Horses join hounds to search for the missing
Deputies and volunteers look for clues using sight and scent
South Florida authorities have a new weapon in the search for missing people: a team of bloodhounds and horses.
This month, they trained for the first time on ways to work together without stepping on each other’s paws or hooves.
“It was seamless, the horses and the dogs were like ‘OK, whatever. This is cool.’ They did great,” said Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Kelli Covet, who trains bloodhound Macie. She is one of three sheriff ’s handlers responding to missing persons cases throughout Broward. The other bloodhounds in the unit are Macie’s brother, Wyatt, and Amber.
During their first encounter, horses from the all-volunteer Mounted Posse lined up behind
trail-sniffing bloodhounds. They served as the dogs’ eyes and ears, combing for evidence. Dogs remained razor-focused with wet noses to the ground.
And those noses — with 4 billion scent receptors — are impressive. To compare, a German shepherd has 220 million scent receptors; a human nose has 5 million.
“When I’m tracking [a scent], I’m just looking where my dog is going,” Covet said. “If I’m in a big open field, she’s taking me on a track and I’m watching her. Of course, I’m not going to always see what’s to the left and to the right of me.”
That’s where the Mounted Posse jumps in, looking for clues to help guide the bloodhounds.
“We’re sitting on horses. We’re high up in the air. We can see way down the trail or we can see over fences into people’s backyards or into swimming pools,” said Don Maines, a sheriff’s civilian employee who runs the posse. “We can see down canal banks if anything is on the trail or if there might be someone floating in the canal bank. So that’s our advantage: being on top of the horse.”
Horses can also walk through brush to check on a trail that a dog can no longer follow because of dense foliage.
Maines has a core group of about a dozen riders and their horses who are volunteering to search for abducted babies, teen runaways and wandering seniors with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Most of these volunteers have shown off their horses at parades, schools and other community events. It’s the first time they’ll pitch in with search-andrescue missions and investigative work.
“It’s important for us to help out and give back to the community. I have children and grandchildren and if God forbid something was wrong with them, I’d want as many qualified people trying to find them,” said Joel Goldmacher, a retired bank executive who is a Mounted Posse member. “If we can help, that would be a great thing. We have the horses, we have the trailers, we have the trucks and we are available.”
Goldmacher has an Arabian horse, Misty, that joined in the training. Most of the other volunteers have quarter horses, he said.
But all horses must have a good temperament, not be easily spooked by police lights and sirens, and become accustomed to different environments, including riding along the beach or canal banks, Maines said.
The bloodhounds — unlike typical police dogs apprehending criminals— are “friendly-find dogs,” Covet said.
Macie recently joined the search for a missing 8-year-old boy in Coral Springs by taking a whiff of his pillowcase and following a trail out the back door. She also helped look for a 100-year-old man who walked away from a Hollywood nursing home. Both were later found safe.
During a recent training session, Covet had a boy wipe his face with a towel and stored the towel in a paper bag. The boy then walked around a softball field, looped around and hid.
Covet brought Macie out of her sheriff’s SUV and walked her around to let her nose get acclimated to the scents in the environment. Then she signaled it was time to work by putting a harness on the bloodhound.
“Everybody has their own unique fingerprint; everybody has their own unique smell as well,” she said. “We can’t tell a difference, but these dogs can.”
Covet barely opened the bag before the dog abruptly darted away on a track. The 107-pound hound dragged Covet toward the boy’s hiding place within minutes. As the dog sniffed around, her floppy ears fanned up the scent on the ground and her slobber activated the odor she tracked.
“I show her who we’re looking for by the smell. She can rule out everybody else’s odor,” Covet said. “She’ll keep working and working and working until she falls over, so it’s our responsibility to pull them off the trail and give them a break.”
Their reward is tons of praise and a treat.
There are lots of opportunities for these slobbery encounters.
This year, through Nov. 20, sheriff’s detectives worked 1,028 missing persons cases. Handlers worked some of those cases and assisted other police departments in their search for missing persons in their cities.
The hounds were donated to the sheriff ’s office by the Jimmy Ryce Center, a foundation created by Don and Claudine Ryce, parents of the 10-year-old Miami-Dade boy who was abducted and killed in 1995.