County : Board of Supervisors Agrees to Hire Spud

Spud the bomb-sniffing dog will be going to work soon.

Without discussion, the Board of Supervisors Tuesday agreed to accept the Labrador retriever as a gift from a group of county businessmen known as the Sheriff’s Advisory Council.

The group will pay $530 to buy the dog, $2,500 for the training it is now receiving in Riverside County, and $559 for a dog run and handlers’ equipment. Another $1,261 will be spent for a concrete pad and equipment at the Sheriff’s Department hazardous devices facility in Orange, and $300 will pay for remodeling a patrol car to accommodate the canine.

For their part, supervisors agreed to pay an estimated $625 this year for Spud’s food, vitamins, and any extraordinary veterinary bills.

Spud will join Sam, the department’s first explosives-sniffing dog, who arrived in 1983. Sam has been used for more than 86 incidents since then. As the number of incidents has increased in recent years, a second trained canine has become necessary, according to sheriff’s officials.

“There has been a significant increase in the kinds of things we use a dog for, and we have found ourselves in the position where we’ve had large areas to search and one dog is not adequate,” said Lt. George Johnson, commander of the bomb squad.

Johnson said that the squad now numbers six officers and that they handled 688 calls last year. They found explosives about half the time. The county now has “one of the busiest bomb squads in the United States,” he said. The dogs are used throughout the county, and they are especially helpful in searching hotel ballrooms about to be visited by high-ranking officials.

But there’s another reason to have a second trained canine around.

“A dog has the mentality and intelligence of a 3- or 4- or 5-year-old human being, and their attention span is affected by a lot of things--be it heat or noise or crowds or things like that,” Johnson said. If one dog gets bored, the other can be pressed into service, he said.

Spud is expected to finish training and join Sam in another two weeks, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said.

The Sheriff’s Department also has five patrol dogs and two other dogs trained to sniff out narcotics, Olson said.