Jennifer Michelson of Hopewell, NJ, says she can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be involved in Search and Rescue (SAR). And her journey with her German Shepherd Dog, “Flint,” has been nothing short of extraordinary. The duo has been awarded the 2025 Award for Canine Excellence in the Search and Rescue: Disaster Response category.
As a search and rescue dog, Flint has been certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task force team member. He is also a member of the New Jersey Task Force-1 (NJTF1) FEMA Urban Search and Rescue team, which is one of 28 federal FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams, along with Michelson, his handler.
In his 9.5 years of life and a SAR career that’s nearly as long, he’s responded to disasters like the Surfside Condo collapse in Florida and, most recently, Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina. He is Michelson’s fourth working GSD and third SAR dog.
The Search and Rescue – Disaster Response category is a new category for the Awards for Canine Excellence this year. Each year, the AKC Humane Fund awards dogs who do extraordinary things in the service of humankind in different categories: Service Dog, Uniformed Service K-9s, Therapy Dogs, Exemplary Companions, Teams, Search and Rescue (SAR) Dogs in the Human Remains Detection and Disaster Response categories, like Flint. Dogs in this category are certified to assist in Disaster Response, responding to natural disasters, building collapses, and other emergencies.
Trying, Trying, and Trying Again
Now, Michelson has about 20 years of SAR under her belt. But she had trouble getting involved at first. In the late 1990s, Michelson noted that the internet wasn’t a place where you could really find much information, so while she had a dog, she couldn’t find a team to work with them. She had children, and when they were about 3 years old, she found a team with her first German Shepherd Dog, “Griffin.” It was around 2005 when she joined the Wilderness Search and Rescue team with Griffin, which was part of NJTF1.
“From when I was little, I knew I wanted to do canine search and rescue. I thought it would be really neat to do something that mattered, something that was useful,” she says. “I like technical training and search and rescue.” Griffin was good at it, so she certified him. At the same time, she also became interested in dog training. Griffin retired in 2014, and in 2015, she got Flint. “He was immediately certified on both teams, two months shy of his third birthday.” She also got a cadaver dog, “Remus,” around the same time.
But her dedication to search-and-rescue relief efforts doesn’t come without sacrifice. In wilderness search and rescue, Michelson says deployments are out of the blue because you don’t know when someone will go missing. For urban search and rescue, the team has four hours to gather at their meeting place, load the trucks with the equipment, and be ready to go, with all humans and dogs in tow.
“We know with USAR deployments, we’re going to be gone for days, if not weeks,” she says. “It’s basically dropping everything, leaving your life behind, and trusting that everybody at home will take care of it for you, and that’s a big ask. It’s a big commitment. I don’t think people realize how much of a commitment it is.”
Her Rock Through a Difficult Time
For Michelson, Flint came into her life at a time when she was truly alone for the first time. “My marriage was ending, and he was the first dog where I was like, I’m just going to handle all of his care myself. I think I ended up separated when he was maybe a year old, in 2015,” she recalls. “The kids are out of the house now, so I’ve got an empty nest. He’s been with me through the part of my life where I ended up single and living alone, and through the entire time, he’s pretty much been my rock.”
Through the hours and hours of SAR training they did together, Michelson says that they bonded more than a typical dog and owner. Though she always knew German Shepherd Dogs were the breed for her, Flint exceeded her expectations.
“German Shepherd [Dogs] often bond a little more strongly with their handlers,” she says. “We own our dogs, and they are 100% our partners. We value them, honestly, more than ourselves, because we understand that they’re doing this wholeheartedly because they love it. But we are responsible for their safety and for keeping them healthy.”
A Natural Fit for SAR
Though Flint wasn’t Michelson’s first SAR dog, she was instantly amazed by the seriousness with which he approached their deployments. There was a small building collapse in West Orange, New Jersey, in 2020, that was Flint’s first rubble deployment. He was 5 years old at the time. “It was really amazing to watch,” Michelson says. “We train on our rubble piles, but they’re not the real thing. So to be able to go to the real thing, and have my dog just easily work out away from me was just very, very wonderful to watch.”
“Really early on, we do a game called ‘Runaways,’ where one person holds the dog, and the other one teases them with food or with a toy, and runs away calling them,” she says, noting that it’s usually apparent in puppies whether or not they will be suited for SAR work. The other person will go a short distance away and hide, and the dog is excited to find them, seeing it as a game. “They have a huge desire to hunt, so we’re just taking advantage of the fact that it’s what they do naturally.”
