In 2024, The SPSD team members were called to 22 searches across North Carolina and our team helped in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene to support the recovery efforts in Western NC. Our K9 trainings included weekly trainings using State Parks, Camps, and other properties in NC where we have permission to train. Outside our weekly trainings, our members attended 6+ multi-day SAR exercises/seminars sponsored by NC Emergency Management and/or other SAR teams.
Not only do our dogs train regularly, our human team members do too! Our hiders, ground pounders, and dog handlers gathered in Western NC in April to spend 4 days training on CalTopo Mapping, radio communications, clue identification, and search stategies. We also teamed up this year with other K9 search teams in central NC for training. Our dogs continue to be trained in Airscent, Trailing, and HRD.
This year we received donations that helped us cover operational expenses, such as filing taxes, plus buying additional radios and Caltopo licenses.
Our extra special exciting news for 2024 is that we added 3 new puppies to our team! We happily welcomed Coco, Abby, and Rosie to the SPSD team. We were also fortunate in adding Susan to our team, with her seasoned search dogs: Birdie and Saffron.
For 2025, we look forward to continued training with our already established K9 heros, and training our new pups. We will be doing lots of puppy runaways and playing puppy ping pong! Luckily, having seasoned K9s helps our puppies learn what to do as they watch the ‘big’ dogs in action and work hard to replicate their behaviours. Look for more fun puppy training pictures to come!
What do we need in 2025? You can see our full wish list here and since we will be spaying/neutering our newest additions, we could use donations to cover the cost of those surgeries as well.
Thank you for all your interest and support in Southern Pride Search Dogs!
