By APB Team American Police Beat
A dog in Fort Worth, Texas, has found a new purpose in life as a drug-sniffing police K-9 for the Fort Worth Police Department — a transformation that took place just months after the pup was rescued from the city's shelter.
“If you talk to me in five years, I guarantee you we're going to have kilos of records to reflect his service to the city,” Sergeant Charles Hubbard of the Fort Worth Police Department told Fox News Digital.
The story of the department's latest K-9 begins at the Fort Worth Animal Control's Chuck & Brenda Silcox Animal Care Adoption Center.
“I asked them, ‘Do you have any high-energy dogs?' Just kind of as a joke,” Fort Worth Officer Kristopher Thompson told KWTX-TV.
Thompson says “Rock,” an 18-month-old German shepherd mix, quickly passed the test to go from shelter dog to K-9 narcotics officer. “He can alert to heroin, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, powder cocaine and marijuana,” he shares. “It's been very valuable in our fight against the fentanyl crisis.”
Hubbard says that Rock has played a big role in the department's narcotics detection operations team, which has taken hundreds of thousands of pills off the streets.
“I'm talking 20,000, 100,000, 500,000 pills off the street before they ever get out into our community,” Hubbard says of the role narcotics detection K-9s play in law enforcement.
The K-9's journey to the Fort Worth Police Department is even more impressive, considering that just last summer, then-six-month-old Rock was found wandering around the city with his sister. The dogs were brought to the adoption center, where shelter superintendent Anastasia Ramsey recognized that the two pups were special.
“We took them out in the yard, and we did some tennis ball exercises where we tossed the ball to see if they had any interest,” she says.
Ramsey adds that she and her team tossed the dogs treats to see if they were able to catch on quickly. “Rock passed with flying colors,” she says. “He just blew everything out of the water.”
Rock's sister, Jade, while just as smart, turned out to have a softer personality. She was placed as a school resource K-9.
Rock isn't the first and shouldn't be the last shelter rescue dogs for Fort Worth police. The unit has six K-9s, and three of them are shelter rescues.
“Many people don't realize there are high-quality dogs that have been given up on or are abandoned in these shelters,” Hubbard says.
Most K-9s cost about $11,000, but that wasn't the case with Rock.
“Because he was from Fort Worth and already in the Fort Worth system, he was free to us,” Thompson says. “We're always going to look at shelters first because we think there's so many good dogs at shelters. I was just floored when I walked into our shelter and saw the number of Siberian huskies, purebred boxer dogs and beautiful German shepherd puppies.”
For Rock, it's a win–win situation with an especially fortunate turn of events for the crime-fighting hound.
“I've got to think that Rock thinks he's won the lottery,” Thompson says.
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