One for all you dog fans, from today’s Times. Controversially the article claims dogs sense of smell is 100,100 greater than humans, but as we all know thanks to our resident cadaver dog handler, this is nonsense and humans could just as easily be able to find cats with their noses if they could be bothered to wander around on all fours.
Lost cat? Call the canine pet detective
October 23 2019, 12:01am,
The world’s top kitten finder isn’t Ace Ventura, after all — it’s a cocker spaniel called Molly. Michael Odell meets the hound and the sleuth she works with
Colin Butcher with Molly the pet detective
Colin Butcher with Molly the pet detectiveRACHEL OATES
A couple of years ago our cat Pip disappeared. One minute he was weaving between my legs, canvassing for a snack, the next, gone. Dutifully I made some “missing” posters, including a photo and mobile number, then taped them to local lampposts. A huge tactical error. We live in an area with a large student population, so I was woken at all hours by drunk teenagers miaowing down the phone. Or else there was silence followed by half-stifled giggles, then: “Hey, are you still looking for pussy?”
I wish I’d known Colin Butcher then. The 59-year-old runs a pet detective agency, the only one in the UK. In fact, he claims to be the only one in the world with cat-detection skills. When it comes to searches and investigations Butcher has serious chops. He served as a diver, then as a member of a helicopter search-and-rescue team in the Royal Navy. And after 11 years doing that he spent 14 years with Surrey Police, rising to the rank of detective inspector in the major crimes unit. “Yes, Molly and I know how to investigate,” he says with an assured grin.
Molly is his specially trained cat-detection dog. We meet in a café near his home in Guildford, Surrey. Both are very much in investigation mode. “You obviously own a dog,” says Butcher, noticing a single strand of fur on my trouser leg.
Molly has olfactory capabilities 100,000 times more powerful than any human
Molly has olfactory capabilities 100,000 times more powerful than any human
Meanwhile, Molly, a boisterous black cocker spaniel with olfactory capabilities 100,000 times more powerful than any human, has already detected a toasted cheese and ham sandwich being prepared on a counter next to us. Butcher picks her up and puts her in his lap. She leans across the table and slurps my tea. “She gets restless if she isn’t working,” Butcher says. “I’m sure she’s excited because the next cat we find will be her hundredth.”
They make a cute couple, but I can’t help wondering how does a high-ranking cop who has put away murderers and drug dealers end up going door-to-door seeking information regarding the whereabouts of Smudge and Cuddles? Butcher has written a book, Molly the Pet Detective Dog, that documents his investigations regarding these missing animals. Sometimes the intensity he brings to the job is startling. Such as when a cat called Oscar gets locked in a neighbour’s shed. Butcher finds it, but it has become so dehydrated it later dies.
“ ‘Damn, if only I’d got to him sooner,’ I told myself, slamming my hand against the steering wheel in frustration,” Butcher writes. He sounds like Sherlock Holmes enraged by a particularly dastardly act of his arch-enemy, Moriarty. Yet it was just a cat, locked in a shed.
“In the navy I rescued people and in the police we halted the activities of some very serious criminals, but there is a sense that I was paid and trained to do those jobs. We didn’t high-five or punch the air. I do when we find a lost pet. I can honestly say finding my first cat I got the same high as the day I got my wings [when qualifying as a crewman on Royal Navy helicopters] or watching a major drug gang go to prison.”
Butcher saw some terrible things while working for the police. In 2000 the body of a teenage boy was found by a police cadaver dog in the River Wey, which runs through Guildford. He had been in the water a long time and Butcher was handed a key found in the trousers of the badly decomposed corpse. The family of a missing teenage boy came forward. Butcher had to tell them that if the key fitted the lock on their front door, this was their son.
“About 20 family members turned up to see me try the key. I slipped it in and the door opened. The mother collapsed and howled in a way I never want to hear again. In the end, the danger is you become hardened and institutionalised, so I eventually decided I needed a new challenge.”
A poster pinned to a tree
A poster pinned to a treeGETTY IMAGES
Butcher became a private eye, investigating company fraud or cases of suspected marital infidelity. One time he investigated a high-ranking fast food executive suspected of taking a secret recipe for dough balls to his new job. Another time he liaised between a football club and a woman who claimed she had compromising photos of one of their married star players. “In that sort of work you are often helping someone leverage an advantage over someone else. Finding a much-loved lost pet has a lot more emotional value,” Butcher says.
When he decided to focus his investigative talents on lost cats people told him he was insane. Few believed a dog could be trained to find a cat without their obvious inter-species hostility becoming a problem. “I was like the guy who invented the ballpoint pen. Everyone told him, ‘We don’t need those’ or, ‘It can’t be done’,” he says.
First Butcher decided to find out everything he could about cats, placing an advertisement in a local magazine called The Guildford asking for volunteers, then setting up surveillance cameras around their homes to find out where their cats went and what they did (some of his research was used in the 2013 BBC Horizon documentary The Secret Life of the Cat).
