K-9 Gunny

Gunny was purchased from Compatible Canine Services, out of Brookline, MA for $5,000.00. Gunny is male (not neutered) approximately 20 months old, and sable in color. He weighs in at approximately 70 pounds.


Gunny came with some basic obedience training, bite work, and retrieval skills. He is guaranteed to pass Canine Patrol and Narcotics and to be free of any genetic health defects for one year.

Gunny and Ofc. Walters attended and passed the Boston Patrol Canine School. They graduated on December 18, 2009. The school was 14 weeks long, Monday through Friday. Currently they are certified as a K9 team for in the following areas:

  • Building Searches
  • Tracking, Evidence Recovery
  • Obedience
  • Apprehension
    • Long bite
    • Vehicle deployment
    • Deployment with gun fire
    • Outing with verbal commands

The team is working towards being certified in USPCA, PB1, and IPWDA.  These certifications are similar to Boston PD certifications, but the more certifications the K9 team has, the better credibility the team will have testifying in court. With the completion of the Patrol school, K9 teams are 70% to 80% proficient. Ofc. Walters and Gunny must train daily to maintain and increase the proficiency level. The skills learned are perishable for both Gunny and Ofc. Walters. They train a minimum of 30 minutes each day. It takes approximately one year to be fully trained, if the daily training is continued. To assist with this, Ofc. Walters and Gunny train with Boston Canine twice a month. This allows the K9 instructor to continually evaluate the K9 team and work on any areas in need of improvement. Training locations are in Massachusetts, in the following towns: Danvers, Arlington, Chelsea, Long Island (in Boston), Jamaica Plain, Wilmington, Bellingham, New Bedford, and Dartmouth. The use of different places challenges the K9 team with different environments.

Types of places were old schools, Brigham Ice Cream Factory, Suffolk County Training Building, office buildings, farm fields, woods, swamps, and industrial parks. They trained during all weather conditions, day and night.

Ofc. Walters also learned how to decoy police dogs. By learning to decoy a dog, the handler gets an appreciation of how a real bite from a dog feels and how the dogs target and hold. Statistically, handlers that decoy dogs have a lower bite ratio. They use bite sleeves and bite suits. The dogs were taught to target by themselves where the apprehension would take place.

As of January 4th, the K9 team has done three tracks. At Cinemagic, Gunny tracked the locations of the get away car, and the place were the suspect laid in the snow, waiting for the employees to come out. On the last track, Gunny located the victim’s cell phone that had been taken at the robbery and later discarded.