Rescue
Kara Becomes First Colorado K-9 Officer
This dog is amazing!
D.G. Sciortino
08.15.17

The Colorado Mounted Rangers, Colorado’s first statewide law enforcement agency, now has another first under its belt.

They recently started their first K-9 unit with a pit bull named Kara.

K-9 Kara will be handled by Dawn Havens who has 11 years of law enforcement and volunteer experience with the Colorado Mounted Rangers, according to 9News.

Havens hopes that Kara will not only help to enforce the law but also break down stereotypes about pit bulls and hopefully challenge existing breed bans in the state.

“She is actually the first pit bull in Colorado to be working K-9 officer,” Havens told 9News. “They’re known to be extremely loyal animals, and extremely protective of people. She’s not at all mean. She’s not aggressive toward anybody. I’ve never seen any aggression towards anybody.”

According to Havens, people have an unconscious bias about dogs the same way they do about people.

“The most common misconception about pit bulls is a common misconception about dogs in general where you can look at a dog and predict how that dog is going behavior you can you have to look at each dog as an individual,” she explains.

Kara’s main objective will be to assist the Colorado Mounted Rangers in searching for narcotics in buildings and vehicles, as well as tracking down and searching for a missing person.

“She’s awesome at tracking,” Havens said.

Kara was rescued from a Canyon Lake, Texas shelter and trained by Operations Director Brad Croft of the Texas-based dog rescue and training group Universal K-9.

Croft told 9 News that pit bulls are the ideal canine candidates for law enforcement work, however, they are seldom chosen for this work. However, their high energy and drive to please their handlers is what makes them suitable for this line of work.

“Those dogs are the high, high drive dogs like Kara,” Croft said. “And, you know, they get looked over in adoption events because people see all that energy and are like ‘Whoa, that’s too much for me.’ But these dogs work really well for our program because we take that energy and focus it and use it for positive things.”

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The Animal Farm Foundation, a New York-based advocacy group, paid for Kara’s training.

“The mission of Animal Farm Foundation is to secure the equal treatment and opportunity for ‘pit bull’ dogs,” Animal Farm Foundation Executive Director Stacey Coleman said. “Denver is one of the most infamous places that still has a law that bans the dogs. Where they have the right to go in an seize somebody’s pet that has done nothing wrong, based only on what that animal looks like. It could have no behavior problem at all, no problems, a perfectly lovely family, a perfectly lovely family pet. But they can go in and seize those dogs and kill those dogs simply on what they look like.”

You can see Kara in action in the video above.

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