On December 23, a young boy went missing in Korpilahti, Central Finland, located about 38 kilometers south of Jyväskylä. A police dog patrol was called to the scene to help with the search.
They called it a Christmas miracle, and it was.
On the night before Christmas Eve, at ten o’clock in the evening, the Emergency Response Center gave the police a report of a missing person in Korpilahti, Central Finland.
The missing person was a young boy of primary school age. The boy was last seen in the backyard at around seven in the evening.
Heavy snow had covered the child’s tracks, but they seemed to have gone toward the center of Korpilahti. The relatives had searched nearby until they thought it best to alert the authorities to join the search.
The police department of Central Finland arrived and was joined by a dog patrol from Jyväskylä.
While the other patrols searched the city center, the dog patrol searched the area around the house with the help of a police dog, a Belgian Malinois named Kuha.
The patrol was informed by relatives that a snowplow had visited the street around eight in the evening. A large pile of snow could be seen at the end of the street.
In the back of the pile were snow caves made by children, and the dog patrol carefully inspected the pile. When Kuha didn’t react to anything out of the ordinary, and the pile was impossible to inspect by hand, the patrol decided to concentrate their search in the surrounding area.
After about an hour of walking, the dog patrol returned to the car. The route took them past the aforementioned snow pile.
The handler let Kuha sniff the pile again.
Suddenly, Kuha froze and refused to go any further.
There were some twigs peeking through the snow, which Kuha sniffed with interest.
The dog patroller started to tear up the twigs and Kuha, excited, started to dig in the snow pile.
However, the snow was so hard that the dog patrolman went to the nearby house to get a shovel.
Meanwhile, Kuha kept digging with his paw and after a while, he came across the bottom of a shoe. It was already Christmas Eve, half past midnight.
All the nearby police officers rushed to the scene and started digging furiously. After what seemed like a long time, but was in fact only a short time, the child’s face was found.
The boy was initially completely unresponsive to treatment, but slowly began to wake up and was able to talk to the ambulance that arrived on the scene.
“The happy ending of this mission is the sum of many factors,” The Police Dog Association noted in a post shared on Facebook. “At the heart of it all is a well-trained police dog and the dog patrol’s persistent groundwork.”
The boy had been playing in a snow cave he had built when a new load of snow brought in by a plow collapsed the cave.
He was covered with 1 to 1.5 meters of snow. Fortunately, a small air pocket had been left in the snow.
“The handler has spent hundreds of hours training Kuha, and success in a task like this is the best reward for his efforts,” the association noted.
“In addition,” according to the association, “the experienced handler’s awareness that human scent slowly rises to the surface in the snow led him to let the dog sniff the pile again. Finally, the patrol’s confidence in the dog has started the rescue.”
No one wants to think about what would have happened if the child had not been found so quickly.
Photograph on the cover: UNSPLASH
