Blue the bloodhound helps Wichita police sniff out the missing

Blue the Bloodhound ain’t Sherlock Holmes.

Or Batman, or Superman.

He slobbers.

He smells funny.

He’s a 100-pound mammal inclined to lay his big, wet, slobbery, wrinkled jaws onto any stranger or friend and get them slobbery, soaking wet.

But Blue’s owner, Officer Joe Camp, wears a badge and a gun for the Wichita Police Department. And he’s got plans.

“The human scent in all of us is as individual to all of us as is DNA,” Camp said. “And Blue knows how to find it.”

The department hasn’t used bloodhounds in decades, preferring to use more easily trainable German shepherds as tracking and tactical K-9 dogs. But Camp’s bosses are now giving Camp’s pet what amounts to an extended job tryout.

Camp says Blue could soon become not only a superb fighter of crime but a finder of lost children and tracker of confused elderly people who wander away from their homes.

Since September, Blue has worked part time for the police, helping with 14 cases, mostly involving missing persons.

Results are encouraging.

On March 8, a young man went missing from his Wichita school. His mother, who had had an argument with him, got worried.

A dozen police officers went out to look.

So did Camp, and Blue.

Blue took one little sniff of something the young man had touched, and headed south from the school. Fast.

“I’ve been a part of searches like that in the past,” Camp said. “We’d send 10 to 15 officers looking, we’d search for miles around, for maybe hours, and often find nothing.”

Not this time.

Camp got on the police radio and told other officers to head south, because Blue had said, in Blue’s own way of communicating, that the person for whom they were looking had headed south from the school.

Officers concentrated south, and found the young man, distant from Blue but walking the same sidewalk that Blue was trailing, floppy ears, funny smell and all.

Humans shed molecules all the time, and all are as distinct in scent as are fingerprints, Camp said. And Blue can find the right one, like finding a needle in a haystack.

Weeks before this, Camp took Blue to the scene of a burglary.

He had Blue sniff a door handle. Blue then took off, sniffing the ground, across the yard, to the sidewalk, where he turned right and followed the sidewalk, making one more turn.

He lost the trail there, Camp said, probably because the burglar had hopped in a car at that point. But minutes later, a neighbor told police that the burglar had run from the house along the trail that Blue’s slobbery snoot had traced out.

Camp says Blue can find anybody. Unless the burglar hops in a car.

Hundreds of years of bloodhound breeding have made bloodhounds masters of smell; even the slobber, and the wrinkled folds of a bloodhound’s face, and the floppy ears, have a purpose, Camp said.

The slobber wets faint scents, making them easier to smell. The skin folds catch the scent and make it linger longer around the nose. And the heavy, floppy ears drag the ground and stir the scent molecules, making them easier to detect.

Before last September, Blue the bloodhound’s main job was to be one of the nine pet dogs of the Camp family. Blue slobbers on Camp and Camp’s wife and six kids at their home outside Wichita. Camp had acquired him as a pup, two years ago. Camp says bloodhounds are the friendliest and gentlest dogs in the canine kingdom.

His family likes Blue, slobber and smells and all.

But Camp believes so ardently in the abilities of trained bloodhounds that he’s talking to his bosses about giving Blue more significant roles in the department.

Camp has a proposal.

He says the community could set up what amounts to a bloodhound data bank, filled with scents swabbed and placed in little containers. We could get a swab of scent from all the kids in schools, all the elders in nursing homes, put those scents in storage, and send Blue to find people when they go missing. One sniff of one scent, and Blue would lope off, hot on the trail.

His bosses are intrigued enough about this that they’ve let Camp put Blue to work.

And not only in finding lost souls.

Blue is a master of public relations, Camp said.

“He is a dog who loves attention, so we take him to school groups and other gatherings,” Camp said. “The public gets to hug him and pet him, and lay on him.

“He’s totally gentle. We were at one school group where they took his picture, with two kids holding out his big floppy ears like wings.

“He didn’t mind.”

This story was originally published March 24, 2017 at 6:33 PM with the headline "Blue the bloodhound helps Wichita police sniff out the missing."