“We get a lot of people that run from cars, run from scenes of crimes, things like that, that us as officers, as humans, would never find, but we use the dog’s nose, we use their sight, we use their hearing to try to track these suspects down,” says K-9 officer Steve Henderson. Watch him and his fellow officers in action during a K-9 training session.
Joel Rains, a CrossFit trainer and K-9 trainer, even uses CrossFit Spartanburg in South Carolina for K-9 training. The dogs become members of the CrossFit community and family members to the officers and their families, who share a close bond with their beasts.
The officers relate their stories with K-9 heroes Igor and Diezel, who gave their lives in the line of duty.
“He’d been with me longer than I’ve had my kids,” officer Nate Cantrell says of Igor. “It’s a void at home.”
To honor their fallen partners, the trainers came up with a fitting tribute: a hero workout named after each dog: K-9 Igor and K-9 Diezel.
“There’s no better way to honor those guys and what they do than just do a workout for them, and the gym just completely embraced it,” says Tal Young, owner of CrossFit Spartanburg.
12min 32sec
Additional video: We’re Buddies, published July 20, 2011.