Rescued puppy now rescues others.

I was looking for a dog, I swore after having 3 puppies, that I would not get another puppy. I searched on petfinder.com for months and applied to adopt several dogs with no luck. I was either too busy for the adoption agency to consider me or I didn't have the money they were asking for the adoption fees. After weeks of driving around to the local shelters, many many emails and applications, I finally found that a local shelter had a litter of puppies coming up for adoption. I emailed them right away and got my application in and was very excited about the prospect of getting another dog, even if it was going to be a puppy. I contacted my local search and rescue team, and talked with Bren Richards. I asked her about joining the team and told her about the litter of puppies and asked her if she would be willing to meet me to help pick one out that I could train for search and rescue, she agreed.

Adoption day came and their were 11 puppies to choose from. This litter of puppies and some other dogs were rescued from a pet hoarder. Brenda and I went through 8 of the puppies and narrowed it down to two, a boy and a girl. I had no preference one way or the other, but the boy showed a little less hesitation and we decided that he would be less work ti train than his sister. We filled out all of the paperwork for the adoption and learned that the puppies temporary name was Mark and that in addition he had a birthday almost exactly the same as my fathers(Mark happens to be my fathers name).

Storm came home with me that day and the next day we were out at our first training with Valley Search and Rescue. Storm and I trained, sometimes as much as four times a week some weeks for almost a year, working towards our state certification. We had our training ups and downs and never having trained a dog for this before, I certainly had my doubts at times if we would ever get certified.

We took most of this summer off due to the heat and people being on vacation, but when we came back, something just clicked with Storm. He was just on it finding people and giving his alert without hesitation. At that point I decided that I would attempt to schedule Storm and I to take our certification test.

This weekend, the culmination of almost a year of training, Storm and I passed our state certification test and became a certified K9 Search and Rescue team.