CASPER — On a stormy morning in May, officers with the Casper Police Department’s K-9 Unit pulled up to a nondescript warehouse in the industrial district neighboring Mills. Inside, a stash of drugs lay hidden.
Fritz, a Belgian Malinois, could sense it the moment he padded through the door, his lean, muscular body flexing with eager intensity.
He bounded toward a structure of wooden cubbies and began to methodically sniff each individual container. His long nose snaked rapidly up and down, side to side, from one cubby to the next as the sound of pummeling rain grew louder overhead, adding tension like a movie score.
At last, he sat and aimed his stare at one precise cubby. He found what he was looking for: 15 grams of cocaine. Officers erupted with congratulatory excitement.
“Good boy. You’re such a good boy, a good, slobbery boy,” said Officer Anna Madrid-Vahlkamp, Fritz’s handler.
It’s the outcome the team hoped for, although no one is going to jail as a result, because these drugs were stashed by the cops themselves.
Fritz is one of three dogs currently in training to join the Wyoming Police Dog Association (WPDA) with dual certifications in narcotics detection and criminal apprehension.
They represent Wyoming’s growing reliance on K-9 cadets, which have become an essential asset in the work of interdiction as narcotics bedevil communities across the state and leave many dead from illegal drug overdoses each year.
With dogs like Fritz, officers hope to stem the tide.
“I took the first opportunity to become a K-9 officer because I want drugs off the streets. I have little girls, and I don’t want them growing up with this stuff on the streets. That's my big why,” said Madrid-Vahlkamp, who serves with the Gillette Police Department, where she will return with Fritz following an intensive instructional program with CPD.
Fritz is joined in the program by Barry and Sisu, both Belgian Malinois. They come from highly vetted European bloodlines and are regarded as a first-choice breed for military and police dogs in the U.S.
For a handsome price, fully certified K-9s can be purchased from European breeders. But as the demand for working dogs has grown, local agencies like CPD have built up training programs of their own – and they are no walk in the park, for neither K-9 nor cop.
Officers describe the training as a trial by fire and full-body reckoning. The days are long, rote and relentlessly physical.
“You anticipate a lot of work, but then you actually get into it and it's 10 times the amount of work you expected. It was kind of a wake-up call,” said Madrid-Vahlkamp, a muscular, blond-haired woman, who explained that since starting the program she’s gotten skinnier and gained muscle definition, a fact emphasized by her family each time she returns home on weekends.
“It's a different kind of physical fitness. I can run a marathon, but running a marathon is completely different than being chased by a K-9 while wearing a 40-pound bite suit, and then curling a 50-pound dog on top of you, over and over again.”
K-9 officer in training Sisu prepares to pursue a “bad guy.” (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
K-9 officer in training Barry eagerly pulls on his lead with his eye on an escaping bad guy (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Officers with the Casper Police Department run detection drills with K-9 officers in training at a warehouse in Mills. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily)
It’s All a Big Game
The program's physicality was on display at the warehouse in Mills, where Madrid-Vahlkamp worked her back like an Olympic rower in a game of tug-of-war with Fritz.
While it may appear like a fun diversion, games like tug-of-war lie at the heart of all K-9 training, according to Officer Gordon Brown of the CPD K-9 Unit.
Handlers teach dogs using the basic psychological principles of positive association: find the drugs and — good boy — get your reward, which can be as simple as belly scratches and pets.
“Whether it's narcotics or apprehension, this is all a big game for them. They know that if they do something for us, they get some sort of reward,” said Brown, nodding by example to Madrid-Vahlkamp, who wrestled with Fritz over a rubber tube filled with cocaine as though it were a pig ear.
As he tugs with puppy-like excitement, the scent of cocaine escapes from perforations in the tube, causing the smell to subconsciously imprint on his mind as a reward. Through repetitive applications of games like this, he will soon become a formidable instrument in the work of detection and detainment.
As much as 80% of K-9 deployments in Wyoming are related to drug calls, according to Brown, so it’s vital that dogs develop an unfaltering olfaction for five distinct scents: marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl.
To achieve this, handlers implement what’s known as the “Four-In-One” method, which accustoms K-9s to a compound scent before splitting drugs out individually. Drug bindles are packaged inside perforated tubing of various materials and treated like a dog toy, in a game of fetch, for instance, or hide-and-seek.
The games get progressively harder as dogs are put in real-world settings teeming with red herring scents.
“For narcotics imprinting training we’re throwing every odor around them. We'll train in the city garage and run lockers where people have dirty socks, dirty underwear and who knows what else,” Brown said.
“We even do rural barn settings. It has to be a barn with active animals, so you have a ton of really weird animal odor, weird foods, all the medicines, the smells, whatever the heck is in there. They learn that those other odors have zero value, and that their toy only comes to them when they locate one of those five scents.”
Though narcotics calls are the bread-and-butter of the K-9 unit, the dogs are also a vital asset in other enforcement scenarios, providing a use-of-force alternative that helps keep officers safe in dicey encounters.
All dog training is designed to tap into combinations of inherent K-9 drives, like play drive and tracking drive, in the case of detection. For apprehension, prey-drive is the emphasis, and an entirely different mode of training is required.
