The Backstory, Part 1

When I was 18 I was volunteering at an animal shelter near where I was living at the time in Vista, California. I don’t know exactly what made me stop in front of this chain linked kennel he was in.

The door had a number of tags and papers attached to it:

Informational sheet, with basic information about the dog in the kennel.

3 red tags:

• Aggressive towards handlers

• Aggressive towards other dogs

• Food aggression

A medical tag that said:

Parvovirus QUARANTINE

Euth List 4:40pm

So, as a very well-meaning, but very ignorant 18 year old, I of course took him home and named him Kooper, with a K for my sister Kim. I learned how to administer IV and IM medications, fluids, how to set a catheter, and all about parvovirus. I was lucky enough to live next door to a local veterinarian who helped walk me though the whole process. After he was cleared medically, and started to feel better, he became a complete nightmare. I even joked about renaming him Taz.

As a first time dog owner, of course I signed him up for local pet store weekend classes! He was actually removed from the group. I can laugh about this now, but it was extremely defeating at the time. Training a dog was clearly not as easy as I thought.

I started hiring trainers and learning as much as I could to help this dog. I knew what his fate would be if I took him back to the shelter. Aggressive, destructive, and fear-driven, that’s all I really knew about him. I started college classes in animal behavior, animal psychology, biology, diet, and animal sciences. On weekends I would take him to local trainers and when I had extinguished their skills, I moved onto one they would recommend as the trainer who taught them. It took more than a few months of training every single day for this dog to become trusting and respectful of humans.

Once that happened our work really began. We went to agility classes, and he was extremely fast and had all the energy to keep up with every dog there, but not the leg-to-body ratio to win anything. Still, he loved it… so we continued. We went to scent work classes. CGC classes, rally classes. We started search and rescue work, and that is when

I realized the skills I had learned on Kooper were able to help shelter dogs, so I volunteered. I would foster sometimes up to 12 dogs at a time, most of the time with my own funds. Training them and helping the rescue place them. That’s when I learned I really had found my passion.

Kooper has since helped countless dogs find permanent homes due to the training I would have never put the time in to get, if it hadn’t been for such an incredible and difficult dog. He truly is the core of Every Dog Matters and our soon-to. launch No Dog Left Behind campaign. Kooper passed on 12/2/22 in my lap. I had him for 16 years and he was 18 years old. He had CKD for the last 5 years of his life, but I was able to control it with an extremely specific diet.

1 month later on 1/2/22 I founded Kooper’s Legacy in his honor. In the previous year I saw such a great need for low cost services in the sweet home area, that I had started training dogs for free. I knew there had to be other animal lovers out there who would join this amazing mission with me.