{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "NewsArticle", "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/police-dogs-history-nottingham-ghent/#article", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://badiyaa.com/police-dogs-history-nottingham-ghent/", "headline": "Nottingham police paid £5 for a trained patrol dog in 1910, 11 years after Ghent started the first unit", "description": "Nottingham City Police paid £5 for a trained patrol dog in 1910, 11 years after Ghent in Belgium set up the first police dog unit.", "datePublished": "2026-11-11T09:22:00+00:00", "dateModified": "2026-11-11T09:22:00+00:00", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Badiyaa Editorial Desk", "url": "https://badiyaa.com/author/editorial-desk/" }, "publisher": { "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization", "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/#organization", "name": "Badiyaa", "url": "https://badiyaa.com/", "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/badiyaa-logo-color-600x60-1.png", "width": 600, "height": 60 }, "email": "badiyaavideo@gmail.com", "publishingPrinciples": "https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/", "correctionsPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/corrections/", "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/contact/", "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://badiyaa.com/about/#ownership", "sameAs": [ "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61595518283625", "https://www.instagram.com/badiyaa.com.ai/", "https://www.threads.net/@badiyaa.com.ai" ], "parentOrganization": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Rezilient Digital", "url": "https://www.rezilientdigital.com/", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "Fl No 3, Nav Shyam Sadan, Plot No 38, Pestom Sagar, Chembur", "addressLocality": "Mumbai", "addressRegion": "Maharashtra", "postalCode": "400089", "addressCountry": "IN" }, "sameAs": [ "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rezilientdigital" ] } }, "isAccessibleForFree": true, "inLanguage": "en-US", "wordCount": 634, "image": [ "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/day-341-west-midlands-police-dog-handlers-receive-awards-8251729393.webp", "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/day-341-west-midlands-police-dog-handlers-receive-awards-8251729393-1024x768.webp" ], "articleSection": "Pets & Animals", "keywords": "Belgian Malinois, Edwin Hautenville Richardson, Ghent, Nottingham, Police dog", "articleBody": "The first trained dog to join a regular British police force cost five pounds. In 1910 the chief constable of Nottingham City Police asked his watch committee for £5 to buy one, and on October 26 that year it arrived to help his officers on night patrol. More than a century later, police dogs are among the most photographed, and most patted, members of any force. That attention is part of the job. People who want to become dog handlers are expected to be approachable and personable, because a dog at an officer’s side reliably draws a crowd. Handlers first finish police academy and serve one to two years on patrol before they can apply to a canine unit. From dock guards to Ghent Dogs have helped keep order for centuries. The oldest record comes from St. Malo in northern France, where, in the early 1300s, dogs stood guard over the harbor’s docks and piers. By the late 1300s, bloodhounds in Scotland were known as “slough dogs”, the source of the word “sleuth” for a detective. The modern police dog was born in Belgium. In 1899 the police department in Ghent set up the first organized police dog service, an idea that spread to Austria-Hungary and Germany. German police settled on the German Shepherd as their ideal breed and opened the first dog training school in 1920 in Greenheide. Britain moved more slowly. A manager at the Hull docks in Yorkshire saw police dogs at work in Belgium and persuaded the North Eastern Railway Police to try them. Four Airedale terriers, trained by the army officer and dog expert Major Edwin Hautenville Richardson, began patrolling the docks in 1908 to stop thefts. In 1910 Richardson wrote to every chief constable in the country urging them to follow, and Nottingham’s £5 purchase from him was the result, the first such dog for a territorial force rather than a railway one. The foreign-language myth A popular belief holds that police dogs learn commands in a foreign language so that suspects cannot order them around. The real reason is simpler. Dogs trained in Europe usually learn commands in the language of the country where they were trained, and it is easier for a new handler to learn a handful of words than to retrain the dog. A shepherd trained in the Netherlands and sent to an American department may simply keep its Dutch. What police dogs do now Initial training takes between eight months and a year. Most dogs are either single-purpose, used for protection and tracking, or dual-purpose, which adds detection work. A dual-purpose dog learns to find either drugs or explosives, never both, because it has no way to tell its handler which one it has found. The breeds have shifted too. The German Shepherd is still the dog most linked with police work, but the Belgian Malinois has become the leading choice thanks to its drive, focus, agility and smaller size. Bloodhounds, Dutch Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers also serve. A quick way to picture a career: a dog that starts work at about age two after its first year in a working home and serves six to nine years retires somewhere between eight and eleven. In 2013, Nottinghamshire, the same corner of England that bought Britain’s first patrol dog, started a pension that gave retired dogs £805 over three years for vet bills, and let original handlers adopt them. Working dogs have a long record on Badiyaa, from Sergeant Stubby, the Yale stray who went to France in World War I to the Icelandic hospital dog listed as a paid staff member. More of the history is on the police dog page. Further reading Wikipedia: Police dog Illustrative image. Image: West Midlands Police, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.", "markdown": "https://badiyaa.com/police-dogs-history-nottingham-ghent.md" }