Apprehension
The following day, Barry, a 16-month-old Belgian Malinois, stood in a creekside meadow near Mike Lansing Field in Casper. Spits of rain dampened his black and tan coat, although by appearances, inclement weather was his furthest concern.
Every fiber of his 40-pound body was keyed into the movement of a “bad guy” escaping toward a grove of Russian olives in the distance. A glint of primal excitement flared in his eyes, and he pulled tight on his lead.
His handler, CPD Officer Andrea Shulz, gave the command and he shot off his leash like an arrow from a compact bow. In an instant he closed the distance and launched mouth first into the high-center back of the runner, knocking him off balance. The man yelped and turned to tussle the dog off.
“Get away from my dog,” Shulz says, chasing to catch up.
Judging by the man’s labored groans and flagging effort, Barry is winning the fight.
The man is not really a bad guy. He’s Officer Ryan Koch of the CPD, and right now it’s his job to act in a way that gives Barry a sense of what to expect in real-world situations.
Today he’s wearing a padded muzzle, which allows trainers to run a higher number of reps while also wearing everyday clothing that helps accustom dogs to real-world expectations. At other times, trainers wear padded bite suits.
Despite the violent facade, and not to mention the potentially bloody bite-and-hold tactics he may be called to perform in the real world, it’s still all just a game to Barry.
“We give ground, which psychologically is telling that dog he’s winning [the game]. And we’re reinforcing it by allowing him to jump up and hit that bad guy again,” said Officer Brown, stepping into the mind of a K-9. “He’s like, Oh, I’m beating that bad guy so good! Heck yeah, I just kicked that guy's ass. He just went over here and collapsed. I’m hot shit right now.”
A key factor in K-9 learning is police dialogue. Officers prompt desired K-9 behavior using ritual and phrases. One such example might sound like, “You in the blue sweater, come out and talk to me or I’m going to send in a dog,” Brown said, explaining how certain statements and vocal gestures indicate for the dogs which “game” they’re meant to play.
Though Barry is full of self-assurance now, teaching him to be an aggressor wasn’t easy, especially in bite-and-hold circumstances.
“When thinking about the bite suits, to get a dog to engage a person like that takes a lot of work. When you're a dog, fighting a person who’s much taller is a pretty scary thing. You have to train that into them,” Brown said.
For Madrid-Vahlkamp, the scariness was mutual.
“When I first put the suit on, I’m pretty sure I was sweating bullets. You don’t know what's it going to feel like. You don’t know how the dog is going to bite or where it's going to bite. It’s scary running away from this dog that I knew was going to come at me full force and lunge at me,” she said.
Barry plays tug of war with a drug-filled tube. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Officers with the Casper Police Department run detection drills with K-9 officers in training at a warehouse in Mills. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Officers with the Casper Police Department run detection drills with K-9 officers in training at a warehouse in Mills. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Officers with the Casper Police Department run detection drills with K-9 officers in training at a warehouse in Mills. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily)
Common Traits, Deep Bond
Similar to these high-drive breeds of working dogs, the officers drawn to K-9 work likewise exhibit heightened appetites for challenge and reward.
Officer Shulz, whose flinty stare and firm posture evoke a female MMA fighter, says she was attracted to the K-9 unit for the high stakes and adrenaline.
“I like to be involved in the high-profile calls we get, the more violent encounters like burglaries, violent crimes, big guns and drug cases. And obviously a dog is a really good tool to have there,” she said. “I like the adrenaline, solving the problem, helping the public deal with drugs."
Another thing these cops have in common is that they all really love dogs.
Police dogs are integrated fully into officers' domestic lives. They cohabitate with other animals and are found off the clock doing the same things all dogs enjoy, like lounging by the sofa with a chew toy or nuzzling for pets.
In this way, the bond that forms between officers and their dogs is deeply intimate, said Officer Brown, speaking about the relationship with his partner, K-9 Bodhi, which he named after a character played by Patrick Swayze in the movie Point Break.
“When we're not working, he’s just like one of our family. In the evening, when the kids go to bed and we're watching TV, he's up on the couch, chewing on a toy. He likes all the normal things you would expect,” he said. “But it goes above and beyond that because of the level of trust we have in each other.
“He has to trust me when I’m telling him to go do these things, and I have to trust he’s going to do what he’s been trained to do. Purely on the amount of time we spend together, working and training, he’s the closest I’ve been with any pet dog I’ve ever had.”
That trust and training have led to an impressive record of successful police work.
In the two years since his certification, Bodhi has been deployed on around 230 traffic stops with potential narcotics involvement, with more than half resulting in some sort of controlled substance seizure, Brown said.
Madrid-Vahlkamp says integrating Fritz with her dogs at her home in Gillette has been a tricky process, as the established alpha has not readily conceded the top post to Fritz, an alpha in both breeding and training.
She says that in her short time working with Fritz, she’s come to feel a profound connection.
“It’s like raising a kid. It’s extremely difficult, but you see them take their first step and it's this emotional moment. In this aspect, that was my dog being able to smell the drugs on the pigeonhole for the first time. It's just this overwhelming emotional proudness you feel,” she said.
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at [email protected].
