A nose for crime: Cayce Public Safety gets its first K-9 officer

Her ears drag across the ground as she walks and sniffs, and she might squirm and whimper if held too long, but Cayce Public Safety’s newest officer will soon be hot on the trail.

An unnamed 2-month-old bloodhound joined the Cayce Department of Public Safety this month and is the first member in the agency’s new K-9 unit.

The bloodhound was donated to the department by a North Carolina police officer who breeds bloodhounds and donates them to agencies across the country.

Cayce Chief Byron Snellgrove says K-9s can play a crucial role in sniffing and locating a variety of items, from weapons or items dropped by a suspect to a missing child or Alzheimer’s patient. In the past, Cayce has relied on Columbia police or the Richland and Lexington sheriff’s department when they needed a K-9.

“They have a great sense of smell, and they have a drive to find what they’re looking for,” Snellgrove said of bloodhounds. “They’re smart, and those are the primary characteristics you look for in a bloodhound.”

The droopy-eyed, floppy-eared pup hasn’t been named, but the department has opened the naming process to elementary and middle school students in Cayce. Snellgrove and the newly named K-9 officer will have a pizza party with the winning class to celebrate her new moniker.

Snellgrove expects she’ll be on the job in the coming months. Search and rescue calls will be her primary focus at first, but the department plans to get her trained in other types of searches.

The bloodhound will work with several different agencies locally, all of which will help with her training, Snellgrove said.

“We’ll have different ideas on how to train her so we can get the overall best dog that we can for our area,” he said. “If you’re training a bloodhound out in the rural area, they don’t usually track well in the city. If you train them in the city, they don’t always track well in a rural area. We have to mix up our training here because we have a combination of both.”

Tammy Bybee has bred bloodhounds and donated them to various agencies for 10 years.

“I wanted to give back to the law enforcement community,” said Bybee, an officer with the Duck Police Department in Duck, N.C. “I know sometimes our budgets don’t provide for things that are necessary for what we need to do with the public.”

The dogs are healthy, up to date on their immunizations and ready for training when Bybee sends them to their new police homes.

“God created them to do exactly what they do,” she said of the bloodhound’s sense of smell. “It’s not the dog that needs training, it’s the handler. The handler needs to allow the dog to do its work.”

Bybee donates dogs to agencies looking to start a bloodhound program or to those wanting to expand an existing program. Snellgrove said his goal is to have a bloodhound on each shift at Cayce Public Safety.

Until Cayce’s newest officer gets some four-legged company, she has plenty of company in the department’s firehouse, where her kennel is.

“She’s a very loving dog,” Snellgrove said. “She’s been really calm, and very alert too. She likes putting her nose to the ground and pulling, which is always good.”

This story was originally published December 22, 2016 at 3:53 PM with the headline "A nose for crime: Cayce Public Safety gets its first K-9 officer."