Antigo Public Library hosts K9 officer

ANTIGO — Riggs, the Antigo Police Department’s relatively new K9 officer, stopped at the library Monday afternoon along with his handler Officer David Treleven. The visit was one of a series of special events planned as part of the library’s summer reading program.

Treleven spoke to children and parents that had gathered about Riggs’ largest contribution to the police department: his sense of smell, which Treleven illustrated by comparing the way dogs and humans might react to the aroma of lasagna.

“We know that smell, because we know that’s lasagna,” Treleven said. “K9 Riggs — not just K9 Riggs, but all dogs — can smell individually the noodles, the meat, the cheese, the sauce, the spices. All that stuff, they can smell it separately, where we can just smell the hodgepodge of those ingredients, and we call it lasagna. So that’s why dogs are used for drug detection and tracking, because they have such good noses.”

Following the information session, kids also saw Riggs’ nose in action, first when he rushed to a box Treleven had hidden pseudo-drugs within inside room, and then again outside when the dog zigzagged his way to a bush on the north side of the library for the car keys of one of the mothers in attendance.

Treleven explained that Riggs had found the keys after being instructed to engage in what he called an “article search.”

“If somebody’s running from the police, they don’t want to get caught with the drugs in their pocket. They don’t want to get caught with the gun or the knife in their pocket, so they’re going to throw things as they’re running. But he’s trained to smell the odor of human hand oil,” he said.

Treleven said the K9 officer has already been used often in drug searches, as well as other crime fighting.

“We’ve had building searches for suspects — we’ve had two confirmed tracks that we’ve found,” said Treleven, who called the event an outreach event for the department meant to bridge the gap between police and the community. “We found someone last week that ran from me at a traffic stop. We had a track down south of town. State patrol had pulled a car over and someone ran out of the car — the driver bailed. That was a confirmed track because we saw the bad guy on trail cameras out in the woods, then 45 minutes later, they saw us going through. So that was another confirmed track.”

Kristie Heistad, the Antigo Public Library’s youth community community engagement specialist, said the purpose of Monday’s event with Riggs, as well as all the special events in the summer reading program, is to encourage kids to continue reading during summer vacation.

“It’s very important to keep them reading throughout the year, because if you can keep kids reading, that helps them for the next school year,” Heistad said. “And reading out loud is one of the best things you can do for your child, so that’s one thing that we also try to do: have story time or have parents reading to their children, or kids just reading themselves just so that they can advance their reading skills.”

The Antigo Public Library will host more special events in the summer reading program throughout July, and a 4-H storytime and craft event will be held this Thursday, June 20 at 11 a.m.