(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone, I'm Sheriff Wayne Ivey
of the Brevard County Sheriff's Office.
And of course, this guy right here needs no introduction.
This is Junny, our agency mascot,
and of course my riding partner.
I've got Corporal Ramsey with me
from our Corrections K-9 Team.
And our Corrections K-9 Team runs all of our bloodhounds.
You know, when we're out,
Junny and I are going around in the community,
a lot of people ask is Junny, still a working dog?
Junny was originally trained to search for missing children,
seniors with Alzheimer's.
Of course, he's been through
our Child Comfort Dog program as well.
But the answer to that is, yeah,
he's still a working dog.
So what we thought is,
we'd show you a little bit
about how Junny works.
Also take an take an opportunity
to tell you how to build
your own child safety kit.
And it really doesn't take a lot
to give our bloodhound handlers an opportunity
to track a missing child.
So, what we want you to do is
put together a kit much like
you see in my hands right now,
a large Ziploc bag.
And the first thing we're gonna to do
is we're gonna to take a Q-tip,
we're going to be very careful
not to touch the end of it.
If you can handle it with gloves,
that's even better because it keeps your scent
from getting on it.
But we want you to do
what we call a buccal swab.
You're basically gonna to take
and put it inside your child's mouth
in the cheek area
right here and spin it around.
Get a good buccal swab on it.
Then you're gonna to put it
into a separate plastic bag.
You can do a couple of them, if you will.
Put that into a separate plastic bag
and put a date on it for us.
Put your child's name on it,
their weight, any other identifying information.
The second thing we want
in our kit is your child's sock.
It's ideal if they've worn it to school,
they've had it on all day.
One of the things that we want to ask you to do
is to be very careful in how you build this kit.
If you touch the sock,
now the dog is trying to pick
between two different scents on it.
So what we want is you to have your child
take it off and then put it carefully into the bag.
We're gonna to seal the bag up
and we're going to put a date on it.
We're going to leave it like that.
I know that's pretty nasty to think
about leaving an old, dirty sock in a plastic bag.
But what we want is for our dog to be able
to pick up what we call a scent article.
If you don't have this kit,
some other things that we use,
and I know Ramsey and I were talking a while ago
about different types of things
is your child's bed case
or pillowcase, your child's sheets,
any of their favorite toys, anything of that nature.
But again, please be careful don't handle it.
When we get there, point it out to us,
our team will pick it up
and make sure they're handling it proper.
What we're gonna to do is
we're gonna put it in a paper sack.
You're gonna see that here in a minute
and then use it to alert the dog
to what they're gonna search for.
So what's going to happen is,
earlier we had Corporal Rodriguez
go lay a track for us.
This is one of the things we do to train our dogs.
Corporal Rodriguez laid the track.
We're gonna to show you the track.
And then Corporal Ramsey is going to take Junny,
he was Junny's handler when Junny
was full-time with our canines
and he's gonna go search for Corporal Rodriguez.
You'll see some of the technique that he uses.
At the end of the day,
though, our ultimate goal is
to find the missing child,
to find our senior with dementia or Alzheimer's.
The dogs work off of our praise.
As you can tell, Junny loves attention.
So the dogs are gonna work off of praise.
You'll see him get rewarded at the end.
And really and truly,
what this dog is working for, is love.
He wants his handler to love him
and to be proud of him and to show him that.
So Ramsey, you ready?
- Absolutely.
- All right, why don't you walk us through
what you're gonna do.
- First, we're gonna walk the bloodhound around
to have him do a scent inventory of the area.
So he gets the whole 360 view
of the entire area that he's working.
'Cause we don't know the direction
of the missing child at this time.
So we're gonna soak him around this whole area.
We're going to walk Junny
up to the article that we collected earlier.
And it's very key to us is that we get a good smell,
the dog gets a good smell from the article that we chose.
We're gonna praise the dog up a little bit.
You ready to go to work? Ready to go to work?
Make sure he gets a good sniff out of the bag.
Seek.
Good boy.
And we're kind of gonna let the dog,
the dog is gonna do all the work here.
He's tracking,
he's lifting his head up,
he's smelling multiple areas and direction
because the wind's blowing at our face right now.
Here he goes.
His head's down on the ground.
So he knows exactly where the track is at.
And that's a good indication for us as well.
Good boy.
So you can see he's eating the grass, right there.
So you know
that the track kind of went through this area
and he actually uses his mouth to smell as well.
So he's gonna start inventorying the area a little bit.
He's trying to find it.
So we're gonna keep passing him around,
let him work a little bit,
let him do his own thing.
Find him.
And those ears, as they're hitting the ground,
they're keeping the scent
tracking straight to his nose,
so he has a good inventory of the track.
(Junny barks)
So Junny is very excited right now.
So I know he is right on track.
I went through with my experience with training with him,
he is very close to the very end of the track
where Corporal Rodriguez is at.
So that gives us a good proximity alert.
So when we understand the dog in this area,
we start to look a lot more in this area,
start to close in our perimeter.
And get some more deputies in the area where I'm at.
It's good check.
Good boy.
(lawn mower mowing)
Is that your man?
- (indistinct) there boy.
- (both) Is that a good boy. Yeah
- (both praise)
- Good boy, Junny
- Good boy.
- And we have a successful track.
- [Wayne] So as you can see,
they get really excited
when they find the missing child,
or in this case, our corporal that he was searching for.
They worked for praise. They work for love.
But they are great parts of our team,
great resources for us.
And I will tell you that our canines
here at the Brevard County Sheriff's Office
have saved many of a child's life,
many of a person that had mental health issues,
people with Alzheimer's,
out looking for criminals, all of it.
This team works hard every day.
You can see the amount of equipment they have to wear.
They're training these dogs on a constant daily basis.
And at the end of the day,
all we're doing is trying to save lives.
So great job, Junny. You've still got it, buddy.
You still got that skill set we got you for.
(upbeat music)