He gave drug dealers a ruff time.
A Border Patrol dog named Milan is retiring after an impressive career where he stopped more than 400 pounds of illegal drugs from entering the US.
The 8-year-old German Shepherd sniffed out more than 122 pounds of marijuana, 253 pounds of cocaine, 45 pounds of ecstasy and 5 pounds of meth at the ports of Miami during his six-year career.
“He’s a wild dog,” Michael Schwank, his handler with US Customs and Border Protection, told The Post.
“All he wanted to do was work.”
Schwank, who called Milan his work partner, said the duo found contraband on a quasi-daily basis, from small amounts of coke and ecstasy to gallons of drugs filled with liquid coke and meth.
“He worked long days in the hot sun and he did his job very well,” Robert Misseri, co-founder of Paws of War, the Long Island-based organization helping to find Milan a new home, told The Post.
“He was a highly respected canine.”
Milan had to retire from USCBP when he started showing signs of intervertebral disc disease, a common condition in dogs where one or more of the discs between vertebrae in the spine become damaged. Schwank couldn’t adopt Milan, he said, because he’s got his hands full with two young children at home.
“It was very difficult to say goodbye. if I was in under different circumstances, I would definitely keep him. It choked me up,” he said.
Paws of War, who pairs animals with veterans and first responders, is paying for Milan’s medical bills, now and in the future. It’s trying to find him a home with a current or former canine handler.
“These dogs don’t know anything other than work,” said Misseri. “What he thinks his play is searching for drugs. The person that we want him to wind up with will role play with him. We have a whole kit of what they use when they train, so something will smell like a certain type of drug.”
Milan’s training alone, at the USCBP’s Canine Center in El Paso, took two years.
“These dogs sacrifice their entire lives to doing good,” said Misseri. “I don’t think anyone will know the true scale of what he’s done in terms of lives saved, by intercepting these dangerous drugs. These dogs can sniff things out that, to this day, we don’t have the technology that surpasses their scent.”
Customs and Border Protection Officer Program Manager Alexander Hernandez called Schwank and Milan “an incredible team” and “laser-focused” on protecting our nation’s borders.
Border Patrol started using dogs in 1986, amid a surging number of illegal migrants and drugs at the border.
Today, the agency has more than 530 enforcement canine teams deployed throughout the country.
