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One simple test will determine the strength and tenaciousness of a bite. In another one, an officer will approach a leashed dog firing his weapon at graduated intervals to measure skittishness levels. Needless to say, the animal that goes into hysterics with the first shot fired 50 feet away will go back to the vendor and be replaced. On the other hand, one that shows mainly curiosity at the noise and the approaching tester will move on to a more sophisticated level of inspection. Those that pass all the preliminaries will eventually be partnered with a patrol officer for a 16-week training program and a years-long friendship that usually extends even beyond police service.

“From that first day of training,” Saunier stresses, “you and your dog are a team. Everything else comes from that. You’ve got to know each other inside out because you’re going to need each other out there, and normally sooner rather than later.”

For the 1994 Academy graduate, the biggest surprise of the training was the sheer physical stamina required. “It is very demanding. You’re running around and screaming at an 85-pound dog. Once you get started, you can’t let up or you’re setting a bad example that could undermine everything. Athletic dogs make for athletic cops.”

Although the training program is the principal criterion for deciding which dogs are fit for duty and which aren’t, it’s not the only obstacle course facing the cop-animal team. All the dogs are channeled toward specializations (rescue, human recovery, evidence recovery, firearms, etc.), and some of these demand more advanced education than others. Arguably the most tested animals are those that, like Mac, meet Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) search-and-rescue standards. To gain this pawhold in the police canine community, the dog must complete a particularly arduous upper school course. Among other things, it must exhibit “long down” ability (staying with other dogs on the ground for five minutes without its master), an agility for climbing ladders, an aptitude for following hand signals, and a talent for sniffing out victims in a pile of rubble. The sniffing tests amount to a street course in physics, with officers expected to recognize such basic scent transport patterns as coning, fanning, fumigating, lofting, looping, and eddying. “It’s not that we just walk around holding a leash,“ Saunier smiles. “We have to know a few things, too.”

The team’s success in getting through the FEMA tests has put it front and center for numerous volunteer search and rescue operations around the country, not least in Texas and Mississippi after the Katrina and Rita hurricane disasters. “We’ve got the experience and FEMA knows it. In fact, if you look at canine units as a whole, probably only Connecticut and New Jersey have as many trained dogs as we do, and that’s at a state police level covering entire states, not just one city.”

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Closer to home than Texas and Mississippi are the regular calls after suspected fugitives. The same day Mac was having to defend his German roots in front of City Hall, for instance, another canine team, Joe Deluca and Kage, answered a call to help hunt for a gunman who had disappeared somewhere near the Belt Parkway after a robbery. No sooner had the gunman been tracked to a weeded area near the parkway than Kage, with the help of a bite or two, dug him out. No shots were fired during the arrest.

Puncturing of fugitives, even those with weapons, has sometimes led imaginative attorneys to file lawsuits against the NYPD and its dogs. Then there is the occasional incidence of accidental bites, when the animals have clamped down on people other than perps. But Saunier, for one, insists this is not a significant problem. “I’ve been here since 2000,” he says, “and in that time we’ve had maybe five people coming up with accidental bites, and even three of them were cops.”

More often than not, the dogs will be employed searching for the missing more than the fleeing. And in this connection their duties reflect a disturbing trend that has become increasingly more prominent in numerous social contexts. “A lot of people would assume that we’re usually looking for children, and sure, that happens quite often. But more and more we’re getting called to search for Alzheimer’s cases and other elderly people who have just wandered away.”

Whatever their heroics on the job, police dogs are fed only once a day, usually at an hour as evenly spaced as possible between going on and going off duty; they don’t even get treats for some particularly dashing derring-do. To feed them more or otherwise would risk not only weight problems, but, as the unit has found out to its dismay in the past, endanger the stomach wall of a creature that might be forced into some exertion while still digesting.

For the most part, animals last between five and ten years on the job. Along the way, they are recertified at fixed intervals and undergo regular medical and dental checkups. It is hardly unknown for the dogs to go through root canal work at $3,000 a pop. It is also such medical bills that become the chief concern of the cops when their partners have lost too many steps to continue on the job. Although a foundation contributes about $1,000 annually for a retired dog’s medical expenses, it falls substantially on the cops who take their dogs home after the last day to manage any serious ailments.

But cops like Saunier aren’t complaining. “A dog like Mac, he’s been looking out for me like I hope I look out for him. He’s family, and you take care of family.”

Donald Dewey’s latest book, to be published in the spring, is True and False: The Story of American Political Cartoons.

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