This dog has had her day

COEUR d'ALENE - The way patrol officer Craig Buhl sees it, both of them are depressed.

Buhl, working Coeur d'Alene's streets since 1990, admits that it's a sad, lonely feeling.

And Justice, Buhl's 12-year-old boxer, hangs her head in despair when she sees the Coeur d'Alene police officer getting ready to go to work.

"She still gets upset when I get up to leave every day," Buhl said Monday, looking down at his padded, blue uniform complete with badge and holster. "Especially when I put all this on."

Justice is retiring.

A combination of bad hips, gray whiskers and a healthy track record of drug busts is telling her it's time to go.

She came to Coeur d'Alene as the department's first police dog, a hand-picked 1-year-old puppy from a canine training facility in McNeil Island, Wash., in 2002. It was a doggy tryout of sorts, where officers from across the region looked at a pool of dogs from a variety of backgrounds to see if the canines had what it took to do police work.

Organizers at the camp tried to get Buhl to take a golden retriever, but Justice showed too much "drive."

That's what it's called when a dog is dedicated to finding an object. Drive is when they won't quit searching until they find what they went out to go find. Take a tennis ball.

"She just went nuts for it," Buhl said of the tennis ball at tryouts. "She almost went through the gate when she went after it."

And she wasn't skittish around things that weed out other dogs, like slippery surfaces. Her drive and guts made Justice Buhl's first choice, and the two have been partners ever since.

But that's coming to an end.

Justice was recently examined by Dr. Mary Prince at Prairie Animal Hospital, which revealed Justice had lost muscle tone in her right hind leg, likely the result of arthritic joints.

It's better to hang it up too soon rather than too late, Buhl rationalized, because the officer said it would be hard to handle putting Justice down if the dog were to be severely injured in the line of duty.

It doesn't mean either Buhl or Justice, 11 years on the force, are happy about it.

"Absolutely," Buhl said when asked if it was a hard going to work without the partner with whom he shared "at least a couple of thousand" drug busts. "It's rough when I think about it."

But Justice will remain Buhl's dog.

On Monday, the city's General Services Committee recommended the City Council declare Justice surplus property so the city would be free to give Justice to Buhl. Declaring surplus property is usually reserved for outdated municipal equipment, like a printer, not officers that can find drugs inside walls or buried in tires.

A unique situation, GSC members said, but who were they to stand in front of a dog and its owner? Unclear now is if the police department will replace Justice. It has one other dog on the force, a German shepherd named Maxx. It takes about six months to train one, assuming the one shows the right "drive" in the first place.

"I don't want to brag," Buhl said of his decorated dog turned regular pet. "But she was a top of the line dog."

Thing is, Justice will have to stay home, and Buhl still wants to put in 10 more years before he hangs it up. That's one more decade of getting dressed for work and seeing Justice her hanging head, a glint of remembering in her eye.