06/10/2026
Well…this has been a wild 48 hours. To everyone who found us because of K9 Sonny’s department portrait which somehow absolutely exploded all over the internet, welcome! We have literally doubled our followers overnight. There are far too many comments for me to answer individually, so I figured I’d introduce myself and explain what exactly Redemption Ranch K9 is.
My name is Rob. I’m a full-time night shift police officer and K9 handler with the Plainfield Police Department, and I also train police canines for departments throughout the county in addition to my rescue dogs. Redemption Ranch isn’t my job—it’s what happens before work, after work, on weekends, breaks and on vacation days. It’s run by incredible volunteers who have bought into what probably looked like a crazy idea.
My partner Jocko is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. He’s stood beside me for ten years through dangerous calls, career successes, and some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my personal life. My love for this dog led me to walk into an animal shelter for the first time and start volunteering. It was there that I saw som**hing I couldn’t stop thinking about: the unbelievable potential sitting behind kennel doors.
When I first started talking about shelter dogs becoming police canines, I heard the same thing over and over again from the “experts": "You can’t do this with pound dogs.”
Let me tell you som**hing I've learned- the word "can't" is bu****it.
Can’t is where cowards who never take a big swing hide. Can’t is where people too afraid to even start som**hing criticize the man in the arena. Every time someone tells me I can’t do som**hing, it lights a fire in me.
Less than two years ago my mom died completely unexpectedly. It hit me that there is never a perfect time to chase som**hing that matters. So with borrowed equipment, handshake agreements, amazing volunteers, and more determination than resources, Redemption Ranch was born.
In a year and a half we’ve saved 27 dogs from shelters. Twenty-six communities are safer because of it. (Plainfield cheated and took two.) And those dogs that supposedly “can’t” do this? They’ve found missing children, tracked dangerous suspects, recovered critical evidence, and gotten drugs, guns, and violent criminals off our streets. Turns out they never lacked the ability at all. They just needed someone to believe in them.
We did.
In the picture below I've got four dogs that launched this. The first is my partner, protector and best friend- my Jocko. The second is of K9 Echo who was my first ever rescue dog to be trained as a canine and showed it could be done. Echo came to the shelter a starving and scared Belgian Mal and would go on to make one of the biggest m**h seizures in Indiana history. Then we have Casper, my first official student in my first ever course. K9 Casper had been dumped at the shelter twice and is now protecting his school community as a drug, gun detection, and therapy dog. Lastly is Teeko, my second ever student in my first course who was labeled “unadoptable.” He wasn’t dangerous—he was scared. Today he’s a respected dog out on patrol who loves his new life, has a family he adores and job he was born to do.
For those asking exactly what we do, we train police canines exclusively for law enforcement. But we don’t just provide a trained dog. We provide the dog, the training, the equipment, veterinary care, monthly in-service training, and yearly recertification completely free to departments that partner with us to save a dog’s life.
A traditionally purchased police dog can cost $20,000 to $30,000 or more before equipment, making it a huge barrier for many agencies.
Our philosophy is simple: Emptier shelters. Safer streets.
Since we suddenly have a whole lot of new people here, let me answer a few common questions.
When a department commits to the program, that’s when we start recruiting through our shelter and rescue network. We look for high-drive, social dogs, generally between one and four years old. We don’t have breed restrictions, and as a rule we don’t take privately owned dogs because we’d rather save the dogs with nowhere else to go—especially those facing euthanasia because of heartbreaking overcrowding.
We train dogs for narcotics detection, fi****ms detection, tracking, or combinations of those disciplines, and we work with agencies from all over the country.
We’re still very small. We don’t have a permanent facility yet.
If a recruited dog doesn’t make it through training, one thing will never happen:
They will NEVER go back to a shelter.
We’ll continue training them, offer the handler the opportunity to keep them, or find them the best home possible. Once they come to us, they’re family.
People have also asked how this is funded.
We’re a 501(c)(3), and every donation is tax deductible. Our very first class was run with borrowed equipment, handshake agreements, and raw grit and belief. This organization was built by local businesses, generous people in our community, volunteers who have poured their hearts into it, and people buying shirts and hats because they believed in the mission.
Our biggest expenses are veterinary care—because some of these dogs arrive in rough shape—and equipment for the departments we serve. We’ve never charged a department a penny. Every dollar goes right back into giving another homeless hero a chance.
And the dream?
One day, if we’re blessed enough, we’ll have enough land and a permanent facility where, when a shelter calls and says, “This dog is out of time,” we don’t have to scramble to find an agency before the clock runs out. We can simply say: "We’ll take them.”
Everybody wins. The dog gets a home, a family, and a purpose. Police departments get another tool to protect their communities. The public gets safer streets at no cost to them. And a life that could have ended up as just another statistic becomes a hero.
Our website is in the comments if you’d like to read about every graduate, follow along with our journey, or help us save the next one through donations or buying merchandise. Thanks for following and supporting us, because we are just getting started. There are still so many incredible dogs sitting in shelters tonight that someone has already given up on. We haven’t
From Shelter to Shield.
