While the retiree, named Kutt, was busy working right up to the end of their contract and so could not appear on AK, Kutt's replacement, a puppy named Zorro, was on-site ahead of attending police dog training school.

PPA senior dog handler Silvar Rattas told AK that Zorro, who is just coming up to two months old, the standard age for starting training, would: "Take a basic course at the Estonian Defense Academy (Kaitseväe Akadeemia) service dog training center, and will start to learn a working dog's tasks, namely tracking, searching for individuals in the forest etc."

"On the broader scale, the idea now is to transform Zorro into a search dog where needed. We can start searches for lost or missing people," Anti Adoson, the dog manager at the PPA's Kuressaare station added.

Adoson became Zorro's handler on Monday as well, saying that "We will live together, 'study' together, exercise and eat together."

Zorro also got acquainted, as dogs will do, with a future colleague in Maru, a PPA dog who has been serving with the force on Saaremaa for seven years now.

The PPA has close to 70 working dogs nationwide and have an average active career length of around eight years, sometimes working for as long as a decade.

The original AK slot (in Estonian) is here.

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