Dogs don’t brag, and you rarely see them pontificating on news shows, so it’s up to humans to act as their publicists. Last month, a Belgian Malinois named Conan chased Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi down a tunnel in Syria, before the terrorist leader blew himself up. Back on the domestic front, a yellow Labrador retriever who goes by Hannah is one of fourteen dogs who have been trained by Connecticut police to sniff out child pornography. One day recently, Hannah and her handler, John Hyla, of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, in New York, were in an abandoned office building in the town of Southeast, looking for flash drives, cell phones, hard drives, and micro S.D. cards that had been hidden in cabinets, vents, and, in one instance, a secret compartment inside a water bottle stashed behind a fire extinguisher.
“Seek, seek, seek,” Hyla told Hannah, drawing each word out into two syllables. He is thirty-five and has close-cropped dark hair and a kind, serious face. He studied information systems at Pace University and has been a policeman since 2007. Hannah and her fellow canine snoops went through a ten-week training course to learn to identify a compound called triphenylphosphine oxide. This chemical envelops the memory chips in all electronic-storage devices, reducing the risk of overheating. Although dogs trained in electronic-storage detection (E.S.D.) can, theoretically, work on any kind of cybercrime, they are almost always used to track down sex offenders. “Hannah is able to find G.P.S. trackers on cars and Bitcoin wallets,” Hyla said. “But most of my cases are child porn.”
It was mealtime for Hannah. “She’s learned that food is available to her only if she works, so once or twice a day I hide some devices, and each time she finds one I reward her with a handful of kibble,” he said. (Dogs schooled by the Connecticut police are typically Labradors, mainly because of their big appetites.) Hannah, svelte and businesslike, hoovered her nose over the industrial carpet. “Dogs can smell all the components of something,” Hyla said. “The way they explained it during training”—he and other handlers attended the latter five weeks of the program—“is that, if there’s a McDonald’s cheeseburger on a plate, you and I would just smell a cheeseburger. A dog smells the bun, the burger, the cheese, the sesame seeds, the lettuce. The smell of a memory device is equivalent to the smell of the lettuce—the faintest of all the scents.” Hannah stopped in front of an oven and nudged its bottom door. “Show me,” Hyla said, opening it. Hannah pointed with her snout to an old Nokia phone inside. She looked up expectantly at Hyla, who obliged her by offering a dainty portion of Royal Kanin dog food from a pouch on his belt. “Good girl, Hannah, grease and all,” he said, referring to a smudge of oven grime on her head.
Before being recruited by the Connecticut State Police K9 Unit, Hannah was a dropout from the Guiding Eyes for the Blind school. “I don’t know the exact reason she didn’t complete training,” Hyla said. “I’ve heard—and I don’t know if it was accurate—that she couldn’t keep a straight line, so she was basically afraid to push the blind person back to keep on course.” (According to the Guiding Eyes Web site, each dog “chooses its own career.”) Hyla looked down at Hannah. “Ready to work?” he asked, leading her into a large room of cubicles. Without much ado, the dog found a RAM card on the floor, concealed by a nameplate that had fallen off a door.
Since Hannah’s graduation, in March, she has accompanied Hyla on more than a dozen missions. (The sheriff felt that it would be too risky to allow a journalist to go out in the field—even a journalist who laughs at danger.) On an early case—a routine search of the home of a man on probation for a sex crime—she turned up a digital camera and a Game Boy inside a knapsack. Does Hannah feel proud when she locates an item? “I don’t know,” Hyla said. “I never asked her.”
When Hannah is not working, she lives with Hyla, his wife, their three kids, and their other dog, Chestnut, a puggle. A while ago, the family misplaced an iPad. So far, Hannah has not been able to find it. ♦
