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On Rotary's Trail

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By BARBARA ROUTEN

Tribune correspondent

Published: September 24, 2008

BRANDON - Deputy Luis Ledbetter of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office held his 4-year-old American bloodhound, Clue, on a leash Aug. 26 in the lobby of Center Place Fine Arts and Civic Association.

Clue knew they were there on a social call, so he sniffed people's shoes, good-naturedly accepted pats on the head and sprawled out on the floor.

If he was wearing his working harness, he would have been all business, Ledbetter said. When he is trailing a scent, nothing distracts him. He won't stop hunting until he finds the person he seeks.

At home, however, "he's an ottoman," Ledbetter said. Clue lives a very laid-back life with his handler and partner and Ledbetter's family. "The more these dogs are handled, the calmer they are," he said.

"I'm glad to hear that!" said Center Place Executive Director Darci D'Onofrio, who stood in the lobby cuddling a soft, warm bloodhound puppy with no intention of letting go. Center Place Coordinator Dawn Galia and Flora Temoin, chairwoman of the facility's gift shop, Pat's Corner, also happily cradled puppies in their arms.

Ledbetter, Clue and the three 8-week-old puppy siblings, temporarily called Rotary, Dakota and Utah, were at Center Place to attend a meeting of the Rotary Club of Brandon. The club recently purchased Rotary to donate him to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office to be trained to find missing children and adults. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and Tampa Police Department have two bloodhounds each.

Valrico resident Hilary Sessions, executive director of Child Protection Education of America - a national missing-children's agency in Brandon - provides scent-discriminating dogs to law enforcement agencies across the country.

She brought the puppies to the meeting to show Rotary members the fruits of their generosity. Later that week, she delivered Dakota to a K-9 unit with the Burleigh County Sheriff's Department in Bismarck, N.D., and Utah to a K-9 unit with the Utah County Sheriff's Office in Provo, Utah.

After Jeff Reynolds, club president, opened the meeting, member Don Pate introduced Ledbetter and Clue. The pair reached the podium, and Ledbetter took the microphone. Clue put his enormous front paws on a table and stood almost as tall as his partner.
Ledbetter explained that puppy Rotary will spend the next eight months living and learning with him and his family. The dog will be exposed to as many experiences as possible to prepare him for his career, including situations involving adults, children, crowds, cats, dogs and horses.

"Palm Beach County is large," Ledbetter said, "and includes wild land areas and islands." Rotary may be needed in remote areas and must be comfortable traveling to them.

"Clue has flown by helicopter and ridden in boats and ATVs," Ledbetter said. With the Everglades nearby, he had to get used to riding in an airboat. Working bloodhounds are rappelled out of helicopters sometimes, too, he said.

German shepherds used by deputies are taught to bite when they locate their quarry, but bloodhounds are "friendly finds," Ledbetter said. "They're trained to touch the person they find. Because of this, we deploy bloodhounds into crowds - schools, malls, fairs. Shepherds we send in only if the bad guy is the only person left in the building.

"Bloodhounds won't stop once they've started," Ledbetter said. "Memory is their strongest trait."

They work four days on, three off. For longer searches, the dogs work for 45-minutes, and then cool down. They can wear refrigerated vests to prolong their work shifts and bullet-proof vests to protect them when they're going after someone who is armed.

Sometimes a bloodhound flanked by German shepherds will track an armed suspect. When the dog finds him or her, the handlers back out the bloodhound and send in the shepherds.

Bloodhounds are teasingly called "life-support for a nose" by K-9 officers with shepherds, Ledbetter said. Although shepherds have at least 220 million scent receptors, bloodhounds may have up to 4 billion, he said.

A shepherd uses his keen eyes to see motion and long, straight-up ears to hear. These are good characteristics for a herder, Ledbetter said.

A bloodhound, on the other hand, has wide, floppy ears longer than his snout that serve as brooms, pushing smells to his nose. The wrinkly skin on the forehead slides forward and covers his eyes when he puts his nose to the ground, reducing distractions and directing his concentration toward following a scent.

Even bloodhounds' excessive drooling is part of their equipment. Moisture activates scent and makes scent particles sticky, so they stay on the dog's fur close to his nose - helping him remember the scent he follows.
Ledbetter said bloodhounds are so proficient at recognizing scents that "a dog's ID is admissible in court."

After Rotary, Dakota and Utah leave their foster homes, they will spend 300 hours at school. By the time they are a year old, they will be ready to search for missing children, Alzheimer's patients who have wandered away from home, suicide victims, escaped prisoners, poachers, lost hunters and people trapped in fallen buildings.

Sessions, whose daughter, Tiffany, has been missing since Nov. 9, 1988, said, "If we'd had one of these on the scene, we might have found out where she was."

A child abduction response team must be at the scene of the last sighting within one hour, Ledbetter said, for the dogs to get the best possible start at tracking.

Sessions agreed. "It's like a pebble in a pond. The circle gets larger and larger as time goes by" as the scent continues to move through the air, she said.

Every individual has a different odor, Ledbetter said. "Grafts of skin, hair, sweat, individual DNA give a different odor. ... Because a car takes in and expels air, the dogs can find a scent even if the person has been abducted by car."

Leslie Granich, a Rotary Club director and principal of Brandon High School, held puppy Rotary on her lap at the meeting.

"I'm floored by what the dogs can do," she said. Although she never has had to bring a bloodhound to the school, "It's a blessing to know that Hillsborough County has some, and that if a student ever appeared missing, we could call for help."

Clue has been honored by the state of Florida for his work. He can differentiate between identical twins. Once he covered four miles in 5 1/2 hours in 100-degree heat and found a girl who had run away from a sexual predator.

Even though the dogs are great at finding missing persons, preventing abduction is better. Child Protection Education of America fingerprints children and offers RAD classes - Resist Aggression Defensively - for children and women at its new facility at 3439 Brook Crossing Drive.

For help, information or to donate money to buy another bloodhound to help find missing persons, visit www.find- missing-children.org or call CPEA at (813) 626-3001 or 1-866-USA-CHILD.

For information about the Rotary Club of Brandon, visit www.brandonrotary.org.

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