“Splash”, A Search And Rescue Otter, Made A Splash At Martin County Sheriff’s Office

This is Splash. Hi Splash, you okay? And he is an Asian small clawed otter that we are training in human remains detection and he's part of the dive team. He's got four successes so far. I think a fifth one's coming because I think they've identified it. But he's been over 20 missions so far. He's just getting started this year. So I'm literally out almost every week with him somewhere working on a case. So what I did when we decided to make him operational I emailed several detective friends that I work with here in Florida and some at FDLE and I said, you know, Splash needs to get out and work so if you've got any cases I can work on, you know, we're free so we'll come out and work for you. We see a lot of innovative things with technology, AI, but we're going back to the basics of using an animal to do what they do best and that's to go in their own environment and detect things that don't belong there. We had an individual who is cutting edge in the field of search and recovery. Again, Martin County, Florida is a place where there's a lot of water. We regularly have missing people within bodies of water that we can't find. So we dive, we use side scan sonar, we use our dogs to the best of their capabilities, but they're not effective enough. So we have people that we can't recover and an individual stepped into that gap and realized that he had the ability to train an otter to go into their natural habitat and find deceased individuals.