A dog once brought in to the Winnipeg Humane Society is now sniffing out leads as a K9 unit dog with the Winnipeg Police Service, a first for the shelter.
Jester, a Labrador retriever and border collie mix, first arrived at the Humane Society in November 2015 and left to join the police later that month.
“At the time he was very malnourished and underweight,” said Kyle Jahns, the communications coordinator at the Winnipeg Humane Society. “We had learned actually from his old home that the type of nutrition he was receiving is he was actually eating oatmeal and Kraft Dinner as part of his diet.”
Jahns said the shelter occasionally contacts police about dogs that they think they might be interested in.
Once his health improved, Jester was taken in by Sgt. Wally Antoniuk, who trained the dog for the next six months.
“Basically kind of accessing him to make sure that he would be an ideal dog for what they were looking for with the police service,” said Jahns. “What they were looking for is a dog with a high drive. They wanted a dog that when you went to go throw something that he wanted to bring that object back right away and then wanted to go retrieve it again. So he had that high drive that they were looking for.”
Jester got up to a healthy weight, went through a couple months training, then officially became part of the K9 unit in May 2017.
“I know that through his training, they would increasingly make his challenges or his training sessions more difficult and longer, and what they found with Jester is that no matter what, he was always up to the challenge and always willing to do better than what he did before,” said Jahns.
Jahns added that another important quality for K9 dogs is to be friendly and be able to work in crowds. Police also saw that in Jester.
Jahns said having a dog from the shelter become a police dog is extremely rare.
“To my understanding he is the only adopted dog that is part of the K9 unit,” he said. “For the fact that he came from the situation that he did where he was malnourished and possibly neglected to the point where he’s able to determine all of these scents and provide such a service to the community is incredible.”
Source: Winnipeg Humane Society
