POLICE DOGS HEAD OFF TO CLASS: LOCAL TRAINER LEADS FIVE-WEEK SEMINAR

As a man raised a club to strike a Missouri State Highway Patrol officer, he was greeted with the snarling face of a lunging police dog. The dog's purpose was twofold -- to protect the police officer and capture the criminal.

The dog passed the test.

And a test it was. The dog, the patrolman and even the man with the club participated in a five-week training seminar in Cape Girardeau for police canine units and their handlers.

The instructor for the seminar, Mike Ervin, has been working with three of the dogs and their highway patrol handlers at his Cape Girardeau home for the entire five week period. Three of the dogs are in for their initial training as highway patrol dogs.

The other two dogs and their handlers have been in town for quarterly training -- a two-week brush-up course.

Ervin, who also works with both the Cape Girardeau and the Sikeston police departments, spends most of his time training dogs and handlers for canine units throughout the state. It is a job that never ends, he says.

"A dog has a mind of a 3-year-old child," he said. "Dogs learn through association and repetition. If you don't keep your dog trained, he will forget. They must practice what they do."

At least eight hours of training a week is ideal, Ervin said.

The dogs that Ervin and the patrol work with the most are German shepherds, which Ervin says have the right temperament for police work. They are both friendly and protective, which are necessary for police work, he said.

When Ervin gets the dogs, who are most often shipped in from Europe, they have had no experience in police work. Some of them have had obedience and protection training, but they have no work in narcotics, a prime use of police dogs.

Sometimes, despite hours of intensive training, the dogs do not succeed as police dogs and must be shipped back.

One of the reasons that dogs do not make it in the canine units is that they have trouble detecting illegal drugs that may be hidden. "If he can't find dope, he won't be with us for long," said Corp. Rick Ryerson of Macon, a canine officer for four and a half years.

The dogs are most often used by police departments in detecting narcotics. A narcotics dog must be trained to detect a minimum of four odors -- marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. They also must be able to locate something so small as a single gram, an amount that can be easily overlooked by the police.

Ryerson estimates that he uses his dog, Rommel, on average once a day. Often he will use the dog at traffic stops. If the dog smells drugs in a car during a walk around, the police have probable cause to search the vehicle even without a warrant.

"That's where the dogs pay for themselves," Ryerson said.

But it is not only the dogs that are being trained during the seminar. Their handlers take part in the training as well because the dogs and handlers work as a team.

When the dog is certified in narcotics investigation, he is certified as part of a team. If the dog gets a new handler, he has to be recertified.

"It's a team effort," said Ervin. "It takes both."

Ervin knows. He and his dogs are sometimes hired by area schools to do searches on school premises in order to keep school drug free.

His T-shirt tells the story. "Narc with a Bark," it reads.