The Dog Squad Page 2

  Sure enough, off-lead Julian trotted happily at Len’s side. Len was initially tense about Julian bolting in combat, but soon it became clear that Julian was fine. Another thing Len noticed was that Julian was a little shell-shocked. When gunfire got too close, the dog started barking and jumping up and down, on high alert. Len would quickly put the lead back on him and had difficulty settling the dog down until the gunfire moved off into the distance. While this wasn’t ideal, Len saw that most of the other army dogs were shell-shocked too; there was little the handlers could do about it.

  A soldier had to understand the alerts and learn to read their dog’s behaviour. Julian might run back and stand near Len; sometimes he would bark, especially around gunfire. Len had to be able to understand that any physical reaction in his dog might suggest a change in circumstances. On patrol, Julian would regularly alert – indicate that something was awry – and then Len would signal for the soldiers to stop and hide. It was hard to know how many times Julian saved Len and the soldier patrols from danger.

  In those early days, Len expected Julian to be a good tracker because the dog had been in service for a couple of years. But he wasn’t as good as he could be because there was little ongoing training and reinforcement in the middle of the war zone. After long perilous patrols, and the stress and humidity of the jungle, any downtime for the young soldier consisted of sitting around and relaxing. He had little energy for ongoing training. Because Len was a replacement in his battalion, after six months all his colleagues returned to Australia and were replaced by reinforcements. When the new battalion arrived, training regimes for the dogs improved.

  It was these early lessons that helped Len understand the nature of working dogs – they required constant training and reinforcement to be their best. It was the principle of ‘use it or lose it’; training had to be constant and consistent, and the handler had to be persistent in maintaining a standard.

  Army tracking teams like Len and his dog Julian were always sent out ahead on patrol. They would lead the way and the infantry­men would follow. The work was so nerve-racking that trackers would only do around thirty minutes at a time at the front of the line; then they would be sent to the rear to rotate with another tracker team. Every now and then a path would be perilous with mines. If Len sensed any strange reactions in Julian, he would quickly call him back and take the necessary precautions.

  Bodies blown to pieces, the destruction, the devastation and the death were all hard to take for anyone, let alone a nineteen-year-old country lad. Len was shit-scared the whole time, and could well understand the shell shock of his dog. Having the dog constantly by his side helped to alleviate the horror of the experience. As Len crawled through the jungle, Julian was there. At night, Julian curled up by Len’s side. The dog made the war a little easier to take.

  One day Len, Julian and another soldier were sent out in the direction of a village to do reconnaissance. Up ahead, something began crashing through the jungle towards them. As the sound got louder and louder, Julian started to whimper. The dog looked up in the air, frantic and unable to pinpoint the source of the crashing sounds. The soldiers couldn’t either. Suddenly, an orangutan landed right above them and Julian yelped, terrified. In seconds, the hairy orange blur had swung to the next tree and was gone.

  Another time, Len and Julian were on patrol alone during a massive thunderstorm accompanied by torrential rain. Len and his dog huddled under a sheet of plastic in a trench. A claymore mine went off and there were sounds of gunfire. Len secured Julian safely in a culvert while he went to investigate. Caught in explosions of artillery, Len got distracted. When he checked on Julian, the dog was wading almost up to his nose in water. Len had to scramble to untie the dog and pull him to safety.

  Sometimes Len and Julian would travel in the army helicopter so they could be winched down into the rugged jungle terrain. Julian loved being in a helicopter; it was the army dog’s equivalent of being on a car ride. The dog loved looking down at the passing terrain – ears flapping, tongue out and the wind in his fur from the always-open door. Until it was time for the winch. Len reckons there is nothing funnier than the look on a dog’s face when it is harnessed and sent out of a helicopter on a winch. Julian would always look at Len with an expression that said: ‘What on earth are you doing to me?’

