UM-Dearborn’s Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement is on standby should the police need her and her dogs to locate a missing person

UM Dearborn Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement Casandra Ulbrich trains with her dog Gryphon. Ulbrich runs a nonprofit organization called Wolverine State Search and Recovery that provides canine search and rescue services to law enforcement agencies. (Photo courtesy of UM-Dearborn)

Dogs can be one of the police’s most effective tools in missing person situations, whether it’s locating a survivor or human remains.

But it may surprise you to learn that most police departments don’t typically have their own search and rescue dogs. Instead, they rely on individuals or organizations to train and treat dogs for very specific purposes.

For example, there are dogs that focus on finding human remains, and tracking dogs that can follow the scent of a specific person, even if the trail is days old. You might also be surprised to learn that Casandra Ulbrich, whom you know as UM-Dearborn’s Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement, is one of Michigan’s most popular rescue and recovery dog ​​trainers and handlers for law enforcement agencies.

She came to this work quite by accident, learning about it while looking for her first German Shepherd, Jaxon.

“The person who helped me find the breeder was doing search and rescue, and I thought that was really cool, so I decided to get him tested,” Ulbrich recalls.

Jaxon was a natural and was soon trained and certified as a human remains sniffer dog. Ulbrich was addicted.

Ulbrich has been doing this work for 15 years and in 2017 founded her own nonprofit organization, Wolverine State Search and Recovery, which provides search and rescue services for law enforcement agencies across the state. It’s a big part of her life, but she also says she “needs to remind myself not to talk to people about it,” at least not to anyone. For the curious, a conversation about how it all works can quickly lead into interesting territory. Training dogs to detect human remains, for example one of Ulbrich’s specialties, means that she must expose dogs to real human remains, which of course requires the acquisition and storage of ‘HR’. A freezer at Ulbrich’s house currently contained human bones, teeth, remains, blood, washcloths left under a corpse during the day, and placenta. Placenta is one of the easiest things to obtain as it is a part of the body that hospitals send someone home with after birth after birth, no questions asked. After that, the person is free to donate it. Teeth are no problem either: one of Ulbrich’s teammates at WSSR works in a dental practice. “But the big stuff” — something like an arm or a leg — “that’s pretty hard to come by,” says Ulbrich. At the moment she is trying to work with a local funeral research program to find out if body parts are donated during the training days and then promptly returned.

All of this work is of course possible because dogs have an incredibly strong sense of smell. One of the most sensitive noses in the canine world, German shepherds have more than 200 million olfactory receptors, giving them a sense of smell 6,000 times stronger than ours. This allows them to perform all sorts of superheroic scent-based tasks. You can search an entire garbage truck and focus on a single item. They can distinguish between regular ashes and human remains. If a person gets lost in the woods, exposing the chasing dog to one of the person’s clothes is enough to follow the trail for miles, even in inclement weather and even days after the person’s disappearance. However, search and rescue operations require more than just a good canine nose. Ulbrich says the handler is just as crucial, as they must be able to recognize subtle dog body language and behavioral changes that signal what the dog is thinking.

“In a backfire situation, for example, a movement as subtle as a head turn can be really meaningful,” explains Ulbrich. “If your dog turns his head and then keeps going straight, you need to keep that in mind because it could be a sign that he should turn his head in that direction.” In an open area, the smell moves. So if the dog hits a dead end, it’s up to you to help get it back on track.” Ulbrich says it takes a long time for a handler to really understand his dog. Some dogs can be difficult to interpret, while others, like their star trail dog, Gryphon, are easy to spot. “The griffin has this big tail that tells me everything I need to know,” she says.

If you’re wondering how Ulbrich fits all of this into her already demanding university schedule, it can get tricky as search and rescue operations are often emergency situations. If a person is suspected to have died, she says she can usually arrange work for Gryphon a few days in advance. However, when she gets a call from law enforcement, saying, for example, a person with dementia is missing, it means she has to quit her job, if possible, and head to the field.

“I’m really lucky that every place I’ve ever worked has supported me,” says Ulbrich. “It’s definitely happened a few times that I’ve texted Chancellor Grasso and said, ‘Hey, Domenico, Gryphon has a job, I have to go.’ And he’s always like, ‘Good luck, take care.’”