Crime & Safety

Meet FCPD's New Bomb Dogs in Training

'Moose' and 'Marco' will hit the streets in July

The two newest Fairfax County Police Department “,” which work with the angency’s Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Unit, will be hitting the streets July 9.

The yellow labs, named Moose and Marco, along with three Central Intelligence Agency dogs, have spent much of this spring at a CIA canine facility in Fairfax County training their noses.

Moose is replacing Puget, who has retired after almost nine years of service to the Fairfax County Police Department. Marco is replacing a black lab named Lightcap, who retired after beating cancer last year.

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Now-retired Puget attended events some humans will never get to, including the Super Bowl. Through a partnership with the federal government, Puget traveled to national sports and political events, including Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Fla., a NASCAR race in Brooklyn, Mich., an All-Star baseball game in Detroit, and the Republican National Convention in New York City, according to the Fairfax County Police Department.

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Ongoing Training

Puget is now more than 10 years old and spends his time relaxing with the family of his handler, MPO Tom Eggers. Eggers said Puget barks more when Eggers leaves the house and he “wants more attention” these days from Eggers and his family.

However, Puget still gets to go to work with Eggers a few days a week and trains for fun.

“For them, it’s all a game because they don’t know they’re looking for something dangerous,” Eggers said.

Yellow labs were bred for hunting, have great noses and are very “handler oriented” in that they want to please.

They also like food, and sniffing out explosive materials is the only way these dogs eat. The dogs are not given breakfast or dinner in a bowl like most other dogs—they only receive food when they successfully sniff out an explosive material. Food is the primary reward during training and during actual operations.

The dogs are trained to pick up on scents that humans may not detect or may not be able to identify. Where humans may smell a chemical odor, dogs can differentiate among those odors.

The first six weeks of training is called “imprinting,” where dogs are familiarized with different scents of potential explosive materials. The next 10 weeks are spent seeking out those explosives in a variety of environments. When a dog discovers an odor they identify as something that smells like an explosive material, they sit and are rewarded with both praise and kibble.

Small amounts of explosive materials are put into tins with holes in the top that the dogs sniff. Other, similar tins are filled with “distractors,” which can be anything they may encounter in the real world, such as hand lotion or human food. One tin at the training facility contained a stale, crunchy cheese ball.

In addition to the CIA training facility, the dogs are taken to Fairfax County Public Schools after school hours, onto buses and into car dealerships and other businesses that have volunteered to provide the dogs with training environments.

“You never know where you might be called to work,” Eggers said. The goal is to expose the dog to as many environments as possible so they are used to a variety of working situations.

Training doesn’t end with graduation. Food-oriented training continues every day, whether the dog is working or not. “It’s what you do from then on that determines how good the dog will be,” said lead instructor for the canine class Jeff Piacquadio. “It’s a perishable skill.”

The five dogs will be certified as working dogs at the end of the month, and continue formal training at the training facility until graduation July 8.

Before Becoming a ‘Bomb Dog’

Moose came to the FCPD through a partnership with the CIA, and he went through a program called Puppies Behind Bars, which works with select breeders.

Puppies Behind Bars is a non-profit organization that pairs prison inmates with puppies. The inmates raise the dogs and give them basic obedience training and socialization. Volunteer families take the Puppies Behind Bars dog home on weekends to further socialize them and introduce them to more environments. Marco and Moose spent much of their first year of life in a women’s prison near Danbury, Ct. FCPD reimbursed Puppies Behind Dogs for Marco and Moose.

Puget came from a program through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and Canine Companions for Independence, which trains assistance dogs for people with disabilities.

The general ATF policy is to retire explosive materials-sniffing dogs at 9-years-old, but Puget worked slightly longer because he was in good health.

Puget was Eggers’s first working dog, but he said he has had dogs all of his life—shepherds, a cocker spaniel, a beagle and now a 14-year-old black lab who gets along just fine with Puget and Moose.


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