Page 462 - NIXBOOK

Kilo’s reward toy was a black Kong on a rope. When he earned the Kong
and it was thrown, he’d fetch it and bring it back, ready to tug on it. He
loved to just tug on it. That was his thing. He could do that for a very,
very long time. It didn’t take long for his aggressive tugging and yanking
to cause a semi-permanent pain in my right shoulder; the pain didn’t go
away until after I transferred out of the K9 program. So whenever we
were called out to assist other officers, I invariably handed the Kong rope
off to the other cops to spare my shoulder, which was something most
K9 cops did not do. But I liked sharing in the fun. Most cops were quite
surprised that they got to play with the dog, and most of them loved it.
But there was one thing about Kilo and the tugging on the Kong…it
tended to make his mouth get kind of drooly, Actually, frothy is a better word. And when his mouth got full of froth and he’d
shake his head back and forth violently with the Kong in his mouth, invariably there would be strings of slobbery dog froth
flying through the air at about waist level, and almost always landing on the officer’s uniforms. Needless to say, it was usually
quite hilarious to see the reactions of the cops when they looked down and saw huge messes of frothy dog slobby on their dark
uniforms. Especially at groin level. I should have taken some pictures, so we can appreciate just what that looked like. Here you
can see a couple Bremerton cops getting some play time in after they wanted Kilo to smell some drug money.

Specifically in that case, the officers had just seized several thousand dollar’s cash and they wanted to prove it was drug money.
I had them set it down in the parking lot and then I put Kilo to work with a command to start sniffing. As always, I started him
far away and I directed him to sniff other things first, like random cars, a garbage dumpster, and light poles. When we go the
money I ignored it and kept moving, so he would not detect any change of expectant behavior from me. But as always, when he
caught an odor of drugs, he zoomed in towards the money pulling me backwards on the leash. After pinpointing the odor source
he confidently sat down and stared, knowing his Kong would come sailing in as a reward. The money was then confiscated and
a notice of forfeiture was served to the defendant/criminal, notifying them formally that the police were not going to give them
their money back. Because reasons.
I enjoyed being the K9 cop. It had a certain high level of cachet to it; there was only one dog handler in the department and that
was me. There were in fact only 3 drug dog police units in the entire county at that time; one of the other ones was from
Bremerton PD and the other one was a tribal cop. At that time, the county sheriff’s office had two dogs but they were both the
kind that smelled out bad guys, not drugs. So Kilo and I were in high demand, and not infrequently I’d get called to help out
somewhere in the county when the other K9 cops were not
on duty.
This meant of course that I was subject to being called out
on my time off. More than once it was at some stupid hour
like 11 pm or 2 am. I remember the first time that happened;
I was sound asleep at night, my phone went off I started
swearing and wondering who in the hell was calling me in
the middle of the night and then I remembered I was the
new K9 handler and I had essentially signed up for that.
“Oh yeah, that’s right I’m the K9 handler now..”