BROOKINGS — There’s a new deputy soon to be prowling about Brookings County, and if you think you can outrun him, it isn’t happening. After all, he’s got four legs to your two.

Meet K9 Deputy Szakal, a 13-month-old Dutch Shepherd who is the newest addition to the Brookings County Sheriff’s Office. He will fill the shoes — paws? — of retired K9 Deputy Arras.

Szakal’s handler and partner, Deputy Charles Wilderson, said the K9 teams are meant to give the community a helping hand.

“K9 teams as a whole are a very good tool and benefit for departments to have,” he told the Brookings Register in a recent interview. “Community support is the biggest thing — that keeps us running.”

That support was seen in covering the roughly $13,000 cost of acquiring Szakal from a training facility near Budel in the Netherlands. Funds came from the Brookings County Commission, Sioux Valley Energy’s Operation Round Up, the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office, Volga City Council and private donations.

While Wilderson and Szakal have been together now for several months, the bonding process is really still in its formative stages. Both are taking part in months-long training offered by the South Dakota Highway Patrol and the Sioux Falls Police Department, but the real challenge is cementing their bond with each other.

“It’s long and strenuous because where these dogs come from, and the training they receive overseas, it takes a lot for these dogs to trust anybody,” Wilderson said. “I’ve had him for about three or four months now — so the bond slowly starts there. He’s gotten to the point, obviously, I can play with him. He knows who I am, he knows that I’m the boss pretty much in that situation — the alpha, I guess.”

Wilderson continued, “But really with these kinds of dogs, these working dogs, they’re not fully trusting in an individual handler until about two years is usually when those dogs are all in.”

Doing the math, that means there’s another 20 months or so to go before Szakal fully trusts Wilderson. The trust process takes longer to establish than what it would with a “normal” dog, which, Wilderson pointed out, isn’t that unusual.

“Your normal house pet isn’t put through the strenuous activities of training like we go through, (such as) detection school and patrol school,” Wilderson noted. “It takes a little bit more time for them to be able to calm down and get into that state of mind where, ‘Hey, when I’m at home, I’m at home and this is my place of just relaxing,’ and, ‘When I’m at work, I’m at work.’ Compared to a normal dog where it’s every day is play day. These dogs, sometimes it’s work, and that’s all it is to these dogs.”

The training is intense, too. When all is said and done, it will give the duo expertise in matters such as narcotics detection, apprehension, detention, tracking and evidence recovery. Then there’s the matter of what comes after the training — namely, the completion of 32 hours training monthly and testing on each skill annually by an independent judging team. Oh, and let’s not forget about normal work obligations, either.

Just reading that makes you want to take a break, doesn’t it? Fortunately, Wilderson and Szakal get their downtime, too — and that’s really the only time they have for themselves. Well, mostly so.

“When we get home and we’re not working, our lives are pretty much separate,” Wilderson said, adding that he keeps Szakal in a kennel because he has a smaller dog in the house. “(Szakal and I) go on walks, we’ll go out and play in the yard and stuff but, for the most part, if we’re not working he’s in his kennel, I’m doing my own thing, he does his.”

Szakal joins an illustrious list of K9 deputies in the sheriff’s office that goes back two decades. His immediate predecessor was Arras. Before that was Buddy. Both of them were partnered with Patrol Sgt. Manny Langstraat. The granddaddy of them all — but not literally — was Bo, who, according to Sheriff Marty Stanwick, came from a Minneapolis kennel in the early 2000s.

The K9 deputies in Brookings County have more than earned their keep over the years, with a big role in that played by Interstate 29. More than a few “finds” have been on that stretch of superhighway.

“(It’s) a decent amount just because I-29 is a pretty traveled interstate for drug trafficking … so, yeah, that one contributes a lot to a lot of the finds,” Wilderson said, adding that it’s not just in the Brookings area, either. He said he’s spoken to Sioux Falls-area troopers that are dog handlers and they, too, have similar issues.

Besides the sheriff’s office, Wilderson said K9 units are also found with the Brookings Police Department and in Moody and Deuel counties. And while the work they do is beyond reproach, it’s also one that comes with a heavy burden.

“Being a dog handler takes a lot of time and effort between training the dog and keeping up on his training,” Wilderson said. “So usually, especially with the size of our department right now, usually just about one is average for smaller departments.”

So, there you have it. Man’s best friend and, in Szakal’s case, one who’s about to more than prove that statement.

— Contact Mondell Keck at mkeck@brookingsregister.com.