By the standards of most German shepherds, Trakr enjoyed a pretty extraordinary life. A sniffer dog with a Canadian “K9” police unit, he led rescue workers to the last survivor in the rubble of Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Now Trakr will enjoy an equally extraordinary afterlife — although he died in April at the age of 16, his memory will live on in the form of five bouncy puppies which look remarkably similar to him. They should do — they are Trakr clones whose DNA matches his as closely as current science will allow.
Trakr’s owner and former police handler James Symington won a competition last year called the Golden Clone Giveway. California-based BioArts International, one of the world’s largest biotech companies offering pet cloning, said he convinced them that Trakr was the world’s most “cloneworthy” dog.
Symington beat 200 other entrants to win a free cloning of his late pet, with BioArts throwing in four additional cloned puppies for good measure. In his winning essay, Symington wrote that “once in a lifetime, a dog comes along that not only captures the hearts of all he touches, but also plays a private role in history.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Symington acted on impulse when he heard the news of the terrorist attacks. He jumped in a van with his loyal dog and drove 14 hours from his home in Halifax, Nova Scotia to Manhattan.
He arrived at Ground Zero to join the first rescue workers to gain access to the site, combing the rubble for survivors. Man and dog spent days among the dust and debris of Ground Zero. By that point, Trakr had retired from active police duty, but had lost none of his olfactory skills. They worked together overnight, concentrating on a specific pile of rubble from the north tower, the first of the skyscrapers to be hit.
Rick Cushman, a National Guardsman from Massachusetts who worked alongside Symington and his dog, said it was about 6am or 7am on Sept. 12 when Trakr suddenly caught a “live hit” — a human scent indicating a survivor under the surface. The animal’s body froze and his tale went stiff.
Trakr’s excitement alerted other rescue workers, who homed in on the area. One spotted a piece of reflective material on a jacket buried down below.
It belonged to Genelle Guzman, an office worker then aged 31. She had been on the 64th floor of the north tower when the first plane struck. She managed to get down to the 13th floor when the skyscraper collapsed.
She landed on top of a dead firefighter, her head pinned by a concrete pillar, but with an air pocket in which she could breathe. She was trapped for about 26 hours before she was discovered and pulled out.
Just before she was rescued, two police officers were also pulled from the rubble, a story retold in the Oliver Stone film World Trade Center.
Cushman has no doubts that Trakr, together with Symington, deserve credit for saving Guzman. “Oh yeah, that dog was a hero all right,” he said.
The cloning of Trakr offers Symington a happy ending to a story that was not entirely positive. When he and his dog returned to Halifax at the end of their Ground Zero mission, he was hauled before his police superiors and disciplined.
At the time of the attacks, Symington had been off work on sick leave for three months suffering from stress. The first that his bosses learned of his rescue dash to New York was when they saw him and Trakr amid the rubble on television.
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