Welcome to Public Safety Dogs, Inc. We began this endeavor in 2003 after our lives were changed by a missing child. While we did not know Jennifer Short personally, her disappearance hit close to home for us because she was growing up in the same rural Virginia neighborhood where Mike spent a lot of his childhood. Couple that with the fact that we both have children of our own and we felt we had to do something to help.

Our personal mission began with helping to find missing children and we started training dogs in scent discrimination to help. Any one who is thirty or older knows how much the world has changed since we were children. With the tragic deaths at schools such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, we realized that children's safety issues extended beyond missing children and we introduced the school resource dog. School resource dogs are well-socialized dogs that are trained to locate guns and drugs. They are placed with school resource officers throughout the country and used during the school year to help keep guns and drugs out of our schools. During the summer, when schools are not in session, these dogs can be used on the streets. We even envision school resource dogs being used at our colleges and universities to help keep our children safe after they leave home. Over the years we have trained dogs that aid law enforcement in all sorts of ways: from finding missing people, to cadaver recover, to criminal apprehension, school safety, contraband detection and more!

We are proud of the fact that in five short years and with very little money, we have donated 19 dogs to law enforcement agencies across the country. These dogs have saved lives, located bodies, and caught numerous criminal suspects.

Photo:

The image above is of Gracie and her handler Corporal Rik Vaughn of the Henry County, Virginia Sheriff's Office. Gracie was our very first dog provided to law enforcement!