RAISING A SEARCH & RESCUE PUPPY
YOU'RE INVITED BEHIND THE SCENES
Watch the journey of two puppies who were selected to become certified human remains detection dogs.
Get an inside look at how their trainers made decisions, addressed challenges, and laid the foundations for their puppy’s success.
"PUPPIES ARE A CRAP SHOOT"
You’ll hear even the most experienced trainers tell you this. And it’s true...sort of.
When you pick a puppy to be your next search dog you research different breeds and select a dog from a pedigree with proven health and performance.
But that's all BEFORE you bring your puppy home.
Once you get your puppy home—then what do you do to ensure their success?
Follow two handlers in their journey to train their next
search & rescue K9 partner
Jo and Kathleen, each with decades of experience and multiple certified search dogs, are sharing what they did to give their puppies the best chance of success.
You’ll get to watch our weekly puppy training and listen in on conversations as we discovered each puppy's unique personality and navigated the different challenges that came up.
Come join us behind the scenes
You'll get access to videos from our weekly training sessions and you can bet we shared the good, the bad, and the ugly. You'll also get to listen to replays of our monthly training chats where we reflected on how our training was going and brainstormed our next steps.
WEEKLY TRAINING VIDEOS
Watch each handler and their puppy during real training sessions.
Learn why the trainers made the choices they did and how they plan on moving forward with their puppy.
You'll follow each puppy's training progress and watch their trainers work through different challenges.
MONTHLY TRAINING CHATS
Listen to replays from our monthly chats as we swap training tales and brainstorm our next steps.
We discusses the latest research and training techniques and how we can apply them to our puppies.
You'll follow along we create individualized training programs (and share stories of our puppy adventures!)
PUPPY QUESTIONS?
Get more ideas for your own puppy training!
Learn more about specific training decisions Jo and Kathleen made with their pups and hear advice they shared with other handlers for their puppies.
You'll get new training ideas and expand your puppy training skills.
Join Us Behind the Scenes
Follow the journey as we raised our puppies with the goal of becoming certified search dogs!
✔️ Videos of each puppy's weekly training sessions
✔️ Insights from the trainers on training plan decisions
✔️ Candid discussions on troubleshooting training challenges
Frequently Asked Questions
Here’s everything you need to know about The Puppy Project and how you'll get to follow along as these puppies train to become certified search dogs.
You are welcome to join us whether you currently have a puppy, are thinking of getting one, are supporting a teammate with a new puppy, or are simply curious what the process of training a puppy looks like for us.
The Puppy Project is your opportunity to learn more about developing strong foundations that are critical to the ultimate success of a search dog.
This is the real exciting part of The Puppy Project!
We believe that cookie cutter training won't get you very far and that it's critical to train the dog in front of you.
Plus, it's our responsibilities as trainers to always be striving to improve the clarity and efficiency of our training.
While we’ll be pulling from our experience with previous dogs, you’ll be following along as we create a unique plan designed specifically for our new puppies.
Jo and Kathleen have spent hours talking about puppies, discussing training strategies, and developing plans for how they're going to raise these new puppies.
During the chat replays you will get additional insights and hear questions from other handlers.
If you still have questions, email us at [email protected].
The Puppy Project includes replays from Jo & Kathleen's monthly chats where we talked all things puppy and puppy training.
We also answered questions presented by other handlers raising their own puppies so you'll get a lot of ideas.
If you want additional support with your puppy, email us at [email protected].
When you bring a new puppy home, so much of the initial work is about getting to know your puppy—their unique personality. You're giving them different experiences to help you learn more about them so you can create a training plan that is customized to them.
Especially in the early months, what we do with our puppies is the very similiar no matter what discipline they being trained for. The variation usually comes later when we introduce target odor.
If you're interested in broading your overall training tool box, we invite you to join us.
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME PUPPY TRAINING?
Get your behind the scenes access to watch how these puppies were trained to become certified search dogs.
Follow along as two trainers start their puppies from 8 weeks with goal of certification.