Andrew Rule: Could sniffer dogs have helped to find Christos Pittas at Dinner Plain

Christos Pittas’ presumed death is the latest in a string of events emphasising the danger of the great outdoors— and how slow police are to adopt life-saving measures.

As far as police know, this is what happened on Friday the 13th. After lunch, Christos Pittas set off on foot from where he and his wife were staying at Dinner Plain. He wanted to see emus that had been spotted nearby.

Dinner Plain is where two worlds meet. Up close, on the neat bitumen entrance leading off the Great Alpine Road near Mt Hotham, the holiday village seems as harmlessly suburban as Wonga Park or Kangaroo Ground. But once a visitor is out of sight of the buildings, the mountain wilderness stretches to the horizon.

If the grandfather from Greensborough wandered off the path into rocky gullies and scrubby snow gums, he could easily have become confused and strayed even farther from well-marked tracks. Then, maybe, he fell and hurt himself.

By nightfall the alarm was raised. At that time it seemed reasonable to think a relatively fit 70-year-old man would be found soon enough, embarrassed and hungry but okay. And if he weren’t found that night, then surely by the next day.

But he wasn’t found, not then or the next day or the next — nor for another seven days. All this despite a steadily widening search of territory that did not reveal for certain even which way Christos had headed.

Local businesses closed as owners and staff joined the hunt alongside police and other paid searchers. By mid-week there were more than 100 people but good will and selflessness were not enough.

Christos vanished while searching for emus in Dinner Plain’s wild terrain. Picture: Supplied

The search was quietly called off after a week, leaving the overwhelming probability that Christos died of exposure or injury, or the tiny possibility that he met foul play or staged his own disappearance.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Which is why, on that first morning, Saturday May 14, decision makers at police headquarters might have thought back to how other searches had been handled. Not just several tragic cases in which no one was ever found but a couple of recent ones hailed as successes that, in fact, came perilously close to tragedy.

Such as the case of Luke Shambrook, an astonishingly resilient 11-year-old autistic boy, by sheer luck spotted from a helicopter after five days lost in bush near Lake Eildon in 2015.

Luke looked up through a gap in the foliage and caught a spotter’s eye. Without that split-second, the result doesn’t bear thinking about.

Luke’s mother Rachel believes that the family’s Christian faith played a part, which is understandable. But if prayers were enough every missing person would be saved.

In the case of another non-verbal autistic boy, William Callaghan, it wasn’t belief that saved him, nor a mass turn out of generous people. It was a black dog.

It was the Monday of the June long weekend in 2020 and William slipped away from his family at Mt Disappointment, rugged country barely half an hour from the outer dormitory suburbs of Whittlesea and Wallan.

In each case, trainers from a Victorian chapter of Search and Rescue Dogs Australia (SARDA) had offered the use of trained search dogs and a handler.

In the Luke Shambrook search, they were rebuffed outright. The reason given was that, at first, the police dog squad apparently didn’t want to use its own dogs at the Eildon search, in which case no outside search dogs were allowed, either.

The scrub and rocky gullies where Christos went missing. Picture: Supplied

The day after William Callaghan went missing, SARDA again offered a search dog and handler. They got a cool reception but turned up early next morning, Wednesday June 10, to join the circus at Mt Disappointment.

By then there were an estimated 500 searchers, some on trail bikes and horses, jostling for room with news crews as they patrolled the access road and a few well-beaten tracks, while a helicopter with heat-seeking technology hovered overhead.

They played William’s favourite cartoon music through loud hailers and barbecued sausages and hamburgers so the smell might attract him.

It made great footage for television news but none of the high-visibility hoopla worked. Because, it seems, the more noise they made, the more William hid from it.

At first, the search dog handler was told to re-check an area already searched. After wasting three hours doing that, he quietly circled around to where William’s shoes had been found beside a creek.

The dog worked along the creek bank and within 15 minutes picked up the boy’s scent and started barking. William, who loves dogs, came out of where he had been hiding and walked towards the dog. That’s when an alert bushwalker saw him.

Both the dog handler and the bushwalker, Ben Gibbs, were working independently of the organised search to avoid the army of searchers thronging the tracks.

Gibbs got some deserved praise for acting outside the square. But the real hero, an American field labrador named Obi, was never mentioned publicly.

Obi’s handlers were later told privately by a friendly senior officer that in internal police debriefings, the dog was credited with locating and “flushing out” the lost boy. Apart from that, no acknowledgement.

