UNLEASHED

“It’s a combination of a public show but it is a very tough competition and they did some things this year that are very adequate to testing to see if a dog will really commit to biting a man versus not doing what he’s trained to do,” said Patterson.

One of the tasks, said Miner, was sending his dog into a jumpy house, “a big ‘ol inflatable jumpy house, through a small opening … We’ve never had to do that before.”

In that event, the decoy takes the bite and then jumps up and down and the officer has to verbally release his dog and call

him back.

“Well that’s something I’ve never done,” said Miner understatedly.

But Adaro did exactly as commanded to do.

In another scenario, the K9 is deployed through a tunnel, then must jump into an octagon-shaped barricade and bite the decoy.

“And you have to verbal out your dog again,” said Miner. “So the dog has to release, and now he’s trapped between the barricade and the decoy and he has to decide, ‘Am I going to listen, jump back over the barricade and go or am I going say screw it and bite him again?’

“It’s all about control. And we don’t practice verbal outs over a barricade

like that.”

“A verbal release of a dog is the pinnacle of obedience,” said Patterson.

The weirdness didn’t end there, however. Another task required the K9s to walk across a swing gate.

But there was also a closer to real-life scenario where the K9 teams were tasked with dealing with approaching a van, in which the doors open, smoke comes out of the van, there’s a suspect inside the van and the officer must send his K9 inside to bite.

“So he’s got to go into that van, get through the smoke and bite the guy. So it’s a very real life thing,” said Miner.

“That one, that one is more like something we’re more comfortable with because we know our dogs can pretty much do anything we need them to do and we prepare ourselves for as much high end police stuff that we can do,” said Patterson, “like flash bangs, super socks, people running, riding in vehicles, jumping out of vehicles, we train for that, we do that. So if they’re going to throw that kind of stuff at us, we’re OK, we go in with confidence knowing that we’re going to do well.”

Patterson speaks from experience.

At the Southern Arizona High Risk Deployment Seminar in Tucson in

2019, Patterson and his K9, Broko, won it all. Miner and Adaro came in third.

The high risk deployment was more straight forward, said Patterson.

“It was real heavy duty, stuff that we know how to do, stuff we train for.

“This one has some stuff that can make you really question what kind of obedience can my dog do, things like can my dog walk on a swing gate. Well we don’t train for that, we don’t care about that stuff.

Under “normal” circumstances, said Patterson, “We’re happy to go out, be just as comfortable as we can be … and if there is someone barricaded in a house with hostages, and we have to figure out how we’re going to handle that, we’re fine. That’s a piece of cake, because we’re judging ourselves, it’s a task to perform, we’ve trained for this, we know what we’re doing.

“Our expectations are our dog is going to go in and he’s going to search and find and we’re going to be right on their tail … that’s not a problem.

“But a huge crowd of people watching you … and you are constantly measured by your peers … that’s a different story.

“But we feel we can do well and not embarrass ourselves. There are a lot of great agencies that have great teams. We’re from Yuma, and we put up a pretty solid name for ourselves. If you go to the Valley, they all know who we are.”