Otter trained in water search rescue has 6 confirmed finds

Typically, it's dogs who are being used by law enforcement when it comes to evidence detection and searches for people. Now in select cases in Florida, there's hope from another more aquatic animal. I'm sure you can't guess what it is. Aria Circa shows us. Meet Splash, an Asian small-clawed otter with a job few animals in the world can do. Trained for underwater human remains and evidence detection, Splash works with Peace River Search and Rescue, the only organization in the world training otters for this type of mission. So we use the dog first, and the dog stays with us and does the alert, tells us where the area is, and then we'll come back and get in our dive gear, load up the otter, and then we'll go back out and dive it and find the evidence or whatever it is we're looking for down there. So he goes down there, finds it, he comes back and tells us, and then he takes us back down. Splash has been deployed 27 times nationwide with six confirmed finds. His initial scent training took about two to three months, and then after that it was all conditioning in the environment, learning how to deploy from the boat, learning how to from the shoreline, whether I was in the water with him or I was just not going to go in the water with him and deploy him from the shoreline. This week he was in Pensacola assisting in the search for 37-year-old Robin Whitmere. Police searched near the Mahogany Mill boat ramp after receiving a lead. Well, anytime investigators get a lead or any kind of information that points us in a certain direction, we're going to go check that out. That's what they're doing out here today is checking on that information. A canine did alert in the area, but investigators say it wasn't strong enough to deploy Splash into the water. There was some indication there, but not enough to put the otter to work, so we kind of kind of wish that that would have happened, but there'll be some more times. That's right. Splash may not got wet, but the police in Pensacola later said that the missing woman was found safe in a different location. Thankful.