  Despite these few light moments, at the end of his tour of duty Len had had enough. While he was reluctant to leave Julian behind, he handed the dog on to the new recruit taking his place and returned home. After a year of mud and blood and loss, Len just wanted to get back to Australia. He felt hardened; he had been shot at, had lost friends, and had seen more dead people than he could ever have imagined. He felt a lot older than his twenty years.

  At Sydney Airport, the most surreal thing for the returning soldiers was that everything was the same as when they left, while they had changed so much after spending a year in a hell hole. In a taxi on the way from the airport, the driver talked to Len like every­thing was normal. You just don’t understand, he thought. You have no idea what’s going on.

  After two weeks’ leave Len was recalled to Simpson Barracks in Watsonia to get his discharge papers signed. A pat on the back completed the transaction, and Len was out of the army. He spent the next two years hitchhiking around the country.

  Eventually, when the memory of the splattering machine gun fire was replaced with the peace of the Australian countryside, Len knew it was time to settle down and get a real job. He joined the Victoria Police in 1972 and did his training at the police depot on St Kilda Road, followed by general duties for a couple of years. The Victoria Police did not have a dog squad and Len hadn’t decided on a particular career path through the police force.

  One day, Len was reading the Police Gazette and saw a call for expressions of interest from anyone with dog-handling experience to help set up a canine division. After a few years without a dog, Len had got himself a black lab as a pet. The ad in the Gazette happened out of the blue, but Len thought it was an excellent idea. On many occasions in general policing he had faced situations – tracking down offenders or finding lost kids – where he knew that tracking dogs would have made things a whole lot easier. As soon as he read that the police force was setting up a dog squad, he knew he wanted to be part of it.

  Len went through the interview process. In those early days of the squad, an inspector had been appointed, and a dog trainer had been brought over from England to offer his expertise. While a lot of men applied for the positions, Len and another police officer, Roger Busiko, were accepted straight away. Roger had been an air force dog handler and he had trained dogs in attack and guard work.

  Len Taylor, Roger Busiko, Paul Deimos, Robert Burton, Jimmy Dixon and Syd Gallagher were the squad’s founding members. The premises at Westmeadows (now called Attwood) consisted of dilapidated kennels that had been built for a police dog squad in the 1960s – back then, the initial model had failed and the trial squad had disbanded.

  Every founding member was enthusiastic, committed and highly motivated. The only thing the early squad didn’t have was dogs. Members were only part-time to begin with, and they spent their days driving around to dog pounds and selecting likely candidates. Len had always worked with labs, but the research and experience of police forces around the world suggested that German shepherds were the way to go. The Victoria Police also advertised for people to donate their German shepherds. In 1975 there weren’t a lot of German shepherds in Australia; however, the founding members eventually got a dog each, and the training began.

  In the beginning dogs were given to handlers randomly, with little effort made to match the personalities of dogs and handlers. This was on the advice of the English trainer, but there were times when Len questioned the man’s experience. Nonetheless, he held his tongue and got on with the business of starting a squad. Each of the new members was on secondment and could be sent back to general duties with the stroke of a pen.

  The Queensland poli
ce department had started a dog squad a couple of years earlier and had a wealth of experience in training dogs, so the Victoria Police brought down a couple of Queensland trainers to help set up the squad. While the English trainer’s advice was a little vague and he often didn’t have the answers to difficult training questions, the Queenslanders always had solutions.

  In the early days, the new handlers had difficulty getting the aggression out of dogs. Aggression was an inherent problem with donated dogs, as the dogs were often donated because their families couldn’t handle them. There is a fine balance between curbing aggression and getting dogs to experience a winning feeling so that they can do the job properly and fearlessly. The Queenslanders had some great strategies. They also had some excellent insights into which of the donated German shepherds would make good police dogs and which wouldn’t.

  All of the founding members of the Dog Squad regularly swapped ideas about training: which strategies worked and which didn’t work as well. They were all keen for the new squad to be successful. Len read every dog-training book he could lay his hands on. Every book he found he passed around to other members – but it was experience that counted in the end. It was a long hard slog to produce dogs that were well trained and ready to go.

