Meet Axel.
He is dark, he is handsome and he is a 9-year-old German Shepherd.
He also has a very special nose. It’s actually one of the best sniffers around.
It is difficult to comprehend just how well Axel can smell, a dog’s sense of smell can’t even be compared to a human’s really, but owner Chuck Melvin does his best and teaches several classes on the subject across the country.
“Our noses can pick up 40 parts per million. And depending on the scent (and dog), a dog can pick up four parts per billion,” Melvin said.
Axel, for example, can smell so well, he tracked a missing journalist in Costa Rica to the very bar stool he sat on nearly one week after he sat there. He also tracked the journalist to the ocean, where the scent trail disappeared.
“There is a lot of controversy and research as to their sense of smell,” Melvin said.
Melvin is the founding member of the Dolores K-9 Search and Rescue team. The team has 24 members, 20 of which are local, with others in California and Arizona. The group started 28 years ago.
Today Melvin, a retired science teacher, travels across the country teaching classes on search theory and how dogs track with their noses.
He was one of the first to discover that the group’s highly trained dogs couldn’t find people who were on methamphetamine.
“People on meth, don’t smell like people,” he said. “Nobody knows why. The rest of the drugs don’t make a difference.”
So Melvin began to train dogs to recognize the smell of people on meth by using blood-soaked rags from someone who had been under the influence of the drug.
Melvin will soon be teaching a class on the subject in Arizona.
Tracking in the water
Axel seems to do best finding people in the water.
“He can track someone and knows exactly where their scent comes up,” Melvin said. “It is then up to the divers to find them.”
It is difficult to know exactly how many lives Axel has saved or how many bodies he has found, but the dog has been on 140 missions and 89 demonstrations. Axel’s 89th demonstration was for the third-graders at Dolores Elementary School.
Today, the quiet black dog is a bit slower than he used to be.
“His mind still works great, his body is just a bit slower,” Melvin said.
Most working dogs don’t work much past 10 years.
Axel’s mother was Czech and his father was born in Germany. In fact, his grandfathers worked on opposing sides of the Berlin wall, Melvin said. Melvin has had Axel since he was a puppy.
“Almost all working shepherds are imported,” Melvin said. American bred shepherds have weak hindquarters, he added.
Dogs in the group do a minimum of 16 hours a month of training. One such training took place on April 7 when a helicopter touched down at what is called the “doghouse,” the group’s headquarters at the entrance of Dolores. Dogs trained with the helicopter, getting in and out and inside to get badges that will allow them to ride with their handlers if dispatched to a search situation.
The group started in 1984 when Melvin, who was working for the sheriff’s department at the time, was dispatched into the forest to find a missing 14-year-old boy.
He couldn’t find the boy and a K-9 search and rescue team was called in from another state. All Melvin could do was wait.
“I said that night, ‘It’s too bad we don’t have our own K-9 team,’” he said.
And the rest is history.
Today, the search and rescue teams are called out to far fewer searches. Technology, the cell phone, GPS devices and satellite devices, keep many hunters and hikers on track. Seldom do people get lost.
“If you go back to when we started, our greatest search load was mostly hunters,” Melvin said.
That is no longer the case.
Today, the search and rescue team goes on far fewer calls and when they do, those calls are usually for children or people with Alzheimer’s, subjects that don’t have the ability to use the high-tech equipment above.
They also search for far more human remains than previously.
After going on hundreds of calls, a few stand out to Melvin.
“We found one guy in 14 minutes,” Melvin smiled.
He was an 84-year-old who got lost while picking piñon nuts. The dogs found him alive and well.
He also remembers the open cases.
“They are out there. Why can’t we find them? Those are frustrating,” he said.
But in the end, it is the dogs’ noses that the team relies on.
“Some believe a plant can pick up the smell of human remains underneath,” Melvin said.
Can Axel do this?
Yes, he can.
For more information about the K-9 Search and Rescue go to http://www.k9team.org.