Search dog Obi and handler Andrew Cowan at Mt Buffalo in 2019. Picture: Supplied

Obi the American field labrador. Picture: Supplied

Still, given that a trained search dog might well have saved William Callaghan’s life after two freezing June nights in the hills, it could have occurred to police command just two years later that a search dog might be a life saver at Dinner Plain. Especially if one were brought in on the first day, before 100-plus searchers criss-crossed the scene.

By day five of the search for Christos Pittas, police were saying in private what no one ever wants to state publicly: they were looking for a body.

“This is now a recovery”, a senior officer told a contact. “Recovery” being the police euphemism for locating a corpse.

Ironically, this grim conversation was happening just as an official police spokesman was telling the media there was cause for optimism because the lost man might survive freezing overnight temperatures if he’d found the right shelter.

Which was technically true, just as it’s true that some people have survived six weeks adrift in a rubber raft and others have survived parachute malfunctions.

Miracles can happen, but Christos Pittas’s family didn’t get one.

There was a reason for the police officer’s quiet conversation about the lost man’s shrinking chances. It was to inquire discreetly about using “cadaver dogs.”

They wanted to know if dogs trained to locate human remains could find a frozen body? Or would such a search have to wait until spring for any remains to thaw?

The answer is that once a body has cooled for three days in sub-zero temperatures, it gives off negligible scent. After snow falls, failed searches are generally called off until the spring melt. Meaning probably another five months of anguish for the missing person’s family.

Even then, all odds are against finding a body before wild dogs, foxes, eagles and crows do, which explains why some people lost in the high country disappear with no apparent trace. Because animals are infinitely better than we are at detecting odours — and dogs bred and trained specifically for such a task are better at it than those that aren’t.

Luke Shambrook is placed in an ambulance after days in freezing bushland. Picture: Mike Keating

In America and Europe, various police forces, agencies and emergency services use specialised detection dogs, bred and trained to detect anything from live people to dead bodies and contraband such as drugs, cash, weapons or smuggled wildlife.

In some places, law enforcement dogs include elite “trailing” or tracker hounds to find lost people or fugitives. But hounds are hard work to train and keep, so many overseas law enforcement groups train “live search” or “human remains detection” dogs selected from gundog breeds that have both a strong “nose” and trainable retrieval instincts.

Of these, the American field labrador is seen as an ideal candidate compared with its English labrador cousins, mostly bred more for appearance than work.

In Victoria, a dedicated handful of breeders and trainers have gathered elite field labrador genetics for decades, importing bloodlines that have helped Australia’s Border Force set up the biggest (and possibly best) detection dog programme in the world.

But Australian state police forces have gone their own way. They traditionally favour what dog breeders call “biters”, guard dog breeds such as German shepherds ahead of field dog breeds such as labradors.

There are reasons for this. German shepherds (and their Belgian equivalent, the malinois) are intelligent and trainable but also big, bold and aggressive enough to intimidate or injure rioters, hostile prisoners or escapers.

They are labelled general purpose police dogs, and their main purpose is day-to-day law enforcement rather than occasional search tasks.

They are the civilian equivalent of military dogs, ideal for running though a building or enclosed spaces to find intruders and hold them. Every week they catch burglars, car thieves and intruders who might otherwise escape — and they regularly bite them, sometimes seriously.

Last month, a 27-year-old mentally-ill man alarmed drivers by running through traffic on the freeway between Newcastle and Sydney.

A danger to himself, and likely to cause a car crash, the man was chased into nearby bush by a police dog and handler. The dog, apparently uncontrolled, mauled the deranged man so badly he was taken to hospital in a critical condition. This example underlines why police handlers tend to work their best biters on leads or lines.

Law firms that sue police over unwarranted injuries to the public are now investigating whether the Newcastle victim’s family wants to pursue a claim. The same law firms are now also taking an interest in any apparent police failure to use the best available means to find lost people.

Christos Pittas’s presumed death is the latest of a string of events that emphasise how dangerous the great outdoors can be — and how slow Australian police are to adopt measures that might save lives or even solve crimes.

Border Force breeds and trains hundreds of the best search dogs in the world at its facility a kilometre west of Melbourne Airport, which is about 10 minutes from the police kennels at 505 Mickleham Rd.

Some day, maybe, Victoria Police will recruit a dog or two that might save the life of the next Christos Pittas or William Callaghan.

Meanwhile, there are volunteer search dogs in training, ready to help.