousel. Little do they know he has 39 significant drug seizures to his credit and is hungry for more. Despite his friendly appearance, nothing would please him more than to catch someone with a few ecstasy tablets in their undies or a gram of cocaine in their suitcase. Serving his country is all well and good, but he’s in it for more selfish reasons. The thing that gets him up in the morning – his reward when he finds illegal substances – is a rolled-up towel.
Meet Detector Dog Duke. He’s six years old and one of 74 four-legged Customs officers working Australian borders. His job is to detect drugs, while some of his canine colleagues are looking for explosives or precursors to chemical weapons. (Rumour has it new additions to the workforce will be sniffing out currency and, possibly, tobacco in the future.) His beagle cousins over in Quarantine are on the fruit, veg, meat and plants beat.
Detector dogs are always on the go – if you see one sitting next to a suitcase or person, it means he’s picked up the scent he’s trained to track. Afterwards, he’s rewarded with some tug-of-war playtime with the rolled-up towel his handler keeps in his pocket.
Duke might look like your average Labrador, but he’s one of the nation’s most valuable defence tools, and he was bred specifically for his job. Born at the National Breeding and Development Centre outside Melbourne, Duke is a product of the most successful working-dog breeding program in the world. Since 1993, Australian Customs Service (ACS) has bred more than 1000 puppies, most of which are now deployed around the country. We don’t just supply dogs to work in Customs, says John Vandeloo, who founded and heads the program. We also supply dogs to the federal and state police forces, to prisons and to the military.
Dogs bred by ACS are also in demand overseas. Aussie dogs work in places such as Guam, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Angola, the United States and, most recently, China. We try to assist our neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region where we can, says Vandeloo. It’s good diplomacy – puppy diplomacy!
The relationship with China Customs began in 2005, when ACS handed over four adult Labradors and six puppies. (A further six puppies went over in March 2006 and again in November 2006.) Results were swift. Three months after arriving in China, two of the adults, Xenos and Quip, made their first drug seizures. The Chinese hope to emulate ACS’s breeding model. We’re about one year into that mission, says Vandeloo, who predicts the project will take a few more years before it’s fully operational. (The China Customs Detector Dog Breeding Centre had its first whelping from an Australian Customs-supplied dog in Beijing on December 28, 2006.)
Whenever dogs or advice are given to another country, the terms of the agreement are worked out between the heads of each agency. In most cases, the dogs are gifts, but there’s often an exchange of information. (Such is the case with the Americans, who have provided specialised training models.)
It’s good will, he says of the typical foreign transaction. We might ask them to contribute to transport or basic development costs – but we’re not in this for profit. While not directly attributed as a reciprocal gesture, Chinese X-ray technology has helped ACS detect illegal drugs with a street value of more than $1 billion. Put simply, the relationship with China, says Vandeloo, is quite strategic.
But it’s the relationship with the United States that is the most significant. While the affiliation between detector-dog personnel from Australian Customs and the US government was in place beforehand, the events of September 11, 2001, strengthened the bond. I happened to be at a breeding conference with John Vandeloo and others on September 11, says Dave Kontny, director of the National Explosives Detection Canine Team Program for the US Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). I will always remember John coming over to me and asking how he and his country could help. We had received our first breeding stock from the ACS in early 2000 but were barely getting started. The ACS really came through and helped accelerate our breeding program.
The two other American groups ACS has donated breeding dogs and expertise to are the US Customs and Border Patrol, and Auburn University’s Canine & Detection Research Institute in Alabama. The latter is a highly specialised facility, says Vandeloo. For years, they had a team of scientists studying the canine’s nose, to try to replicate it in machines. But towards the end of the ’90s, they threw their hands up in the air and said, ‘We can’t! Why don’t we do ourselves a favour and try to improve the traditional biological system, like the Aussies are?’
As useful as X-ray and other hi-tech scanners are, there’s nothing like a cold, wet nose when it comes to sniffing out trouble. Dogs are Mother Nature’s detection system, says Vandeloo. It’s a marvellous thing, although I don’t think we fully understand the depth or power of it.
Even among dog experts, there is no real consensus on how powerful their noses are. A dog’s sense of smell is said to be anywhere from 10 times better than a human’s, to more than 100,000 times superior. To quote an instructor at the US Customs and Border Patrol’s Canine Enforcement Training Center Humans smell a stew. Dogs smell the carrots, the potatoes, the meat. They break it down.
On the job, this translates to a canine team being able to examine a vehicle in five to six minutes. A cursory once-over by a Customs officer without a dog would take at least 20 minutes. A busy day for a dog such as Duke can see him screening 1000 passengers, 200 bags, 50 bulk airmail bags, 100 boxes of freight, a 747 aircraft and a cargo container.
The great thing about dogs is they’re so portable, says Vandeloo. And they’re capable of vapour detection and particle detection. A lot of the machines are only [good for] one or the other.
For someone who has been working with detector dogs for more than 20 years, Vandeloo is unfailingly enthusiastic and seems constantly in awe of, in his words, our canine friends. His down-to-earth demeanour belies a wealth of expertise that anchors the entire ACS Detector Dog program.
When it began in the ’60s, dogs were recruited from shelters and families with unwanted pets. We used to interview 1000 dogs to get one who could enter training, says Vandeloo. The breeding program came about as a way to improve those results.
