Baltimore County police officers said the purchase of four hand-selected German shepherds will replenish their depleted K-9 unit after a streak of sudden deaths wiped out six dogs during the past three years.
The four dogs ? Gunny, Zeus, Jet and Carbo ? will be the first to go through an intensive combined basic and specialty training to get the dogs on the streets as quickly as possible, said Lt. Dave Folderauer, the department?sK-9 unit commander. The dogs will be capable of handing everything from drug searches to bomb threats and crowd control to missing Alzheimer?s patients in about 24 weeks, he said.
“We?ve been doing the best we can with what we?ve got,” Folderauer said. “But having extra dogs on the street will be better for everyone.”
Grinning officers Tuesday trotted the four canines around a gym inside the Dundalk precinct station house, which will serve as an interim training facility. Members of the county?s police union pressured the county into closing its Baltimore Highlands training park in September 2006. The effort followed six canine deaths and a rash of employee health problems, which the unit blamed on cancer-causing chemicals leaking near the facility, which was built near a former landfill.
But county administrators said only two dogs have died of cancer, both types unrelated to environmental conditions. They said a third-party vendor more likely sold the county unhealthy dogs, and launched an investigation of the canine procurement process.
Folderauer said Tuesday the county purchased the new dogs for just under $4,500 each from a vendor called K-9 Center LLC, based in Oxford, Penn. An employee of the company said the county has purchased other dogs, which they import from Czechoslovakia, from them over the last three years.
With the most recent purchase, the unit is short just one canine, Folderauer said.
