K9 UNIT SHARPENS ITS SKILLS

PARRY SOUND - Seven-year-old Ki (pronounced Kye) isn't exactly your average
member of the Ontario Provincial Police. Outweighed by his partner
Constable Shawn Campbell by about a good 50 pounds, Ki has a nose for
tracking down criminals, those who are lost and even a few street drugs.

At the annual Emergency Services Family Fun Day on June 4, Ki, a German
Shepherd who has been on the force for the last four years, upstaged his
partner, by showing just what the District of Muskoka K9 Unit is made of.

Through a variety of exercises, like sniffing out drugs purposely hidden on
a police cruiser to tracking a 'criminal' through the surrounding brush,
Mr. Campbell and Ki demonstrated just how serious they take their job.

"A lot of people don't realize what we do and we like to give them an idea
what we do," said Mr. Campbell. "Especially with kids, it gives them an
opportunity to talk to an officer and meet his dog."

Each General Service Dog - there are only 24 in the province - is assigned
to one officer who is the animal's sole caregiver.

"We train that dog, we train with that dog for four months and then we
learn from the dog and the dog learns from us and we work together as a
partnership," said Mr. Campbell. "Generally they're not the kind of dog
that we want kids to come up to and touch, we discourage that, because
they're aggression trained there's a liability that we have to be careful
about who we let approach our dogs. They can be very sociable, but because
their trained, they're trained to bite we're always very careful who we let
touch our dogs."

The dog starts its training through bonding exercises with its future
partner, from beginning to end, the animal is trained in four months.

"Then there's obedience, so he knows I'm the boss, not him," he said. "Then
we take them through agility courses to get their confidence up - like
walking on logs and climbing up ladders. We do all that, so a bond develops
between us and then we start getting into the tracking."

The animal first tracks its partner, then other people, from their the
tracking becomes more difficult, over pavement instead of a wooded area.

"Then we bring in aggression, so that, instead it being a friendly find
when he finds someone lost, it might be a bad guy we're finding he might
have to bite that person because of them being a violent criminal."

The main duties of a General Service Dog is tracking humans and
cross-trained for narcotics.

"He's trained to detect the common narcotics in our society, pot, hashish,
heroin, cocaine and crack," he said. "There are three drug dogs across the
province that are being trained to find ecstasy and they're also trained to
find guns."

The K9 dogs aren't specifically bread for this particular line of work,
they're often sold to the OPP or given to them from previous owners.

"We've had ones who come from families, and they have this nice German
Shepherd and it turns out it's too aggressive," he said. "We put them
though a lot of tests to make sure they have a hunting instinct, that have
a lot of courage so they don't back down from somebody. They're also
checked out medically."

Ki lives in a kennel in Mr. Campbell's backyard that's built by the OPP.
It's well insulated so that he can stay outdoors comfortably year round.

"The dog stays with us, for the remainder of it's career, ideally. I feed
him and he's socialized to accept that I'm his caregiver and no one else,
that way he'll work for me," he said. "So when it's minus 25 out, in the
middle of February at three o'clock in the morning and I say 'okay, we've
got to go work.' He knows okay, this is the guy I work for. It's a great
partnership."