  Each new recruit went through about three dogs before they found the perfect fit. Sultan was Len’s first operational dog. Len had gone out to assess him at a farm in Harrietville. At the front gate, he looked down the driveway and saw a black monster of a dog tied to a verandah post. The dog was barking and shaking so much that the whole verandah seemed to quiver. Len was a little nervous.

  When the owners came out onto the verandah, Len chatted to them about the dog. ‘Is he bothered by gunfire?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope,’ said the owners.

  ‘Has he ever bitten anyone?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Has he ever had any training?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Len saw no fear in the dog. His only reservation was that Sultan was a little old at two and a half; the ideal age for training is between eight months and two years old.

  The couple who owned the dog travelled, and they felt it wasn’t fair to leave him behind all the time. Len decided to take him, but joked that the owners had better put him in the back of the station wagon themselves. They loaded up the dog and waved a tearful goodbye.

  Back at the Attwood compound, Len opened the car door and let Sultan out, careful to talk to him the whole time. ‘Good boy, Sultan, good boy.’

  Sultan stepped down and began sniffing around. The dog was assertive and confident and happy when he heard his name.

  The other handlers came out of the office to put their two cents in. ‘Gee, he’s a nice-looking dog,’ said one of the guys.

  Sultan was allocated to Len. The training was a little different from the army days. Len took Sultan home straight away and slowly introduced him to his family. He had given his other dog away because a handler needs to focus solely on his police dog. Len had known that right from the start; he would have to commit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to his police dog. Any shared loyalties would diminish the bond.

  In the early days of the squad, a stray cat had a litter under one of the police buildings. At one stage there were about twenty cats hanging around the compound. The cats were put to good use to test against distraction; the police dogs had to learn not to be distracted by anything, let alone a cat – or twenty of them, as the case may be. Once, in the search for a lost boy, a number of handlers and their dogs were called in to assist. One of the police dogs took off after a kangaroo and it took the squad a day to find the dog.

  That night, after a long day of searching, Len fell into an exhausted sleep. He dreamed of the lost boy and saw him clearly on the other side of the dam to where the police and the searchers had been scouring the terrain. The boy was disabled, and his carers didn’t think that he could have crossed the narrow bridge to get to the other side of the dam. Len had enough experience to know that when someone said that something couldn’t be done, often it was a possibility. The next day, Len took Sultan across the causeway, and within ten minutes they had found the boy’s jacket. Len quickly called the other searchers.

  ‘Find him!’ Len shouted to Sultan.

  Sultan bolted off into the bush, skidded to a halt, then raised his magnificent head and picked up an air scent – which meant the boy was close enough for his scent to fill the air. Then he ran towards a thicket, barking a couple of times. Sultan had found the boy.

  Len called him back and raced towards the thicket. It was so thick that it was impossible for man or dog to get through. With reinforcements, and thick gloves and secateurs to cut through the blackberry prickles, the searchers quickly got to the badly scratched – but alive – boy. Len reckoned the boy must have crawled his way through and got stuck.

  It was moments like these that made the job so rewarding.

  One evening, Len and Sultan were working around Broadmeadows. There were reports of some blokes throwing gelignite into the river. An exploding stick of gelignite would stun or kill any fish near the boat. The fish would float to the surface and be scooped into nets. It was much easier than fishing the hard way, with rod and tackle. It was also dangerous and illegal. The local cops had already caught one of the men, and Len was tasked with finding the other one. He flew along behind Sultan on a long lead, struggling to keep up with the dog. Finally, Len let Sultan off the lead. Soon afterwards, he heard a wailing cry: ‘Get ’im off me! Get ’im off me!’