Then he set about finding a suitable dog. As a child living in Singapore (his father was also in the navy and the family were briefly posted there), Butcher had once seen a man drown a sack of unwanted puppies. The experience convinced him to get a rescue dog.
A friend found Molly, an unwanted dog living in the Midlands, and Butcher sent her for a year’s training at the Milton Keynes-based company Medical Detection Dogs. The organisation can train dogs to smell low blood sugar levels in the body odour of people suffering with type 1 diabetes and even some cancers. Butcher asked them to train Molly to find cats. “It’s just a question of honing the cocker spaniel skill-set,” he says, “but there were definitely doubters and the day we recovered our first cat, our ‘proof of concept’, was one of the best days of my life.”
That first case was a missing cat called Rusty, last seen near St Albans in Hertfordshire. The owner, Tim, was distraught, so Butcher put his recovery plan into action for the first time. He interviewed Tim in detail. He checked for sheds and lock-up garages on Google Maps. He did a weather assessment because wind and rain can negatively affect a sniffer dog’s accuracy. As hopes faded Tim mentioned the recent death of an elderly neighbour on his street, and Butcher’s ears (as well as those, presumably, of Molly) pricked up.
It didn’t take Butcher long to deduce that Rusty’s was a case of “involuntary transportation”: Rusty had been taken away in the back of the private ambulance carrying the corpse of a 90-year-old woman to the undertaker. Butcher traced the undertaker. Molly searched the village where it was based. Rusty was found. Tim burst into tears and delighted villagers applauded. Butcher writes: “I had adopted the strategic and analytical role, drawing upon my raft of detecting experience to assess the probabilities and possibilities regarding Rusty’s whereabouts and to establish the credibility and reliability of witnesses.”
Fair enough, but Butcher charges £95 an hour with a minimum four-hour booking, plus travel expenses. And all along it was the fault of the world’s least vigilant undertakers, who had allowed a cat to stroll into their hearse, ride to a neighbouring village next to a corpse, then disembark without being noticed. To me it sounded like a plotline from the film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Butcher doesn’t agree. And few things rile him more than mention of Jim Carrey’s 1994 comedy hit. “That guy has been the bane of my life,” he says in a rare lapse in mood. “There will always be people who think a pet detective is a joke, but Molly is the only dog in the world who can trace a specific cat using scent-match discrimination and if I hadn’t asked appropriate questions and analysed the situation, Rusty might never have been found.”
Butcher and Molly have cat detection down to a fine art. By the end of the book they have tracked down 74 cats out of 100 cases. And recovered one tortoise. I can’t help thinking that there ought to have been a discount for that one. “We take each investigation on its merits,” Butcher says coolly. “And if you have the right pet insurance, then you can claim these costs back.”
One of the most striking things about his investigations is how members of the public respond. Butcher goes door-to-door and, more often than not, they let him search their cellars and sheds. I wonder if that’s because he wears a fleece with a UKPD logo on it. UKPD stands for United Kingdom Pet Detectives, but it sounds a bit like LAPD and I think of hard-bitten cops eating doughnuts during a stake-out. I wonder what Butcher and Molly snack on during a stake-out? Choc drops? A chew toy? “The uniform establishes trust,” Butcher insists. “It shows we are serious and that often makes the difference whether people talk to you or not.”
I also wonder what effect Butcher and Molly’s obvious camaraderie has on his personal life. Butcher describes how his long-term partner, Sarah, isn’t very keen on Molly and I am struck too how, when he writes about his dog, he gives her a human voice. “There’s no cat here, Dad, let’s go,” she “says” during one search.
“It’s an intense working relationship, sure, but that’s pets for you,” Butcher says. “Molly receives thank-you cards from satisfied clients who write in the voice of their cats. We got one recently saying, ‘Molly, it’s a year since you rescued me. Thank you. I will never forget you.’ ”
Business is booming for UKPD. Not only because pets wander off or get trapped in sheds, but also because the increasing popularity of high-value breeds makes some pets obvious targets for thieves. In one very impressive investigation Butcher traces a dog stolen in west London through painstaking detective work. The thieves also stole the dog owner’s car. The car contained very little petrol. Butcher questions local petrol stations, one of which reports a recent “pump and run”. CCTV gives him a numberplate and the car is traced to a pound. Inside the car, discarded under the driver’s seat, is a parking ticket with an address. “I got Buffy back through an intermediary, no questions asked. A really good day in the office,” he says.
I mention my cat, Pip. It’s become a more complex case. I’ve seen him strolling through the neighbourhood and asleep on a neighbour’s sofa. I have even stroked him while he sits on a car roof. He’s not missing. He has just moved on. “Sometimes cats just prefer someone else,” Butcher says, a tad brutally. “Not a case for us.”
Molly the Pet Detective Dog by Colin Butcher is out in paperback on October 31
