Meet Hank, a dog with a talent that’s not to be sniffed at
FROM cute puppy to top dog, Hank is taking a huge bite out of prison contraband. The border collie has a rare talent — he is one of two dogs in Australia able to sniff out mobiles.
NSW
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FROM cute puppy to top dog, Hank is taking a huge bite out of prison contraband.
The two-year-old border collie has a particular talent that puts him in big demand in the state’s jails — he is one of only two dogs in Australia able to sniff out mobile phones.
His handler Luke said Hank could detect the unique scent of a mobile phone even if the inmate hid it inside his or her body, in what is known in jailhouse slang as the “prison purse”.
“You name the place and inmates have hidden things there,” Luke, a dog handler with the Security Operations Group inside Corrective Services NSW, said yesterday.
“Hank can detect mobile phones in pockets and inside internal body cavities.”
His role as one of the prison’s 40-strong dog team has been highlighted in recent raids in maximum-security Parklea Correctional Centre cells, after inmate Carl Walton used a mobile phone to film himself and his cellmate then upload it to YouTube.
The two raids netted 13 mobile phones and chargers, along with steroid tablets and other contraband items.
Hank’s workmate, an english springer spaniel called Ivy, is the country’s only other mobile phone-sniffing dog.
Luke said mobile phones had a distinct odour that could not be detected by humans unless it was magnified, but the smell was almost impossible to describe.
It did not matter whether the phone was switched on or off.
“Hank is trained to detect odours associated with mobile phones,” Luke said.
Hank started off life on a sheep station and was chosen by Luke when he was six weeks old, with no promise that he could be successfully trained.
“He’s very relaxed at home,” Luke said. “He is a very calm dog who will lie in the backyard but when he goes into a correctional facility he is ready to work.
“Being a border collie, he is very task-oriented and doesn’t stop until he finds what he is looking for.”
Before Hank and Ivy, the only mobile-phone sniffer dogs were in the US and handlers travelled there to train.
More than 132 mobile phones were found inside NSW prisons in the first four months of this year, some as small as a car key ring and made mainly out of plastic so they can beat metal detectors.
They are openly for sale online, marketed as “butt phones”.
“Mobile phones in correctional facilities pose dangers not only to inmates but to staff and victims of crime,” Luke said.
There is now a hi-tech body scanner known as the BOSS — body orifice security scanner — chair at Goulburn’s SuperMax jail.
A second BOSS chair is moved between jails but the mobile phone sniffer dogs will always have their day.
“The support we have had from Corrective Services and particularly the SOG shows how committed they are to stamping out contraband,” Luke said.
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