  When Len caught up with his dog, he shone the spotlight onto the funniest scene he had witnessed in a long time. A man was crouched in the bushes, trying to keep the branches between him and the huge barking beast. As Len drew closer, Sultan cocked his leg and piddled on the man. Len laughed at his dog’s disdain for the crook. He called off the dog, and led the sniffling, smelly offender back to the cops.

  ‘You got him!’ said one of the cops, incredulous.

  ‘Of course,’ Len shrugged. ‘You asked me to find him and here he is.’ These early captures showed the local cops what police dogs could do.

  It wasn’t the only time that Sultan piddled on someone. On another occasion, the English trainer, in his cravat and all his pompous glory, was lecturing the handlers. Sultan came up behind him, sniffed in a rather contemptuous way, then piddled right down the guy’s gumboots. Sultan disgraced himself again during his first public appearance at Bay 13 at the MCG; he pooped in front of 50 000 people.

  One night a taxi driver had been stabbed in Eltham. Len and Sultan were about twenty minutes away when they got the call; the offender, it seemed, had run off into bushland. ‘Don’t follow the offender,’ Len instructed the cops over the radio, knowing that it would interfere with the scent trail.

  In Eltham, Len put Sultan on the long tracking lead and together they took off into an adjoining paddock. Within minutes, Len heard a muffled cry and saw the offender lying in long grass. The offender had tried to kick Sultan, and the dog had promptly bitten him on the leg. Len called him off straight away, and the man limped his way back to the police car in handcuffs.

  To promote the new Dog Squad, TV presenter Michael Willesee got permission to come out and do a story on police dogs. A camera­man filmed one of the dogs being put through his paces while Len watched from the sidelines with Sultan at his side. As the filming progressed, a soundman came up behind Len with a big boom microphone. Before Len even saw him move, Sultan had grabbed the soundman by the arm and was shaking him back and forth. Len called him off, and the soundman was patched up at the local doctor’s surgery and given an honorary handler certificate – because every handler had been bitten at least once. The incident illustrated very clearly that while the dogs are highly trained and obedient, they will attack if they perceive a threat to their handler.

  When two guys escaped from the Old Castlemaine Gaol, Len got the call and he and Sultan set off up the Calder Highway. On the way, he got word tha
t detectives from the prison squad were also headed to the scene. Among the police radio chatter, Len heard a report of a red and white Holden station wagon that had been stolen. Not long after, he saw a car matching the description of the Holden, but with a different numberplate. Not one to ignore the coincidence, Len did a quick U-turn and turned on his siren. He radioed in the pursuit, trying to guess his location to the best of his ability. The Holden sped up and Len wasn’t far behind it. Eventually, the car pulled in to the side of the road and the two men jumped out and ran into the bush.

  ‘I’ve got a police dog!’ Len called as Sultan, on the lead, started barking.

  ‘I give up!’ shouted one of the guys, jumping up with his hands in the air.

  ‘I’m letting him off the lead if you both don’t give up!’ Len yelled.

  ‘I give up too!’ yelled the other one.

  Len didn’t know if they had weapons, so he kept Sultan in a state of excitement just in case. The two quivering men – who it turned out were the escapees – came out of the bush with their hands up, and Len made them lie down on the ground with their arms out.

  ‘You won’t let that dog go,’ said one of the guys, a note of false bravado in his voice.

  ‘You move and he’s coming at you. And he will hurt you!’ Len said. Meanwhile, he used his portable radio to call in backup. His colleagues were dumfounded that he had caught the escapees before even getting to the scene.

  ❖

  Sultan was operational for five years. His most famous case was when he was involved in the search for the victims of the Faraday School kidnapping. On 6 October 1972, a young schoolteacher, Mary Gibbs, and her six pupils were kidnapped for a million-dollar ransom. Police, including members of the Dog Squad, scoured the surrounding bushland. The courageous teacher managed to free herself and her pupils while the offenders, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, went to collect the ransom. Nonetheless, the presence of the police dogs at the search and in the media did a lot to help the public and the wider police force to see the value of the dogs as a resource.