Whanganui has a new police dog on the beat.
Female German shepherd Ulfi and Constable Matt McLay recently completed their final course in Wellington and were one of four to graduate at the Dog Training Centre in Trentham.
McLay was given the task of handling Ulfi, who will be 3 in October, about six months ago.
He said it can be challenging to build a strong bond in a short amount of time.
“But she was quite sweet, attentive and showing interest pretty much after a couple of days,” McLay said.
“It was made easier just by spending time with her and playing with her.”
McLay, 33, has been a police officer for seven years and a dog handler since October 2023.
Born and bred in Whanganui, McLay attended Whanganui High School before working as a veterinarian for several years.
McLay said he has always had a passion for working with animals.
“I had always wanted to join the police and work with animals,” he said.
“The moment it clicked for me was when, at my old job, I got to the point where I couldn’t get any further so I though now was the time to give it a go and broaden my horizons.”
He said it was a big learning curve training his first dog, Blitz, who was cut from the programme after not making the police standard.
McLay trained another dog before being assigned to Ulfi who has excelled.
The final course, in particular, is challenging for handlers and their dogs, McLay said.
“It’s challenging all the time because you might make progress one day in one thing and then the next day you can’t repeat it or the dog doesn’t want to do it so there is a lot of failure in the training,” he said.
“You’ve got to be good with accepting failure and just know that you will progress slowly.”
McClay believes Ulfi has all the attributes to succeed in her police career.
“She’ll be fine, she has got a lot of courage, she’ll hit things full-steam ahead I’d say,” he said.
Police dogs serve a range of purposes on the frontline, including safety, tracking and as de-escalation tools.
“The dogs and the dog handlers provide a huge capability for safety,” McLay said.
“We are there to make sure frontline stays safe with the use of a dog, the biggest thing for us is that we help locate and find those offenders that otherwise would get away.
“We might bring them out as a deterrent, sometimes people see the dogs and think ‘okay, nah, we’ll stop’, so they’re used as a de-escalation tool.”
McLay and Ulfi will start field work from August 25, joining the existing four police dogs in Whanganui.
McLay said he and Ulfi will continue to develop their relationship and get back into an operational mindset after a long stint of training.
“I’ve been training for 18 months so I have to get my mindset into an operational sense, there is not going to be someone behind me telling me where the person has gone,” McLay said.
“The biggest thing is trusting her, we have trained her to this point, she knows what she is doing, she knows how to locate so it’s about trusting her that she knows where she is going.”
McLay hopes to stick with Ulfi for a long time - most police dogs work until they are 8 years old.
“I’m hoping to get a good bit of time out of her, it’s just about managing her out on the street. I’ve got to know her limits and look after her health.”
Fin Ocheduszko Brown is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.