In 2021 a thin stray Labrador puppy turned up at the Hancock County Animal Shelter in Mississippi. He had a habit the staff could not ignore: he collected toys and rocks and dropped them at people's feet until somebody threw one. Most dogs with that much drive wear out their welcome in a kennel. This one got noticed by a handler who saw something else in it. Five years later he is the ASPCA Dog of the Year, and he has worked three of the worst disasters in recent American memory.

The Washington Post profile that ran October 11 picks up the story at the shelter.

Texas A&M Task Force 1 works with FEMA and the state of Texas. It is one of the units that gets the call when a building comes down or a river takes a town. Bormann's job was to turn a puppy's fetch obsession into a search tool. The raw material was already there.

The method is simpler than most people expect.

A dog's nose does the hard part. What it can smell under rubble, water, and ash is beyond anything a human or a machine can match in the field. In 2023 Canyon earned two certifications: one from FEMA for human remains detection and one from the International Police Work Dog Association for wilderness operations. He was certified for missing-person searches that May. Then the calls started.

Canyon's record reads like a list of the decade's worst headlines.

Bormann described his job in one sentence. "All he has to do is figure out where." The families on the other end of that sentence are the point. Pauline Boss, a University of Minnesota professor emeritus who studies grief when there is no body to bury, told the Post that dogs like Canyon provide "immense benefit" to people who would otherwise wait without an answer. A dog that finds someone ends a search. A dog that finds nothing ends it too.

Every trait that made Canyon hard to place is the trait that makes him useful now.

Most owners spend a lot of effort trying to switch that drive off. A better plan is to give it somewhere to go. Even a house dog with a fraction of Canyon's energy settles faster with brain games that let it hunt for something. Canyon got the biggest version of that game there is. The result is a dog families in three states are grateful for.

On October 8 the ASPCA honored Canyon as its Dog of the Year at its annual Humane Awards luncheon at The Plaza Hotel in New York. ASPCA CEO Matt Bershadker said "Canyon embodies the incredible potential in every animal." That sentence applies to a specific Labrador with a specific record. It also applies to the dog in the third kennel from the left at your county shelter who will not stop dropping a tennis ball at the gate. Somebody just has to throw it.