By Sara Oppenheimer
For Charleston Gazette-Mail
Pip the dog starts every morning that he’s on the job by pawing at Rick McElhaney’s office door.
“If somebody doesn’t know any better, they think, ‘Oh, he’s looking forward to seeing Rick,’” said McElhaney, the deputy director of operations for Metro 911, the dispatch office for Kanawha County. “No, he’s looking for me to open my door so he can go in my office and wait by the window for the people that he likes more than me. Then he runs to the door and greets them.”
Pip, a certified “super-mutt,” is not McElhaney’s dog, nor is he anyone else’s dog in the Ned Chilton 911 Center in Charleston. Pip is the public safety mascot of Metro 911 — its first ever canine employee.
“He’s a good boy,” McElhaney said. “He’s well acclimated with everybody here. Everybody that comes in that visits is very impressed with him.”
‘Adopting was always the plan’
Pip’s story with Metro 911 began two years ago when the Kanawha-Charleston Humane Association received Pip after he had been hit by a car. Around this same time, Metro 911 was in the market for a shelter dog.
“We contacted the shelter and told them an idea of what we wanted,” McElhaney said. “For our purposes, and our heart’s purposes, adopting was always the plan.”
When Metro 911 called KCHA about adopting a dog, Pip had already healed from his injuries. Johnny Rutherford, former director of Metro 911, knew immediately Pip would be the dog for them.
“You could see where his leg had been shaved and his belly was shaved for surgery, so he was still fresh out of it,” said Lt. Erica Buchanan, one of Pip’s handlers.
Metro 911 sent Pip to Follow Our Lead, a dog training organization based in Charleston, where he learned how to sit, stay, shake and how to tell the difference between play time and work time.
“When he puts his vest on, he knows he’s working,” Buchanan said. “You tell him to place, and he sits on his little bed and lets the kids pet him and loves it.”
Pip came back with a couple quirks, though, like a sudden love of sitting in chairs.
“The first day he was up here, we had a meeting in here and he was sitting in the chair with us,” Buchanan said. “We kind of had to put a stop to it actually in the center because he would just sit there in the chair with you the whole time.”
Pip’s impact
In Pip’s eyes, his day-to-day job consists of getting treats and pets from his human friends and playing with his favorite toy, Lambchop.
For the dispatchers, though, his presence makes their hard days on the job a little easier. After growing up in the dispatch, the employees say Pip knows the team needs to focus and when a dispatcher needs a little extra love after a tough call.
“I think he knows — he can tell people’s emotions,” Buchanan said.
“I personally had one,” she added, speaking about emotionally difficult calls. “There was a fire in Charleston, and unfortunately a lot of dogs were involved in the fire, so that was a really rough one and he sat there beside me the whole time like he could tell that I was not okay with it.”
Outside of the dispatch office, Pip works as Metro 911’s public safety mascot, showing up as a staple at the office’s public events and on its Facebook page to help educate people about public safety and weather announcements and help recruit people to work as dispatchers.
“Who doesn’t want to come work with a dog?” Buchanan said.
Field trips and friends
Pip spends most of his nights at the dispatch, sleeping in one of his many beds around the call room. A handful of times a month, though, he goes home with one of his handlers to spend a little time outside of the office. Outside of work, the handlers say Pip is a totally different animal.
“As soon as he gets to my house and gets home, he knows he can be a dog.” Buchanan said. “It’s like every bark he’s held in, he’s got to get out.”
When he gets back to the office, though, Pip is always excited to see his human friends again.
“When he’s been at my house and has been gone for a few days, I tell him, ‘We’re going home, we’re going back to Metro,’” Buchanan said. “When he gets here, up in the parking lot, he starts zooming around like he’s so happy to be back home.”
Though Metro 911 doesn’t know the exact day of Pip’s birthday, they celebrate it every year around October. This year, his handlers want to do something extra special for him.
“It depends on how our shifts are scheduled, but he’s got friends like my dog, a couple other people that take him home and they have their own dogs, so he knows his friends,” Buchanan said. “I’d love to get them all through together and just have a little party.”
According to Metro 911 staff, it’s a small gesture for someone (or some-pup) who has changed their work life for the better.
“He’s just a really good dog,” Buchanan said. “I always joke and say, you know, Metro has got me for as long as Pip’s here.”
Read more from HDMedia, here
The post Pip the Dispatch Dog: How a shelter pup became Metro 911’s first canine employee appeared first on West Virginia Press Association.
