(PUNTA GORDA) The latest addition to the Sheriff’s Office’s K9 Unit arrived on Thursday when officials from DeSoto Correctional Institute (DCI) donated a bloodhound from its kennels to CCSO.
With the agency’s current bloodhound about to retire, Sergeant Duane Tucker began looking around to find a replacement. But the prices that he was finding for dogs was out of CCSO’s budget range. When he checked with DCI to see if any of their dogs were for sale, he found that DCI had recently bred their adult bloodhounds and might have a young, untrained dog available.
On Wednesday Tucker and DFC John Mills went to DCI to check out the 9 month old. “He had good energy and definitely wanted to track,” Tucker said. So the deal was struck.
On Thursday Tucker and Mills met with DCI’s Assistant Warden Patrick Murphy to take delivery of the black and brown hound. According to two of DCI’s handlers Officer C. Evans and Sergeant C. Jacobs, the young dog comes from good stock. His uncle Max was the bloodhound who in November 2009 located Jamey Mosch, a hunter lost for several days in the Everglades.
Even though he had been named while at DCI, the new dog has been re-named “Binks” by Mills. Mills will be training Binks, while also working his current dog Boba.