Alleged Drunk Driver Can’t Escape Nose of Michigan Police Dog

Michigan police dog Brix stares intently at a Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy, who is holding a coveted toy.

There’s one thing I’ve learned while doing the research for my book, Soldier Dogs, which comes out next week (Wow, next week! I am very excited! Please check out my website or Facebook page to learn more.):

Little escapes the nose of a well-trained law-enforcement dog. No high-tech machinery can take its place.

Such was the case Sunday evening with a German Shepherd named Brix, a Jackson County (Mich.) Sheriff’s Department K9. Brix was assisting his handler, who was pursuing an alleged drunk driver who’d had an accident and fled the scene.

It was a difficult place for tracking, especially because it was a swampy area. But it probably didn’t hurt that the driver was barefoot. Try as we may to be all clean and fresh, we humans smell very potent to our canine friends. Here’s how Alexandra Horowitz puts it in her excellent book, Inside of a Dog.

“Humans stink. The human armpit is one of the most profound sources of odor produced by any animal; our breath is a confusing melody of smells; our genitals reek. The organ that covers our body — our skin — is itself covered in sweat and sebaceous glands, which are regularly churning out fluid and oils holding our particular brand of scent. When we touch objects, we leave a bit of ourselves on them; a slough of skin, with its clutch of bacteria steadily munching and excreting away. This is our smell, our signature odor.”

As you have surely figured out by now, the dog found his man. His smelly man. His rapturously odiferous man with bare feet. And as if that weren’t reward enough, Brix probably also got loads of praise from his handler, and maybe even a ball to chonk on for a minute.

Dogs are so cool, aren’t they?

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Two ways to not kill pets in Michigan

I haven’t been in Michigan four weeks yet, and already there’s a huge PR mess at the Michigan Humane Society, with two board members resigning in protest over the high kill rate at the organization’s three shelters, and its leadership’s unwillingness to do anything about it.

Society vice-president Mike Robbins whined that it’s not the shelter’s fault; he claims that 60 percent of the dogs and cats that come their doors are “unadoptable.” He also said, “A lot of what we do is not popular…. A lot of things you do because they have to be done.”

Gee, you’d think these folks would get a new line.  That one’s getting really old.

Apparently the fact that all over the entire nation — coast to coast; north, east, south, and west; rich or poor; urban or rural — other communities find that only 10 percent or less of the pets they take in are not able to be saved has no bearing at all on Michigan, because as states go, Michigan is the speshulest speshul snowflake of all.

One of the reasons people like Robbins often claim they cannot save nearly all their community’s dogs is that way too many of them are, or seem to be, or could be if you squinted your eyes just right, pit bulls. And as everyone knows, pit bulls are vicious evil monsters who would  just as soon tear out your throat as eat a nice raw steak liberally sprinkled with gunpowder.

At least, that’s what Michigan state representative Tim Bledsoe (D-Grosse Pointe) seems to believe, based on the idiotic law he proposed last week, Michigan House Bill No. 4714. (It was, thank dog, killed in committee today.)

Of course, what every region that has a lot of pit bulls dying in their so-called “shelters” needs, including Metro Detroit, is not a pit bull ban, but a full-on pit bull image rehab and adoption effort.

These dogs need the myths about them busted. They need people to realize that every pit bull is an individual dog and deserves to be individually assessed.

Pit bulls, and dogs who resemble them, can very often be adopted out as safely as any other dog. This becomes possible on a large scale when the ground in the community has been softened with PR, outreach and marketing efforts.

Like dogs of all breeds, some pit bulls and pit bull-esque dogs need some rehab before they go to their new homes. And others may need only very specialized placement or sanctuary or, in a few cases, to be killed to relieve their suffering or protect humans and other animals.

But the bottom line is they need individual evaluation, not to be judged en masse as if they had some sort of horrific Borg-like hive mind and then summarily executed to protect the public from their evilness.

And how the hell do you put programs like that in place if it’s against the law to own a pit bull? A law like this would have meant that not only would all the pit bulls currently in Michigan’s shelters be killed instead of adopted, but so would all the pit bulls currently snoozing at their owners’ feet, as well as all of them wandering the streets of Detroit starving to death, their only hope the determined efforts of rescue groups hoping to save them.

So here I am, my two biggest issues in big-screen play within a month of my arrival in the state. Why do these things happen to me????

Photo: Buckley, a vicious monster who must be banned to protect the phosphorescent stuffed toy snakes of Michigan. Courtesy of MJ Murphy.

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