The police do not consider them "fun and games". They don't have a budget for this.
Read the False Alerts section here :
http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/MARTIN_GRIMES.htm
It clearly states that Eddie was used 200 times but not in 200 cases
200 criminal case "searches" is the clue
SY has a budget for fun and games.
The mound they searched in mid-2014 is/was - probably occupied by one Godfrey Barrington Norton in May 2007 - a main route into Luz from the west side of the town and from Burgau - overlooked by the Paraíso development and the St James complex - probably overlooked by the Amici Italian restaurant (it opened in 2007 and it makes sense to open it at the start of season, but I don't know that for a fact, hence the probably) - it looks like a nothing little road going through the mound, but the reality is that the one-way system forces traffic to use it - and you can't manually dig holes in the middle of Luz without one hell of a lot of time, one hell of a lot of effort and one hell of a lot of noise.
The cemetery uses a JCB for graves, ditto all the drain schemes and road works.
Yet we had SY with pickaxes and shovels. In central Luz. If you are old enough you will remember Brian Rix farces.
What has this got to do with Amaral and the dogs? The dogs were marketed as rocket science, when they were anything but. I have had months to examine the capability of the dogs. The timescale on the case was much shorter, and the information available then is what I would describe as skewed.