Mourning a mate and partner

Kerry McCloud once faced a desperate illegal user who lunged at him with a screwdriver to escape arrest. But that was a move always destined to fail, with McCloud’s loyal partner, Police Dog Max, on the scene.

Max had led his handler on an hours-long search for the offender before he found him hiding in a Dover Gardens backyard. With McCloud only two metres from a certain stabbing injury, or even death, Max pounced.

“Max apprehended him just in the inner-thigh,” recalls McCloud. “And this chap was either on drugs, or whatever – he tried to climb a fence still with the dog hanging off of him. It was a very nasty situation.”

In his time, Max, a 40kg German shepherd, scored many great victories, which live on in McCloud’s memory. In 1999, the pair joined a throng of police in a massive manhunt for two murderers who had escaped from Mobilong Prison.

Despite the efforts of STAR Division, a helicopter crew, and a number of police patrols, the escapees seemed able to stay out of reach. But their elusiveness only lasted until McCloud took Max to search slowly along the banks of the Murray at Mypolonga.

Senior Constable Kerry McCloud with Police Dog Max in the 1990s

Suddenly, a slight twitch of Max’s nose drew McCloud’s attention. With complete faith in his partner, McCloud decided to “let the dog do what he was doing and just see what would happen”. “This area had a large number of willow trees between us and the water,” he says. “He went round a corner and, within seconds, located them (the escapees) hiding in the willows. They had been there since early morning.”

And, in one of his earliest successes, Max found an armed hold-up man, who had robbed the Rosewater post office in 1993. After he fled from the robbery scene, he found his way into a Cheltenham backyard, where he manipulated the lock on a shed door.

But the robber somehow left the lock looking as if it had not been touched; and the resident insisted no one had entered his yard. Max, who kept scratching at the shed door, insisted otherwise.

So, McCloud opened the door, walked into pitch black darkness, and found the offender hiding under machinery covered by a tarpaulin.

Max was just 18 months old when, in the early ’90s, he and McCloud began what would become a six-and-a-half-year working partnership. Like other dog handlers, McCloud came to spend practically all his time with Max, both at work and at home.

And just as most handlers’ entire families come to love the police dogs that live as pets at home, so, too, did the McCloud family come to adore Max. But no one loved him more than McCloud himself.

He even regarded himself as closer to Max than the human members of his family. “You’re talking about eight hours working together in the same car,” says McCloud, “looking after, caring for, and taking the dog to the vet.

“My strongest memories are those of Mobilong and the armed hold-up offender but, probably more than that, was the closeness; the fact that the animal required nothing more than loyalty.

“And I remember the loyalty of the dog: if I was grumpy one day, he didn’t hold it against me the next day.”

All that Max wanted was to be at work, tracking evasive offenders for his master. He even preferred, by far, to be on the beat than at home. Whenever he heard the phone ring, Max hoped it meant recall to duty, and cried out accordingly.

Says McCloud: “He knew when I was getting changed to go to work, and he would start to cry because he knew he was going to go, too.

“And, at home, if you walked past the side of the house, you’d think he was knocking down the house with his tail – just out of the joy of seeing you. He was always happy to see you, and just wanted to be with you.”

The pair’s working partnership carried on until 2000, when Max had to retire aged eight, and McCloud left the Dog Operations Unit. Max’s future then lay in McCloud’s hands: he could leave him to face euthanasia, or keep him as that deeply loved member of the family.

McCloud needed no time to think. Max, he knew instantly, would go home with him, to live out his well-earned retirement. But Max would still have preferred to be off to work in the car each day. And staying home as McCloud went off to his new post at the Communications Centre frustrated him.

As a former police dog, he looked to get out, simply to find something to do. So he made the occasional escape from home. Out of his backyard, he sometimes dragged his heavy frame over 2m high fences, and went to explore.

But no one’s love for Max diminished, and life went on routinely – until mid-2003. Max suffered a stroke, which left him near totally deaf, and perilously close to blindness in his left eye. Evidence of paralysis down his left side also emerged through a vet examination.

“That took a lot of his independence away,” says McCloud. “I found it very difficult to deal with. If he walked out, he would just want to get up and run to me, even though he couldn’t quite make it.”

Then, in early December last, Max escaped again. From his Hawthorndene home, he made it to the Belair National Park. When McCloud recovered him, he seemed only to have a limp, but went into “a major decline” over the next 24 hours.

“That was the hardest thing,” says McCloud. “His back end really gave out. He lost control as far as his leg movement. He would walk along and, the next minute, he’d fall over. That was horrific.”

Three days later, McCloud left home around dawn for dayshift on Sunday, December 7. Some way into the shift, his wife called to tell him Max had died. McCloud had last seen him the previous night as he put him to bed in his kennel.

“There was a film over the eye,” says McCloud, “almost as if he was crying. I knew that was the last night. I just knew he wasn’t going to be there in the morning. As soon as someone said: ‘Oh, your wife’s on the phone’, I thought: ‘That’s what it is’.

“I went straight home and dug a grave for him. That allowed me to say my goodbyes. I had this photograph of him next to my bed and just put it down on top of him. I said: ‘I’ve had this next to me for the last five years – now you take it with you’.

“The emotion just poured out when I was burying him, particularly when I was actually laying him down.”

In honour of his beloved Max, McCloud built a memorial out of five Hebel blocks over his backyard grave. On top of one of the blocks sits his food bowl and choker chain, both secured down by screws.

McCloud now reflects on his working partnership with Max as “the greatest experience” he could have imagined. “Because,” he says, “when things got tough and rough for me, I knew I could trust and rely on the loyalty of my partner, Police Dog Max.”