Local school may sponsor mine-sniffing dog

by A.J. O'CONNELL

STAMFORD — Perry Baltimore III, president of the Marshall Legacy Institute, knelt before a room of 60 elementary school students at Grace Christian School in Stamford, holding up a small, flat canister about the size of a coaster. The top of it resembled a big, flat button.

"It's kind of hard to believe that something so small like this could hurt you," he said, pushing the canister's button. The contraption is a deactivated land mine, and the mission of the Marshall Legacy Institute — an organization dedicated to upholding the mission of the Marshall Plan —is to make sure that no more mines are around to hurt innocent people.

Baltimore and members of the Institute's Children Against Land Mines Program [CHAMPS] visited Grace School in hopes that the school will help them raise money to buy and train a mine-sniffing dog.

The real star of last Friday's program was Utsi, a retired mine-detecting dog, and the canine ambassador for the Marshall Legacy Institute. The seven-year-old Belgian Malinois worked until recently in Eritrea, Africa, where over a period of five years she helped clear mines from one million square meters of land.

On Friday, she showed the student body at Grace School how she does her job, sniffing at several napkins and sitting down when she reached the one covering Baltimore's deactivated land mine. Mine-sniffing dogs are trained to sit down when they've found a possible mine — their handler marks the area where the mine has been found with two sticks and a team is brought in later to dispose of it.

Mine-sniffing dogs are important in the 72 countries where land mines are still prevalent, said CHAMPS director Kimberly McCasland, because they can cover a lot of ground very quickly and effectively— the alternative to mine dogs are men or children using a long stick to poke the soil every few inches; metal detectors are useless since many mines are made of plastic.

CHAMPS was started as a way of getting children in different schools together to raise enough money to buy, train and transport a mine-sniffing dog to a region still dotted with land mines. Most of the people injured or killed by forgotten mines, said Baltimore, are children.

"[During this presentation] one or two children may lose a life or may lose a limb because of something like this," said Baltimore. "Do you believe just the bare foot of a three-year-old child can cause this plunger to be depressed?"

Animals are often wounded, too, he said, recounting the story of an elephant that lost part of her leg to a mine in Sri Lanka.

"It's still a huge global issue," said Betsy Parkinson, the regional coordinator for CHAMPS.

Seven of the 91 dogs sponsored by the Marshall Legacy Institute were paid for by children. The first CHAMPS dog, Wyoming, [paid for by groups of schoolchildren in Wyoming] is currently working in Sri Lanka.

According to Baltimore, there are also dogs named Arizona, Granite, Apollo, South Hadley, Lilo and Lipscomb, named for the defining features of the regions that adopted him —Granite was adopted by New Hampshire.

The cost of each dog is $20,000. Many of the dogs are trained at the K9 Global Training Academy in Texas, which trains the dogs used to sniff out bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and police dogs which sniff out drugs, fugitives and lost persons.

Parkinson says CHAMPS has risen about half the money needed to buy and train a dog that will be named Connecticut.

So far, she's worked with nine schools in Greenwich to raise the funds, as well as with scouting troops in Stamford, Norwalk, Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich. She hopes to have raised the rest of the money this spring, and then wants to begin fundraising in the Hartford area to buy a second dog, which will be named Nutmeg.

"By the end of 2007, we plan to provide at least 12 more land mine detection dogs to needy countries, including at least four sponsored by CHAMPS [Brownie, Connecticut, Tornado, and Vermont]," said David Berlan, business manager for the Marshall Legacy Institute.