Police dog surprise

MATT BROWN matt@topsouthmedia.co.nz

Friday nights are for relaxing, a quiet beer - and training police dogs, apparently.

A special exercise to get a young police dog ready for its exams made an incredibly fun change to the regular Friday night ritual.

Nearing bedtime, when your five-year-old tells you there’s a policeman at your back door, you can forgive a parent for not believing them.

Cue a rapping at the door. The back door, where no one ever knocks.

“It’s probably just the boy,” I told my partner. With the stupid hot temperatures, we had every single curtain in the house pulled and the air conditioning on full blast. She checked, because, it turns out, it’s wise to listen to your children sometimes, and found Senior Constable Aaron Senior.

He very politely asked to use our property in a training exercise for 15-month-old Police dog in training, Buzz.

“He’ll come over that fence in about ten minutes,” he told us, pointing at the arched fence, very in need of paint and with nails sticking out of it, in our back garden.

“A gift,” I thought to myself, as I prepared my camera and notebook. I love it when interesting things happen.

While my partner worried about her plants, and we both dreamed of a great, hulking brute of dog bursting through the fence in a slather of saliva and justice – and the re- sulting insurance claim - the svelte 30kg-ish buzz was in fact lovingly hoisted over the ACC-claim worthy fence and quickly found the scent to the lane beyond.

Buzz zoomed around our culde-sac, presumably distracted by the four-and-a-half million cats that seem to live on the lane, all of which poo in our garden, before latching on to the scent again.

Aaron told me afterwards that training in residential areas is especially difficult, but they need to have their dogs ready to go wherever offenders are.

The training takes place not just near homes, but rurally and through industrial areas too.

Buzz is working towards being operational, with his certification course, at Trentham’s Police Dog Training Centre, coming up in April.

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