A Scottish fire brigade is using two four-legged detectives to help sniff out arsonists across the country.
Five-year-old Springer Spaniel Mitch and seven-year-old collie Jay are specially trained to sniff out chemical accelerants used to start fires and have been working with Central Scotland Fire and Rescue for the last few years.
Along with their handler Trevor Lynch, they form the only fire-service owned canine investigation team in Scotland.
The dogs help to significantly reduce the time and money spent on investigating deliberate fires.
In 2008 the body of 29-year-old James Taylor was found badly burned in woods in Motherwell. Evidence discovered by the dogs helped prove that he had been killed where his body had been found rather than being dumped afterwards.
Trevor said: “Someone had been seriously assaulted by having flammable liquid poured over them.
“The forensic scientists were looking to see if the assault had taken place where the victim was found or elsewhere in the area.
“The dogs quickly indicated to a liquid at the spot where the body was found and scientists were able to dig down around a metre and extract a large quantity of accelerant from the soil and undergrowth which proved the assault had taken place at that spot.”
Establishing where the murder had taken place prevented the need for a sweep of the entire forest, an exercise which would have taken the investigation longer to complete and required a lot of manpower.
Following a joint investigation involving the fire service, police and forensic scientists, Stuart McKelvie was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2009 for the murder.
The evidence the dogs find is inadmissible in court and samples have to go to a forensic lab in Edinburgh or Dundee to be verified but the work the dogs do speeds up the process of detecting wilful fires.
“A dog’s sense of smell is more sensitive than a human being,” continued Trevor.
“Having the dogs means accelerant may be detected quicker. As a result they don’t need to take as many samples for the forensic scientists.
“Also, the dogs are small and nimble and can therefore gain access to areas where fire personnel can’t.
However not every fire he attends is deliberate. The dog team is brought in if a fire investigator thinks a fire may be suspicious but cannot see any immediate cause for the fire.
He continued: “They have a success rate of more or less 100%, every fire that’s investigated; if there are accelerants there the dogs will find it.
“There have been a number of cases where the dogs have been brought in and not found anything. That doesn’t mean that the fire wasn’t wilful, just that there was no accelerant used.”
Trevor got the idea from English services, which have been using dog units since 1996. The idea originally came from America.
“There was research done in the US on whether dogs could be conditioned to detect accelerants, said Trevor.
“This was done after seeing what the police had done in training dogs to search for drugs.”
He estimates there are now more than 200 accelerant dogs in America.
Amazingly the dogs can tell the difference between liquids deliberately placed to start a fire and the oils produced by man-made materials when they burn.
“When man made products burn they produce hydrocarbon gases,” explained Trevor.
“The dogs are trained to search for signature smells, they are not trained to find hydrocarbons, they are trained on the source liquids.”
The dogs are even more important as arsonists are continually trying to outwit the fire investigation teams.
Trevor said: “The people that do this are always looking for ways to try and trick us.”
“We once went out to Livingston where a chip shop roof had been on fire.
“At first it just looked like a normal chip shop fire, because they do happen, but a closer look revealed the roof tiles had been stripped off, a hole cut into the roof and accelerants had been poured in.
“We also searched the surrounding area and found gloves abandoned by the person who had started the fire, as well as a lighter.”
Trevor has so far attended around eight incidents this year, including a hotel fire in Tranent, East Lothian and a nightclub fire in Livingston.
Jay’s other role is in community education. “We go and do fire investigation talks and show the kids the benefits of us having the dogs,” said Trevor.
“We go to schools and youth groups and tell the children that the dogs can find matches and lighters. We put them down beside a child and get the dog to find it to show them what the dogs can do.”
As statistics show that 49% of deliberate fires are started by 11 to 16-year-olds and the aim is to reduce this number by showing children the role dogs play in fire detection.
The dogs are unusual because both started off as family pets.
Jay was Trevor’s own family pet and was and originally going to be trained him as a search and rescue dog, to find people lost on the hills.
However, following a change in government legislation which required the police, fire service and forensic teams to work together to increase the detection rate of malicious fires, Trevor decided to ask his boss if Jay could be trained to detect accelerants instead.
Mitch proved to be too much of a handful for his original owners who were unable to cope with his boisterous and excitable nature, and gave him up when he was just four months old. He was initially offered to Central Scotland Police, before finding a home with the fire service.
Outside of work the dogs are still treated as pets, though Trevor doesn’t allow them any treats to prevent them picking up food from the floors of burnt out buildings.
“The dogs are pets as well so when they are not working they do what normal pets do, except that they train twice a week.
“That’s why they are so unusual because they are just normal pets until their harness is put on; that’s the trigger for them to work and they know they’ll get their ball if they work hard.
“They have a life of luxury until they are needed but if they see me in my overalls they start to get quite excited.
“The dogs love their job – or they wouldn’t do it, that’s the bottom line.”
In 2008/2009 there were more than 13 thousand fires in Scotland, of which 4572 were deliberate.
