Driftwood River Banks returns-with a friend

Handlers plan to start a search-and-rescue and human remains detection operation

Remember Driftwood River Banks, the dog stranded on Horseshoe Bend for months fending for himself before being rescued by local officials last summer?

He’s back. And with a new friend, the German shepherd starts a new chapter.

From the very first time the German shepherd stepped off Horseshoe Bend and came onto the rescue boat, he has been the apple of the eye of former Henderson Humane Society president Stacey McCord-Crooks. After he was rescued, Driftwood spent nearly a year at the Henderson County Humane Society. Throughout his time there, Driftwood would be let outside only to immediately start sniffing and get on the trail of something, anything.

“He’s nose to the ground the whole time he’s outside,” McCord-Crooks said

McCord-Crooks said Henderson County Animal Control Office Jake Ashby, who has some past experience with K-9 dogs, did some further training with Driftwood. What he found, according to McCord-Crooks, is that Driftwood is a natural.

“He’s a shepherd,” McCord-Crooks said. “It’s in his DNA.”

When Driftwood first came to the Humane Society, there were numerous offers to adopt him, much of that enthusiasm fueled by media and social media reports of the dog’s months-long stay on Horseshoe Bend. But McCord-Crooks at the time felt that he wasn’t ready to go to a home—he needed to time to readjust to living around people and other animals.

But those adoption attempts dwindled in the months after because McCord-Crooks knew that Driftwood still wasn’t ready to get out into the world and she wasn’t going to let him go to a home where he’d be stuck inside on a couch. A life like that, she said, would cause him depression and might even push him to flee the inside world only to end up out on his own again.

In the spring, McCord-Crooks’ time at the Humane Society came to an end. And when she left, Driftwood came with her. For a while McCord-Crooks didn’t know what her or Driftwood’s future held.

One day an old friend, Opal Zollinger, texted her from out of the blue. That led to a three-hour conversation in which Zollinger, who for many years was the executive director of SNIPZ, the low-cost spay and neuter center, talked about her new passion—working with dogs trained for human remains detection. Zollinger began training two dogs, Palmer, a Treeing Tennessee Brindle, and Judy, a German shepherd, after SNIPZ no longer had a building to work from.

The conversation sparked an idea, McCord-Crooks said. With Zollinger’s human remains detection dogs, Driftwood could fill in another piece—in fact, Driftwood could train for what’s already in his DNA, becoming a search and rescue dog.

From that conversation, McCord-Crooks and Zollinger decided to team up. With McCord-Crooks as president and Zollinger as vice president of Cheyenne’s Hope Farm Sanctuary, their goal is to assist authorities during emergency operations in locating people believed to be still alive and later those who are believed to have died.

An example of when they might be called out and how it plays out, according to Zollinger, is if it is believed a person could have drowned. Authorities might first call out the search and rescue dog, and if that dog couldn’t locate a person, then they might call the HRD dog to locate a body, Zollinger said.

Providing this service, which would be the first of its kind in Henderson County, is still a long way off, McCord-Crooks said.

Zollinger, who has taken her dogs to trainings in Alabama and in the lakes area of western Kentucky, added that it might take up to a year before both handlers and the dogs will be ready to assist at scenes.

They all need more training and need to obtain certifications and a FEMA ID number, McCord-Crooks said. Also, Cheyenne’s Hope, a nonprofit, must raise money for supplies, such as GPS collars and dog life jackets, she said. The nonprofit also needs to raise $3,000 to pay for a gastropexy procedure for Driftwood so that he doesn’t get bloated and stomach twist while out in the heat during rescue missions, McCord-Crooks said.

Even though there’s training still to be done and official partnerships with law enforcement and emergency officials have not yet been signed, it appears that Driftwood is on his way to fulfilling a prediction that McCord-Crooks made after he was rescued from Horseshoe Bend last year.

“He’s the rescued who wants to be the rescuer,” McCord-Crooks said last year.