Below is an article that was published in the Commercial Appeal newspaper on February 25, 2008. The article outlines some of the training and successes of the dog teams in DeSoto County. These dogs and handlers were recently trained by Highland Canine Training.

DeSoto officials use Labrador to find human remains
By Toni Lepeska
Monday, February 25, 2008

The Brazilian black Labrador dug furiously at the wet earth, slinging clods of dirt behind him, but this was no typical neighborhood canine looking for a buried ham bone.

Tank was looking for human remains — specifically, parts of a human liver encased in a PVC pipe, his toy.

Tim Curtis, deputy director of DeSoto County Emergency Management, watches as Tank digs up a plastic pipe containing blood samples.

The weekly training ritual keeps the dog sharp. It’s a game to Tank, but in the real world, the body parts are not in the dog’s toy and no one knows where the remains are hidden.

Tank’s job is to distinguish the scent of human death from all the other scents his superior nose can pick up, then alert authorities to the location.

Other dogs owned by volunteers have helped find human remains here, but Tank is the first dog of his kind to be owned by the county. His handler is Tim Curtis, deputy director of emergency management for DeSoto County.

Tank’s first real-life scenario took place Feb. 14, when highway workers found the torso of a woman near the Coldwater River bridge off U.S. 78 near the Ingrams Mill Road exit in DeSoto County.

Her head was missing. Her hands were missing. Her feet were missing.

While divers checked the river, Tank was sent in to search the grounds. They found nothing.

Authorities worried they would have a lot of difficulty identifying the woman and solving the crime, but detective work and DNA analysis broke through those barriers.

The crime was traced back to Memphis, where James Hawkins, 30, was accused of killing, then dismembering, his live-in girlfriend Charlene Gaither and dumping her body in DeSoto County.

According to authorities, Hawkins’ 12-year-old daughter allegedly saw her father kill her mother, and her father forced the girl to help him throw the body parts out of his car in secluded spots in Mississippi.

To properly train dogs for detection, actual human remains must be used. Blood. Tissue. Teeth. Hair. Fingernail and toe clippings. All donations to science.

A mixture of types of materials are used from a mixture of people, so the dog learns the general smell of human death rather than the specific smells of individuals.

“It tends to gross the average citizen out, but when you think about it that’s how medical doctors and dentist learn,” Curtis said, holding Tank by a leash.

Tank, who also knows how to track the living, trained for six weeks before he was paired with Curtis an additional three weeks.

Along with Tank, the county obtained Texas, a Brazilian yellow Labrador, about two months ago. She’s an expert in finding the living — under rubble.

She and her handler were put on standby Feb. 5 after tornados ripped through a Southaven warehouse district. Had authorities learned someone might have been trapped, Texas would have been sent to make the find.

She also can find specific individuals.

“She can find the one person out of 200 people,” said her handler, D.W. Gilbert, a who conducts fire inspections and investigations for the county.

Her reward?

“Affection and a stuffed bunny,” Gilbert said.

Tank’s reward is the PVC pipe. He loves to chew on it.

For real life finds, however, Curtis must watch his dog carefully. He can’t be chewing on the evidence. So, Curtis trains himself to be alert to the signs that Tank has found human remains.

In a concreted area, “he snorts like a pig,” Curtis said. “He has a change in his breathing habits.”

If there’s dirt around and the scent is good, “he digs like crazy,” Curtis said. “That’s his ‘Daddy, I’m really on it.’”

The county also owns two other dogs. Dixi is a bloodhound that looks for lost people.

The other dog is Ibar, a 4-year-old Czechoslovakian shepherd. He’s an expert in explosive detection and tracking people by scent. He also was trained to protect his handler, so he usually is only sent to track criminal suspects.

However, early in Ibar’s career, he was sent to find a man who’d wandered away in the cold wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and slippers. Already, people had been looking two or three hours.

Ibar found the man in 17 minutes.

The dogs, costing approximately $8,000 apiece, are rarely needed, but they are invaluable, their handlers say.

“When they do get their action, they’re well worth it,” said Bobby Storey, director of emergency management. “The second week we had Ibar, he found an 80-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. That one case, that dog paid for himself.”