Christmas miracle.
On 23 December 2023 at 10:00 pm, the emergency center gave the police a task about a missing person in Korpilahti. The elementary school-age child was last seen in his home yard at 7:00 pm. The steadily falling snow had covered the child's tracks, but initially they seemed to go in the direction of the center of Korpilahti. The relatives had made a close search until they thought it best to alert the authorities to join the search.
The Inner Finland Police Department established a situational organization at the scene, which was also joined by a dog patrol from Jyväskylä. While other patrols concentrated their resources in the direction of the city center, the dog patrol did a search near the home with the help of the police dog Kuha. The patrol found out from the relatives that at around 8:00 pm a snow plow had been on the street and a high pile of snow could be seen at the end of the street. At the back of the pile were snow caves made by children and the dog patrol carefully inspected the pile. When Kuha did not react to anything and the pile was impossible to inspect by hand, the patrol decided to focus its search on the nearby terrain.
After jogging for about an hour, the dog patrol was returning to the car. The route went past the snow pile mentioned above. The dog handler let Kuha still sniff the pile. Suddenly Kuha froze in one spot and refused to continue the journey. There were pine cones sticking out through the snow, which Kuha sniffed with interest. The dog patrolman started to tear the pine cone and, excited by this, Kuha also started digging in the snow pile. The search became so intense that the patrolman went to get a shovel from a nearby house. During that time, Kuha continued to dig with his paws, and after a while, he came across a shoe sole. It was already Christmas Eve, the time being 00:30 am. All the police officers in the vicinity rushed to the spot and started frantically digging. After what seemed like a long, but actually short moment, the child's face was revealed. At first, he was completely unresponsive to treatment, but slowly started to recover and was already able to talk in the ambulance that arrived.
The happy ending of the story with this mission is the sum of many factors. However, the focus is on a well-trained police dog and the tenacious basic work of the dog patrol. The child had been playing in the snow cave he had built, when the new snow load brought by the plow had collapsed the cave. There was 1 to 1.5 meters of snow on the child. Fortunately, however, there was a small air pocket left in the snow.
The dog trainer has spent hundreds of hours training Kuha, and success in a task like this is the best reward for that work. Also, the experienced handler's awareness that the human smell slowly rises to the surface in the snow caused him to let the dog sniff the pile again. Finally, the patrol's trust in the dog made the rescue operation possible. No one even wants to think about what would have happened if the child had not been found so quickly. The case has gained attention of and touched the whole police dog community.
Such successes also motivate other dog patrols to train and do everything they can to find the lost persons in time. But above all, the surrounding community has a great feeling of relief and happiness for the family in question, which certainly got the best Christmas present possible.
The Finnish Police Dog Association congratulates the dog patrol on its great success and gives a three shouts of hurrah to the police dog Kuha!
