Meet Kratos, the dog who guards Government Center

Sometimes the dog’s smarter than the human.

A few years ago Muscogee County Sheriff’s Technician Eric Stinson was working nights with Rex, a German shepherd tracking and patrol dog, when on the radio he heard Columbus police were on the scene of a business burglary on 10th Avenue near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The suspect had set off an alarm and fled. Police needed a tracking dog.

“We were over there in 10 minutes,” Stinson recalled, and Rex went to work.

It seemed logical to Stinson that the burglar would have run northeast toward some apartments off the boulevard, and it was. It was dark in that area, with plenty of escape routes and places to hide.

That the burglar instead would go directly north through a razor-wire fence made no sense.

For 20 minutes, Stinson tried to drag Rex toward the apartments, using a zig-zag method to find the suspect’s track, sweeping 15 yards in either direction, back and forth.

He thought Rex was pulling him back to ground they’d already covered.

“You just assume he ran off into these apartments, and I’m just dragging the dog all over the place, trying to get him to go down there, and he just pulls me back over,” Stinson remembered. “And I’m like, ‘I know he’s been over here. Come on; pull over here.’ Well, finally, he pulls me up to the fence.”

The burglar had climbed through the fence and run to the U-Haul business next door, to hide in a truck.

“You’d have never thought that. I mean, why would you dive out of this window here and there’s nothing but apartments to run through, pitch-black dark, and you go straight to the hardest place.”

Had Rex not persisted, the suspect might have died, Stinson said. “He cut himself up bad.”

Across the fence, a clear blood trail led to a truck the burglar had hidden in.

It was proof that sometimes the dog knows more than the human.

“It was just me being ignorant, thinking I know what’s best, and he’s pulling me the whole time, like, ‘Come on, idiot!’”

Rex later developed a bad back, and since has retired. Now Stinson has a younger shepherd, 3 years old, named “Kratos,” for the Greek god of strength.

Visitors to the Columbus Government Center may have seen Stinson and Kratos there, walking the perimeter, a daily routine.

A primary purpose the sheriff’s dogs serve is monitoring inmates, particularly those who go out every day to perform labor for the city. Sometimes they manage to have someone hide something for them, drugs or other contraband, where they normally work.

“We’re sending people out in droves,” Sheriff John Darr said of inmate labor, and it’s nearly impossible to monitor their every move.

So in those areas inmates frequent, it is Kratos’ job to find planted contraband before they do. When he does, he sits. That’s his way of telling Stinson he found something. Other dogs have different alerts, some for good reason.

Aggression is for chasing down and capturing suspects, not for searches. No law enforcement officer would want a bomb-sniffing dog to signal a suspicious package by biting or pawing at it. One deputy joked that if you’re running a drug dog, you hope he finds something. If you’re working with a bomb dog, you hope he doesn’t.

The sheriff’s office currently has no dog for explosives, but borrows one from other agencies. The last explosives dog it had moved away with its handler.

The one before that, named Ajax, a long-haired shepherd, had an alert suited to the risks of finding an explosive.

“If the bomb scent was right here, he would sniff, and you would see him back, and back, and back, and then sit down,” Stinson said. Ajax aged out of the job because of hip dysplasia, a joint ailment common to the breed.

Currently the sheriff’s office has two other dogs, one a “therapy dog” that works with mentally ill inmates in the jail, and the other a cellphone sniffer named Marley. Searching for cellphones smuggled into the jail is a continuing challenge, the sheriff said.

What the danger of inmates’ having cellphones?

“You don’t want them to be able to communicate, because if you’re able to communicate, you’re able to tell somebody on the outside, ‘Hey, we’re coming to court,’” Darr said. That raises the risk of coordinating an escape. “When you’re transporting inmates, you don’t want them to be able to get that information out.”

Inmates facing trial could use cellphones to threaten witnesses or concoct alibis. Corrections officers can track calls made through jail telephones, but not through cellphones.

The therapy dog, named Beethoven, is deaf, Darr said. So, were a mentally ill inmate abruptly to raise a loud ruckus, Beethoven wouldn’t hear it.

The dog’s visits are much anticipated, and inmates who misbehave can be punished by denying them Beethoven’s company, the sheriff said.

“That is one of the most popular things at the county jail. … When Beethoven’s coming, they get excited,” Darr said. “They’re more focused on Beethoven’s coming than doing other things.”

A trained drug dog can cost $12,000-$15,000; a bomb dog $2,000-$3,000 more, because bomb dogs must be trained to learn more than 30 odors, Stinson said.

Darr said the sheriff’s office has spent no taxpayer money on its dogs, whose purchase was funded by grants or by revenue from the jail commissary inmates use.

Stinson said training human handlers is harder than training dogs.

“Training a dog is easy. People are the hard part.” Handlers have to go through a six-week course. Typically dogs are ready to go to work when they’re a year to 18 months old.

Training dogs is a matter of honing the instincts and senses they already have. “It’s all about prey drive,” Stinson said. “All dogs like to go find stuff. … Whether it’s finding bombs, drugs, cigarettes, cellphones, your whole goal is to harness that prey drive into finding what you want them to find.”

Research shows a dog’s nose has 220 million olfactory receptors; a human’s only about 5 million. A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times ours, and though a dog’s brain is about a tenth the size of a human’s, the portion devoted to deciphering scents is 40 times larger.

During a test in New Orleans, trainers laid down a scent track before Mardi Gras, and after the raucous, odoriferous celebration, they brought in a tracking dog. It picked the trail up without distraction.

Kratos is trained to find marijuana, heroin and both crack and powdered cocaine.

Concealing a drug in coffee does not deter him, said Stinson, using a beef-stew metaphor to illustrate the precision of a dog’s olfactory sense: If you visit a friend whose cooking stew, you smell stew. A dog smells the carrots, the corn, the potatoes and the meat: “He’s able to differentiate all these smells.”

So, pack cocaine in coffee before a drug dog sniffs it, and “he’s going to smell coffee and he’s going to smell cocaine, and there’s nothing that’s going to cover it up,” Stinson said.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 3:21 PM with the headline "Meet Kratos, the dog who guards Government Center."