News Photo by Julie Riddle Kaiser, a search and rescue dog hero, waits for a ball to be thrown at his owner’s Atlanta home on Tuesday.

ATLANTA — A slobber-coated toy dropped onto the grass. The German shepherd’s friendly eyes glowed as he tensed with puppy-like glee, ready to play.

“I love watching how he’s bouncing around on that hip,” the dog’s owner said as the pet with a hero’s past charged merrily after the ball.

Kaiser, the four-year-old star of the Alpena County Search and Rescue team, recently underwent an invasive hip surgery that sidelined the happy hound from his favorite activity — looking for lost people.

A second surgery is planned in the next few weeks, Kaiser’s owner, Chris Moe-Herlick, said, an expensive but crucial step to lengthening the career of the best search and rescue dog she’s ever met.

Kaiser is known to Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops around the state as the furry face of Moe-Herlick’s Hug-A-Tree presentations, training sessions that teach young people how to stay safe in the woods.

“He’s my go-to dog,” Moe-Herlick said, explaining that most dogs can’t stay focused in such environments. “He’s the one dog I know that can. He can tune everything else out and do his job.”

The dog has a bigger role in life, though. The first canine member of the Alpena County Search and Rescue team, which formed in 2013, he has been a part of nine deployments, helping his human companions search for area residents who have gone missing.

Kaiser — named for a search and rescue dog who worked at Ground Zero on 9/11 — is known as the Cleanup Dog, his owner said, regularly able to find a hidden person during trainings after other dogs have searched the area and missed the scent.

The search and rescue team trains their dogs weekly, keeping them focused and ready to be called into action at a moment’s notice. Since his surgery, Kaiser hasn’t been able to train as much as he’d like, Moe-Herlick said, and is agitated when she takes her other dogs out to train but he doesn’t hear the jingle of his special collar.

Sometimes, as Kaiser heals, his owner runs a mini-training for him in the back yard, making the dog ecstatic.

“You can just see the smile on his face — ‘Oh, I can find ’em!'” Moe-Herlick said

Moe-Herlick recounted the day of Kaiser’s crowning achievement, back in September 2017. Police had been looking many hours for an Alpena woman who, they had reason to believe, was missing and in life-threatening circumstances in the Norway Ridge area.

Kaiser and his team were called into action early on a Friday morning, asked to utilize his training and skills to pick up the scent of the missing woman.

Within 20 minutes, searching where human eyes had seen nothing, Kaiser’s keen nose and tracking instincts led him to the missing woman, who was barely alive.

Moe-Herlick’s eyes misted as she recounted the moment the woman’s young son threw his arms around the dog who had saved his mother’s life.

When the dog first showed signs of hip dysplasia before he was a year old, his owners had a choice, doctors said. They could have him euthanized, or they could have a few years with him in increasing pain and then put him down, or they could start saving money and plan on paying for expensive surgeries.

Even at his young age, the dog already was showing signs of being an outstanding search and rescue dog. Moe-Herlick, who has trained several dogs of her own and also serves as an evaluator for other rescue teams around the state, assessing at least 50 dogs in her years of experience, proclaimed Kaiser better at his job than any dog she’s ever worked with.

“He’s exceptional at his work,” Moe-Herlick said. “He has this old soul of saving people, of wanting to be with people.”

The decision for the dog owner and her husband came easy — they’d start saving their money.

When Kaiser started showing signs that he was in pain as he worked, Moe-Herlick decided it was time for the surgery. She acknowledges that most dog owners, reasonably wouldn’t — and couldn’t — spend the kind of money she is taking from her pocket to provide surgery for a dog. The total bill after the surgeries will be about $13,000, a lot of money to put toward even a loved animal.

A donations tab on the search and rescue team’s website — alpenacountysar.com — allows site visitors to donate toward the cost of Kaiser’s surgery. Any donations also will be used to pay for medical care for Jax, a human remains detection dog on the search and rescue team who is currently undergoing medical testing. Financial help for her canine hero is welcome, Moe-Herlick said. Interested donors can attach a note stating they’d like to help Kaiser and Jax keep saving lives.

Asked why it made sense to pay for surgery for a dog who, while he has been on many missions, has only had one save that was truly his, Moe-Herlick was quick with a reply.

“The one life is only the beginning,” she said. “I think he has many more lives to save.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.