This Otter Is Making a Splash in Police Search and Rescue Work

Meet Splash, a 2-year-old Asian small-clawed otter. He’s not your typical otter — he’s trained in scent detection and recovery work, helping Florida’s Marion County Sheriff’s Office locate missing people in the water.

Splash is the first of his kind in the world, an otter trained to find human remains in the water. His success at the job is, well, making a splash.

Florida has roughly 2,300 open cases of missing people across the state. If Splash can help locate even a few of them, it will bring relief to both law enforcement and families.

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Splash’s handler, Mike Hadsell of Peace River K9 Search and Rescue, trained him to locate and identify the scent of human remains. “So, his job is to find the human victim underwater in the low-visibility conditions where we can’t see them,” Hadsell told 10 Tampa Bay.

The work isn’t without danger — especially in Florida’s gator-filled waters. Hadsell makes sure he has spotters and sonar to keep both himself and Splash safe.

Splash the search otter. Peace River K9 Search and Rescue

When Splash isn’t working, he lives at home with Hadsell and his other pets. Sometimes he sits in Dutch the German Shepherd’s water bowl, wrestles with the family cat, and curls up in the family bed. “He sleeps with us. He likes to curl up either down by my feet or up by my head on the pillow,” Hadsell said.

Given Splash’s unique skills, Hadsell says he’s receiving requests from all over the country. “I’ve got a list now of search requests for people wanting to use ‘Splash’ all over the United States. He’s very popular with the FBI and FDLE now.”

“I expect to see a lot of otters out there,” Hadsell guessed about the future for otter search & rescue work. “I think they’ll be standard issue probably in 10 years from now.”