Police dog play area not just for pups
To be a K9 officer requires brains as well as bark, and now police dogs and their prison and border sniffer counterparts have a new playground to keep their minds sharp.
A dog fort has been built for the national police dog breeding and training facility at Trentham, Upper Hutt, after kennel and breeding services worker Simone Botterill asked for a way to keep the dogs she looks after every day stimulated, and sociable.
The Police Dog Trust funded Botterill’s project, with Hutt Valley builder Rodney Verhoeven giving up his weekends to build the structure, which features ramps, platforms and tunnels.
The fort is not just for budding police dogs, it is also available to Corrections and Customs detector dogs in training, as well as breeding stock and new puppies.
‘‘It serves a lot of purposes for the dogs,’’ Botterill said.
‘‘Instead of just being an open, empty area for the dogs to socialise in, it provides them with shelter, obviously some mental stimulation – there’s a lot of different surfaces and textures – especially for the younger puppies to learn on.
‘‘This makes my job easier in the sense that the dogs aren’t all locked up in the kennels every day. They get to have some freedom and spend their whole day running around with other dogs.’’
Next, she will look at having a miniature version of the dog fort built for police puppies.
The first batch of the new year were born early on Saturday.
The newborns are a ‘‘T’’ litter, which means every new pup’s name must start with ‘‘T’’.
The police dog breeding service had gone through the alphabet so many times, it was running out of ideas for ‘‘Q’’ and ‘‘X’’ names and sometimes skipped them, Botterill said.
The puppies’ older friends seemed impressed with their new digs on Tuesday.
Casha, a breeding bitch, Dani the labrador – a possible detector dog who is being raised by trust chairman and national police dog co-ordinator Inspector Todd Southall – Botterill’s own beloved dog Covac, and Ivy, who is in the police puppy development programme, bounded around the fort.
‘‘They absolutely love it,’’ she said. – Fairfax NZ