Tasmania Police K9 Breeding Centre

Origins

Until the late 2000s, Tasmania Police bought most of its working dogs from mainland breeders and interstate police programmes. The arrangement was expensive and unreliable. Dogs bred for the flat suburbs of Melbourne or Adelaide did not always adapt to Tasmanian conditions: wet scrub, steep forested gullies, buttongrass plain and long searches in cold rain. A run of failed purchases in the mid-2000s, including the Belgian Malinois importation of 2003 in which only two of twelve dogs reached operational certification, persuaded the force that it needed to breed its own.

The proposal for a dedicated breeding facility was approved in 2008, at a capital cost of $2.3 million. Its timing was poor. The global financial crisis arrived within months, and the project survived the subsequent budget reviews only narrowly, alongside the rest of the state's K9 programme. The Tasmania Police K9 Breeding Centre opened in the spring of 2009 on a semi-rural property in the Derwent Valley, a few kilometres outside New Norfolk. It sat at the end of a gravel road among paddocks and hop country, far enough from neighbours to keep the noise of fifty dogs to itself.

Its founding director was Dr Margaret Calder, a veterinarian who had spent fifteen years in companion-animal practice in Hobart before joining the police programme. Calder ran the centre from its opening. She treated it as a breeding operation first and a police facility second, an order of priorities that did not always please the uniformed officers who funded it.

The Property

The centre occupied about twenty hectares of former grazing land. The main kennel block held twenty-four runs with heated sleeping quarters, separate whelping rooms, a puppy nursery and an isolation wing for sick or newly arrived dogs. A small veterinary clinic handled routine care, screening and minor surgery. More serious cases went to Hobart.

Beyond the kennels, the paddocks had been laid out for early training and exposure. There was a gravel yard, a stretch of open grass, a timber-and-iron shed fitted out to resemble the inside of a house, a parked car and a disused trailer, and a fenced strip of bush along the creek line. Pups learnt to cross metal grates, wet clay, timber stairs and slippery lino before they were three months old, and to walk calmly past a running generator and a recording of gunfire.

The centre was not open to the public. Its gate was locked, its fences were built to keep dogs in and visitors out, and its staff were expected not to discuss individual dogs outside work.

Breeding and Bloodlines

The centre bred two breeds. German Shepherds were favoured for general-purpose, tracking and detective-support work. Belgian Malinois were bred in smaller numbers for agility, apprehension and tactical roles. Breeding stock was drawn from proven operational dogs wherever possible, supplemented by carefully screened imports from interstate and New Zealand programmes.

Kenneth Rawlings, who had bred working dogs in the Derwent Valley for twenty years before joining the centre as its senior breeder, managed the breeding programme. He kept the stud book, planned the pairings, and maintained a register of every litter and every pup the centre produced. Litters were numbered in sequence and pups were lettered by birth order within each litter. A dog's registration therefore recorded its origin in its name: Jargus-9B was the second pup of the ninth litter bred under the programme.

Every breeding dog was screened for hip and elbow dysplasia and degenerative myelopathy, and for the temperament faults that ended more careers than any physical defect: noise sensitivity, fear aggression and dependence on a single person. Rawlings argued throughout his time at the centre that temperament was more heritable than most handlers believed. His insistence on breeding only from dogs that had proved themselves in the field, rather than from dogs that looked the part, became the centre's founding principle.

From Whelping to Rokeby

Pups spent their first twelve weeks at the centre with their mothers and littermates. Kennel staff handled each pup daily from birth and recorded its weight, responses and behaviour. From four weeks, pups were introduced to new surfaces, sounds and people in graded steps. Thomas Mitchell, who supervised the kennels from 2010, kept the daily records that later became the first entry in every dog's file.

At twelve weeks, every pup sat a standardised aptitude assessment. Senior Handler Rebecca Thornton conducted most of them. It measured scent interest, retrieve drive, focus duration, recovery from a sudden startle, and willingness to engage with a stranger. Pups that scored well remained on the police track. The rest were withdrawn and offered for adoption.

From four months to a year, police-track pups lived with volunteer puppy raisers, usually off-duty police staff or approved local families in the Derwent Valley and Hobart's northern suburbs. Raisers took them into shops, onto buses and into busy streets, and brought them back to the centre every fortnight for assessment. At twelve to eighteen months, the dogs that had passed every stage were transferred to the Rokeby K9 Training Centre for formal training.

Fewer than two in three of any cohort reached Rokeby. Of those that did, a further share failed to certify there.

Rokeby and New Norfolk

The centre's relationship with Rokeby was close, necessary and frequently tense. Rokeby depended on New Norfolk for every dog it trained, and New Norfolk depended on Rokeby's results to justify its budget. The two facilities disagreed regularly about which pups should be sent forward and at what age.

The disagreements sharpened after Claire Morgenstern became Programme Director at Rokeby in December 2014. Morgenstern wanted the centre to introduce early neurological stimulation for newborn pups and to begin selecting breeding stock for genetic markers of olfactory acuity. Calder and Rawlings agreed with the aims and disliked being directed by a training facility on how to run a breeding programme. The measures were eventually adopted from 2015, after a series of meetings that both sides remembered as difficult.

Losses and Controversy

The centre's record was not unblemished. An outbreak of parvovirus in the winter of 2011 killed four pups in a single litter and closed the nursery for six weeks, and an external veterinary review found that the isolation wing had been used to house healthy dogs during a period of overcrowding. Calder accepted the findings and rebuilt the isolation procedures, though she privately blamed the budget that had left the centre short of runs.

Neighbours on the surrounding properties complained repeatedly to the Derwent Valley Council about noise in the centre's first years, particularly at feeding times and during gunfire conditioning. The complaints eased after the centre moved its noise training to the far end of the property and began inviting neighbours to its annual open morning.

The centre also carried the cost every working-dog programme carries. A large share of the dogs it bred never worked. Most of them were rehomed successfully through the centre's adoption scheme, though not all. Each year a small number of dogs with temperament faults too serious for placement had to be euthanised. Staff described those decisions as the hardest part of the job. The centre never published the number.

Notable Dogs

The centre's reputation rested on the dogs it sent into the field. Milo, a German Shepherd from one of the centre's early litters, tracked six-year-old Adele Norring across eleven kilometres of bush during the Three Pines abduction of 2016. Rika, a Malinois, made the key finds in the Sandy Bay narcotics operation of 2019.

Jargus-9B was born at the centre at 3:47 am on 10 October 2015, the second of seven pups from Rex-4A and Bella-7C. Rawlings noted his unusual focus and his indifference to the pack within days of his birth, and Mitchell's records from his sixth week describe him separating from his littermates at feeding. Thornton's twelve-week assessment placed him in the top few per cent of his cohort for scent discrimination and focus. He went to Rokeby in February 2017, at sixteen months, and was paired with Detective Karl Jenkins that November.

Character

The Tasmania Police K9 Breeding Centre was a working farm as much as a police facility: muddy in winter, dusty in summer, and loud at feeding time. Its staff were few, long-serving and protective of their dogs, and they measured their success in years rather than in single operations. Most of what they produced never made the news. The few dogs that did carried the centre's name with them.