Dogs trained to search waters for submerged bodies

WAYNESVILLE, OHIO » Jason LaGore pulled the frozen body part from the red-and-white Coleman cooler in the bed of his pickup truck, tucked it inside a wire cage to hold it together over time, tethered the contraption to a tree limb and let it sink 8 feet into the middle of Caesar Creek Lake.

He waited a few minutes for the scent to travel up through the water.

Then LaGore, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources officer who trains the department’s six-dog K-9 unit, strapped a life vest onto Sarge, his 2-yearold Labrador retriever, and together they boarded a small boat.

As the vessel motored out across the lake, LaGore waved his hand toward the water and gave Sarge his command: Find Fred. The dog immediately dropped his head over the bow of the boat and went to work, sniffing for a scent from the gases and oils that a cadaver gives off.

The dogs, used by the state for on-water searches since 2012, are getting quite a workout this year. In all of 2016, the state’s search dogs were used on water 13 times; this year, they’ve been out 21 times, and there’s plenty of summer left.

The 2017 number doesn’t necessarily mean that many more incidents, but it reflects that the state added two dogs this year and that the dogs are sometimes deployed on consecutive days to try to make a find.

The dogs aren’t used only on the water. They are also variously trained in drug detection, suspect searches, the tracking and finding of missing people on land, handler protection and other tasks.

In addition to the handler’s salaries, the dogs cost the state about $8,000 a year, said ODNR spokeswoman Carey Santiana.

Scent sleuthing is not an exact science: Even a little wind can carry a body’s scent and scatter it. And plenty of skeptics must be converted, each seeing in person that these dogs indeed can be trained to sniff out a submerged body.