Anderson: Tails wagging, Minnesota DNR officers' dogs find lost people and missing evidence

The joke at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is that managers' happiest workers are also the lowest paid.

Their dogs.

If that's true, the eight tail waggers who toil for DNR conservation officers aren't looking to form a union. They're too busy sniffing out evidence that bad guys hide, finding disoriented hunters and tracking down lost kids.

Last month, Bolt, a black Labrador retriever handled by conservation officer (CO) Mike Krauel of Mora, needed only eight minutes to locate an autistic 4-year-old Onamia boy who had been missing for two hours after wandering away from home.

It was Bolt's second heroic find in recent times, coming just months after locating a lost hunter in the woods.

"One main reason we have the dogs is to locate people and things, which makes our officers more efficient," said Capt. Phil Mohs, who heads up the DNR's K9 unit. "It might be a person we're looking for or a shell casing or zebra mussels attached to a boat. The dogs help make these things possible."

A former U.S. Army dog handler and Iraq War veteran, Mohs, 42, said as a kid he was afraid of German shepherds. But he put those reservations aside when he extended his Army service for five years to learn how to train and handle military dogs, most of which are Belgian Malinois, German shepherds or crosses of the two.

"We classify those as apprehension dogs, and we [at the DNR] have some of those," Mohs said. "But increasingly, we're going to the sporting breeds such as Labradors, which are more often used for detection."

On a recent day, Mohs and COs Cassie Block, Dustin Roemeling, Annette Schlag and Jake Swedberg were training with their canine buddies at Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area near Forest Lake.

Block is taking over Jet, a trained 4-year-old black Labrador, while Roemeling, Schlag and Swedberg have 1-year-old Labradors acquired by the DNR in January.

They've been meeting at Carlos Avery or Camp Ripley near Little Falls every week since February.

Other DNR officers whose dogs are already trained often attend the sessions to keep their charges and themselves sharp.

For officers and dogs alike, the coaching is extensive, and is both similar and dissimilar from ways amateurs might instruct their dogs.

"The group training sessions for the young Labradors and their handlers, and for Cassie [Block], who is new to her dog, will continue through the end of May," Mohs said.

The dogs' training occurs in steps, with one learned behavior leading to another. At times, the animals need correcting, Mohs said. But generally they're set up for success and are guided by positive reinforcement.

When the dogs perform a desired task, for example, they're rewarded either with food, their ball, praise from their handler — or a combination of the three.

Block, 29, who is stationed in Willmar but will soon transfer to Two Harbors, grew up in Ramsey in a family that had dogs.

"I had expressed an interest in [the DNR Enforcement Division's] dog program last summer, and in January when I was offered the opportunity to handle Jet, whose previous handler took a promotion, I said yes," Block said. "It's been a very smooth transition. As the officer who had him previously said, 'You'll be Jet's new human dispenser of food.'"

With their 1-year-old Labs, which are littermates, Schlag, Swedberg and Roemeling are not only training their dogs, they're being trained themselves.

A former Nobles County sheriff's deputy and Worthington Police Department officer who in those roles handled a German shepherd and Belgian Malinois, Roemeling, 37, grew up in southwest Minnesota with hunting dogs.

"We had litters of German shorthairs every year and I helped with those," he said.

Working with his young black Labrador, Cora, has been different than working with the apprehension dogs he handled in his previous postings.

"For 12 years I worked with dual purpose dogs that are used for both searching and apprehension," Roemeling said. "Those are important dogs, but with this young Lab, not having to be so concerned about the apprehension side, it allows us to search differently."

Labradors can be freed from their leashes, Roemeling said, and can cover wide areas looking for an object or a person, whereas shepherds and other apprehension breeds are kept leashed.

"When we're training for searches like these, the person who is hiding often provides the reward by showing excitement and giving the dog his ball," Roemeling said. "Soon enough, the dog learns if he finds the guy, all kinds of good things happen."

Timing of rewards must be as exact as possible, Block said, so the dogs know which behavior is being honored.

Because food is one reward, the dogs aren't fed twice a day, as typical owners might feed their dogs. Instead they're fed in small portions throughout a day, when they perform tasks successfully.

Similarly, unlike family dogs that are sometimes allowed to lounge on a sofa or sleep on a bed, DNR and other similarly trained enforcement canines are often kept in outside kennels.

"We socialize the dogs and allow them to come inside when the weather is bad and at some other times," Block said. "But keeping them separate from you when you're not training or traveling with them ensures that you're not 'old news' to them. It keeps their motivations to work at a high level."

The dogs' noses can be trained to find everything from a pheasant or a duck that a poacher might hide, to zebra mussels so small they're nearly invisible.

"I have a 6-year-old Malinois named Mack and I regularly check boats for zebra mussels with him at a Minnetonka landing," Mohs said. "One time when a boat pulled up to the landing a boy said, 'Dad, you better check the boat for zebra mussels. Mack's here.'"

Wherever DNR officers go for work, their dogs accompany them. But a dog generally doesn't get out of an officer's truck unless it's needed. The officers' vehicles are rigged with special heat alarms, and if the inside temperature rises too much, a fan will come on, a window will go down and the officer is notified.

It's important, Mohs said, that COs with dogs are available to help other law enforcement agencies when needed, sometimes at a moment's notice.

Such was the case when CO Krauel and his Labrador Bolt responded to find the lost autistic boy.

Which the dog did happily.