Duty Dogs in the news!
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Duty Dogs in the news! 〰️
Trained Labrador offers young woman peace of mind — March 9th 2025
ROCK SPRINGS — A Western Wyoming Community College student finally has peace of mind after getting her diabetes alert dog.
After nearly two years of waiting, Green River resident Elena Barrera was finally paired with Storm, a strong, obedient black Labrador retriever. He is a professionally trained therapy dog from Duty Dogs in Cody.
No one should be fooled by his name, though. Barrera describes him as a very calm dog.“He acts like an old Lab, but he’s still a very young dog,” Barrera said. “He loves toys. He will carry them around the house, but he won’t chew them up and make a mess. He’s very mellow.”
Storm gets along with other animals, including Nova, the family pet and her grandparents’ dog. Barrera noted he can play with other dogs for a while, but he is “always alert and doing his job.”
“It’s a happy medium,” she said. “He knows when to let loose and when I need his attention.”
Storm is always ready for a car ride, too.
GREEN RIVER – Therapy canines are making a difference in the way law enforcement serves communities.
Buddy joined the Green River Police Department in June of 2021. At that time, he was six months old and required additional training.
GRPD Juvenile Detective Martha Holzgrafe is Buddy’s handler. “I continued to work with Buddy to prepare him for his final evaluations,” said Holzgrafe.
In November of 2021, Buddy and Martha traveled to Columbus, Ohio where they attended the only Law Enforcement K9 Therapy School in the United States. During that time, Buddy completed and achieved his full Therapy Dog Certification, his ACK Canine Good Citizen and his AKC Urban Canine Good Citizen. Buddy started working in his certified therapy role in November of 2021. Buddy came from Duty Dogs in Cody, Wyoming. His trainers Jeremy and Alicia Becker have been breeding pure breed English labradors since 2013. Initially, they specialized in training diabetes alert dogs but they have since branched out into training additional service animals.
“Buddy and I are excited to be a part of the Duty Dogs family,” Holzgrafe stated.
GREEN RIVER — The Green River City Council unanimously authorized the Green River Police Department (GRPD) to seek a children’s trust fund grant for a therapy canine program during their meeting Tuesday night.
GRPD Juvenile Detective Martha Holzgrafe identified programs in other states that utilize a therapy canine to assists victims during interviews and later court testimony and decided she wanted to initiate a program here in Green River. This therapy K9 program will be the first program in Wyoming.
Ninety percent of Detective Holzgrafe’s caseload involves kids who are either a victim, witness, or suspect to a crime, she said. When interviewing children, the kids disclose traumatic events. Nationwide, therapy K9s have been increasingly used during these forensic interviews.
What do diabetes, service dogs and preparing youth for life skills have in common?
Say hello to Duty Dogs, the perfect scenario to monitor a disease and build a business that teaches home-schooled children the value of hard work.
“I have been praying for a way to help our kids learn work ethic,” Jeremy Becker said recently.While living near Fresno, Calif., Jeremy and Alicia Becker heard words no parent wants to hear.
Their son Wyatt, then 4, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
Now 11, Wyatt is in the thick of it, training service dogs along with his siblings Hannah, 16, Jedidiah, 9, Jubilee, 7, Michael, 5, and Benjamin, 3.
Diabetes Alert Dogs DADs Save Lives — Sierra News Online May 15th 2014
OAKHURST – Six kids and a bunch of dogs: one might think that’s a recipe for a happy sort of chaos, and it is. For the Becker family, it’s also the business plan for the entrepreneurial adventure of a lifetime, or even generations.
Jeremy and Alicia Becker, together with their half-dozen children who range in age from two to fifteen, have embarked on a mission to breed and train Diabetes Alert Dogs (DADs).
“Our specially-trained diabetes alert dogs can detect the scent of a diabetic who is experiencing the chemical change of falling blood sugar,” explains Jeremy, referring to the scent of saliva on diabetic patients. The dogs are also trained to alert their person when this change occurs, so the diabetic can “correct” their “low” before it becomes a problem.
“Big pharmaceutical companies are spending big money to try to determine this smell. Yet it just comes naturally to man’s best friend.”
DADS All the kids with all three dogs on ridge - photo by Virginia LazarThe family’s oldest son, Wyatt, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) when he was just four years old.