The first step was to settle on Labrador Retrievers, which were chosen for their versatility, temperament, and strong drive to hunt and retrieve. In 1993, Vandeloo and ACS teamed up with Melbourne University and Australian guide-dog associations to conduct a three-year study on what would make a Labrador the perfect detector dog. In a nutshell, the results showed that traits such as the desire to hunt and retrieve were genetic. But so was fear – which can be the ‘undoing’ of a working dog. What we established, says Vandeloo, is that these puppies had the ability to change their body chemistry to suit the world they’re born into. The concept is no different to the way other animals adapt to their environments. By selecting dogs with the strongest positive traits, and not breeding those with strong negative traits, such as fear, Vandeloo and his crew hoped to create a growing brood of Superdogs.
Drawing on research done by the US military in the ’70s, environmental factors were also used – such as handling pups from a very young age. If you expose puppies to the rigours of the world out there, they will develop enough adrenalin to cope, Vandeloo explains. This blend of science and experience resulted in the sought-after program that exists today.
We’d hoped that after three generations, one out of three puppies would enter training. In fact, we had one in two going in – with about 80 per cent graduating. The program is now five generations in, with 60 per cent of pups suitable for Customs training. A further 10 to 15 per cent are suitable for related training styles, such as law enforcement. (Customs training is considered more rigorous than other law enforcement training that may use food rewards rather than play rewards.) Essentially, says Vandeloo, seven out of 10 puppies born at our centre have futures in serving their country.
Vandeloo is also spearheading the development of a global gene bank to ensure quality bloodlines for future generations of detector dogs. The road from puppy to working dog is one full of diligent training – but also one filled with love. Pups are placed with families who help raise them for up to 12 months, until they begin formal training with their handlers. Foster families help socialise the dogs for the sights, sounds and smells of suburbia, says Vandeloo [see box, opposite]. Their progress is monitored by Customs, which makes monthly visits to help mould the dogs’ skills.
On duty at Sydney Airport, Duke works hard, while tourists coo over him and try to take photos of him as he noses around their luggage. He’s adorable, and it’s not hard to wonder if your fat Labrador snoozing on the couch couldn’t do this work. They’re not that different to look at, says Vandeloo of his crack troops. But to do this work, the dogs need to be finely tuned – extremely fit and healthy. We like to think of them as our Olympians. They’re the best of the best.
Even with such stellar credentials, Customs dogs such as Duke occasionally act like their carefree pet counterparts. Yesterday, he pulled a Danish out of the bin on an aircraft, says Robert Kapusta, Duke’s handler in Sydney [both have since been re-assigned to other positions with ACS]. But you can usually tell if he’s really sniffing something he’s meant to, or if he’s just having a perv.
When dogs such as Duke retire, they finally get to be couch potatoes or lap dogs. (Handlers have the option of adopting them or they may be donated to nursing homes.) But until then, you could say it’s a ‘K9 to 5′ life, with arguably low pay. It’s hard to believe, but Duke and his pals work purely for praise – and the hope of some quality time chomping on that rolled-up towel.
The big bucks are on the other end of the equation. How much does it cost to produce an elite detector such as Duke? Accounting for costs ranging from training staff to the dog food ACS provides to families raising puppies in their home, Vandeloo is reluctant to name a price. I can tell you that the figure is extremely small, compared to the mechanical technology out there. Some people use figures of $70,000 per dog. But, really, they’re priceless.
PUPPY PARENTING
Before pups become fully-fledged detector dogs, they need to be raised as regular, well-behaved young puppies. That’s where the public comes in. Customs relies on volunteers – individuals and families – around Melbourne to host pups for up to a year, until they enter formal training. Having just welcomed his 23rd and 24th Customs puppies, Flicka and Flynn, Andrew Carter is just the man to explain what’s involved.
Along with his wife, Dawn, Carter first started raising pups nine years ago, and hasn’t been without one since. I’ll go out to pick up the food at Customs and they’ll say, ‘Oh, Andrew, we have this special dog!’ And I buckle and bring another one home. We usually have two to four dogs at a time. That sounds like a handful, but Carter says the dogs are intelligent and easy to train – as long as you have patience. It can be repetitious, but once you get the pups to a basic level of discipline, it becomes easy. They’ll push you as much as they can, but you set boundaries.
Puppy raisers must learn basic commands and work with the pups on games designed to hone their hunting instincts and build their desire to work for a reward. We work on tug of war, says Carter, so they’ll want to play tug with the towel that Customs handlers use down the track.
Each month, the dogs are taken to the Customs breeding centre for evaluation, and the raisers are given direction by training staff. You have to handle them and get them used to as much as possible, explains Carter. Noises, vehicles, stairs, elevators, escalators, jumping up on things, jumping off things. The goal is to create a sociable, confident dog that won’t be easily scared once on the job.
Not surprisingly, the worst part of fostering pups is giving them back. But the sadness is replaced with happy times when you take on your new pups, says Carter. It’s so rewarding to see the dogs we’ve raised working at the airport.
For now, Flicka and Flynn are enjoying what Carter calls the life of Riley in Middle Park. The dogs get the run of the park and we’re about 500m from the beach, so they get to swim when it’s hot. It’s great – you come home at night and play with them and all your issues just go away.
For more information on fostering a Customs pup, call 1800 664 106. Customs provides all food, vet needs, equipment, advice and training.
Copyright © 2007 News Limited
