Experience

Laura has been training and working dogs for more than 30 years. Though she has been training dogs professionally since 1996, she went into business for herself in 2002 with LJT Training for behavior consultation and training. Over the years, she has trained mobility, hearing, and therapeutic assistance dogs as a part of her own business as well as with volunteer organizations. In addition to training, she has managed a large kennel (75+ runs) as well as a doggie daycare. More recently, she has been developing protocols adapted for training scent detection dogs for wildlife and plant identification as well as diabetes assistance.

Laura has been tracking pets since 2002. She brings with her more than 15 years of search and rescue (SAR) experience and hundreds of missions working area search, cadaver and trailing dogs. She has trained and worked three tracking dogs and is also a K9 instructor for Law Enforcement Training Specialists (LETS). She travels nationally as an instructor in this role. She certifies her own missing persons detection dogs annually with LETS and other National and State SAR certifying bodies. Laura has received numerous award and accolades for her role in missing persons and pet cases including three Governor's Awards in Maryland. She has also received awards from the United States Police Canine Association, Baltimore County Police, Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. and others.

Laura's experience and passion for training and working search dogs has led her to volunteer countless hours finding missing pets across the Mid-Atlantic States. She has made a study of lost pet behavior characteristics and applies principles used in human search management to guide search operations for pet detection. Laura is one of the first Missing Animal Response (MAR) canine pet tracking instructors and is also recognized as one of the first to apply SAR techniques to missing pet detection as well as use a trained SAR tracking dog for this purpose.

Laura has been involved in hundreds of successes and estimates that in about 70-80 percent of her cases, the missing pet has been found. She attributes this to the hard work and persistence of the pet owner, and contributes through both consultation and tracking. According to Laura, only a relatively small number of her cases (10-20 percent) results in a walk-up find. But her tracking dogs have been very successful in confirming or disconfirming sightings, finding direction of travel, and also pin-pointing areas for more detailed search.