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SALT LAKE CITY — The Salt Lake City Fire Department has officially welcomed a new arson K-9 — K-9 George.
KSL-TV was there Friday as he was introduced and given a badge, along with his handler.
Each year, hundreds of lives are lost on top of the billions of dollars in property damage — all because of fires intentionally set by arsonists. Now, there's a new detective with the Salt Lake City Fire Department trying to sniff out the criminals and change that trend.
Investigator Chris McGinnis and K-9 George completed their training with the State Farm Arson K-9 Program in April.
During training, the pup and handler completes a four-week, or 200-hour, course where they become a certified arson dog team.
"In partnership with a human handler, arson dogs have the ability to identify the cause of residential or commercial fires. They can seek out hard-to-find evidence in cold case incidents and may be able to recover evidence in homicide or other cases of serious crime," said Salt Lake City Fire Chief Karl Lieb.
Since the early '90s, the program has placed more than 450 teams in over 45 states.
Dogs that are trained come from training organizations for the blind, disabled and/or local animal shelters.
Throughout the course, they are trained by positive praise, otherwise known as treats.
"The way he gets fed is he has to smell a training unit, which is 50% evaporated gas, and that's when I feed him. So everyday, I train him in the morning, middle of the day and night. We do drills and I feed him, and based off of that training, he's able to smell a wide variety of accelerants," McGinnis said.
"You stay focused alright? Are you ready?" McGinnis said to K-9 George, who is the third K-9 the department has received through the State Farm program.
Arson dogs like K-9 George play a key role in helping find the cause of many fires. But let's just hope this fire season, he doesn't have to work much.
