KIEV (dpa) – Dinar is a cop who works in Ukraine where smuggling is rampant. His reward is an unheated hut and two meals a day.
If that sound’s like a dog’s life – it is.Dinar, a German shepherd male, works with Ukrainian customs officers. Armed with one of nature’s most sensitive noses, Dinar is ready and able to sniff out smuggled narcotics or concealed explosives.But the police veteran (age 6 – or 42 in dog years) is among Ukraine’s finest when it comes to stopping antique smugglers thieving Ukrainian religious art.“He’s our icon specialist, and he’s very good,” said Oleksander Nechai, Dinar’s commander at the Zhitomyr police canine detachment. “Maybe he senses the holy energy.”Nechai is at least partly serious.For Dinar to uncover a mid-19th century image of the Holy Virgin in a train, he needs not only to pick up its scent. Dinar was born with the ability to detect a ten-thousand-dollar piece of Slavic art work among several thousand pieces of luggage, but as a dog – with dog priorities – he was hardly inclined by nature to try.“Some dogs have talent,” explained Vasily Hrinchiuk, director of Ukraine’s national canine corps. “What we do is find the ones with the ability, and then work with them.”Ten years ago when Ukraine became a poor but independent country, experienced staff were deserting the national police force in droves. Labour-saving technologies – the sensors and computers of modern police work – were too expensive for Ukraine, whose economy is cash- strapped like Russia’s.Ukrainian police, often not receiving pay checks, for years have rated among Europe’s most corrupt.Hrinchiuk was hired eight years ago to replace, wherever possible, human Ukrainian cops with the four-pawed kind.Today Ukraine’s canine cop corps is doing fairly well. Funding is regular. Every dog on the force receives two squares a day of tasty Magnat dog food, made in Ukraine.Not just any mutt gets to join the ranks of the dog police. Puppies usually begin their careers at a breeding farm near the city Kherson, though sometimes Hrinchiuk imports “foreigners” to improve the blood of the corps. All go to dog school for six months.In all, some 3,500 canine cops serve in Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Ukraine is as big as France, and its traditions of law and order are rooted in the Soviet Union.Dinar and his pals have plenty to do.Like their human counterparts, it takes different cops for different kinds of police work. German and Belgian shepherds are best at sniffing tasks, because they can discern smell roughly 200 times more effectively than humans.Some sniffer specialists join the vice squad to hunt drug users and dealers. Others join the bomb squad – in Ukraine a very dangerous job, as between 50 and 100 World War II-vintage munitions turn up in Ukraine every day.Still others patrol passenger trains in search of food that shouldn’t be imported into Ukraine – most often these days beef from west Europe.Smaller cocker spaniels, a bit less inquisitive but also equipped with superior olfactory sense, perform the same job indoors, or in small spaces the shepherds can’t get to.A full-grown cocker fits perfectly into the roof compartments of a standard Ukrainian passenger car, Nehcai noted.The only “local breed” regularly used in Ukrainian police work is the Caucasian shepherd, a massive dog originally bred by Georgian and Chechen mountaineers to hunt boar.Usually they patrol Ukraine’s forested western borders, where the game most commonly is “ant traders” (locals backpacking cigarettes or drugs across the frontier), or illegal migrants en route to work in Europe.Dinar, an elite sniffer, specialises in icons. Antique smuggling is big business in Ukraine: an icon stolen from a rural church can sell for thousands of dollars in a west European or American antique store.Finding the loot isn’t easy. Icon paints are natural tints and egg and oil; a century or more of weathering wipes away all detectable scents, even for Dinar’s super-sensitive nose.So how does the dog detective detect?“We trained him to sniff for incense and wax, because one always lights a candle and incense when one prays at an icon,” Hrinchiuk said. “Police work is always a team effort.”
