K9 dog goes on retirement
He was always top-of-the-range and he always found the person he was looking for
Boelie, who worked with Warrant Officer Jacques Meyer of the Ladysmith K9 Unit for eight years, has retired. A journalist from the Ladysmith Gazette visited them on the day that Boelie officially retired.
Boelie was the first search and rescue dog in Ladysmith when he started working here in 2006. Boelie was born in Cape Town in 2004 and was donated to the K9 Dog School in Pretoria.
Both Boelie and WO Meyer were born in April, so there is an extra special connection between the two of them.
When Boelie was two years old, he was old enough to go to work. Both WO Meyer and Boelie had to go for a five-month training course in Pretoria in order to work as search and rescue officers.
Together, they worked on a lot of cases, most of which were drownings. They also looked for missing persons and conducted area searches to locate dead bodies.
WO Meyer says that, “He was an excellent dog. He was always top-of-the-range and he always found the person he was looking for. Now that he is older, the work is very strenuous on him, so it is better for him to retire. After eight years of hard work, he can now relax.”
WO Meyer has a new dog he will be working with, and is happy that Boelie can now take a break from the hard work.