Part of the success of these SAR dogs is their temperament. “I’ve been very careful with my dogs, trying to get the true, proper temperament of a German Shepherd Dog. Even though GSDs are my breed, I believe they’re the best-suited dog for everything,” she says. “They’re supposed to be strong and have a level of protective instincts, but they’re also supposed to be solid enough not to see danger anywhere other than true danger. Flint is protective, he’s powerful, he’s strong. His temperament is just so solid that he can go anywhere with me. He can go anywhere, he can do anything.”
The Emotional Toll of Tragedy
In 2021, they were deployed down to Florida, responding to the Surfside condominium collapse. “It was his biggest rubble collapse, and biggest building collapse,” she said, even to this day. “He was perfectly happy to do his job — he worked without any problem.” Champlain Towers South was a 12-story residential building that suddenly, partially collapsed overnight. Of the 136 units in the building, over half were destroyed, and 98 people died as a result. It took a month to recover everyone.
For her, this was one of the most difficult deployments, especially seeing all the families that showed up day after day, hoping for a miracle.
“The more I’ve done it, the more I guess it’s hit me,” she says. “I didn’t entirely realize what I was getting myself into. The emotional part, that was a realization I came to as I continued to do more deployments.”
Michelson says Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was the first time she really saw the damage that storms like this can cause. She was deployed with her dog, Griffin. “I saw the true, destructive power of nature, houses turned on their heads, entire neighborhoods moved over and tumbled in the sand.”
Perhaps luckily, the dogs seem to have an easier time working without the emotional burden, but they also don’t entirely know what they’re getting into.
“I don’t believe that the dogs understand that somebody is lost or missing or in trouble,” Michelson says. “They’re bred to work like this, and they’re going to be very driven to do this kind of work. He does it anyway, not knowing the danger.”
Flint’s Hurricane Deployments
Aside from building collapses, Flint and Michelson often respond to hurricane aftermath on the East Coast. They were deployed to Hurricane Ida in 2021 and then to Hurricane Idalia in 2023. They were already in Asheville, North Carolina, when Hurricane Helene hit in September 2024. As the roads were washed away, the SAR team was trapped in Asheville, waiting out the storm. They were in a hotel, in a location where it was deemed safe, but still couldn’t get to work right away. Michelson says the hotel lost power immediately, and the water ran out quickly. They weren’t able to get local food either. “Urban SAR teams are set up to exist on our own for, I believe, three days. So we have generators, we have everything we need to take care of ourselves, plus do our rescue operations, for three days,” she says.
Helene was another one that Michelson had a major emotional toll. She and Flint worked for 17 days in North Carolina, assessing the damage immediately after the hurricane passed. “As soon as the water receded, we were out the door to work for rescues in the areas that we were assigned,” she recalls.
“Helene was really difficult because we were there immediately, and no one knew how many people were missing — there were a lot of people missing. We didn’t know whether they were truly affected by the flooding and the building collapses, or if they just hadn’t been accounted for yet.” Along with the SAR teams, there were also teams searching the waters for survivors or missing people. The operations quickly turned from recovery to finding bodies.
Michelson says their team worked closely with the local fire department. “They knew the people who lived there, and we had to help with their pain too, because it was very personal for them,” she says. “They knew who they were searching for.”
In the United States alone, Helene’s death toll was 252 people, impacting six U.S. states directly. North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia were primarily hit, along with Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. It ended up being the fifth-costliest U.S. Atlantic Hurricane, with $78.7 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
An Incredibly Serious Worker
Griffin, Michelson’s first SAR dog, was fantastic, but vastly different than Flint. “Griffin was fantastic. He was funny, and he loved people; he was just a goofball,” she recalls. “He was absolutely perfect for that part of my life, and he was a fantastic search dog.” Flint, on the other hand, is much more serious. “He’s a nice dog, but he’s not happy-go-lucky. His serious nature has always made me feel safe.”
Whether they’re out doing a search or at home on Michelson’s farm, Flint does a great job of living up to his breed’s loyal, working nature. “He keeps me in line, he keeps tabs on me, makes sure I’m where I’m supposed to be,” she says. Before her kids went to college, Flint would always be around them, watching over them. Similarly, he protected Michelson’s chickens with iron focus. “He’s a steady presence, he’s calm. He’s also tolerant,” she notes, which is important in their line of work. “If he hurts his foot or needs to be bandaged, I could just tape a sock to this foot, and he won’t try to take it off or anything. I think he’s silly, but he’s like, ‘there’s nothing going on here.’
And though he’s a “beast in work,” Michelson says that he’s equally a softie. “He’s a nice, sweet, calm dog who easily settles when he’s not working. He helped me raise three litters of feral kittens, insists on being with them and lying there as I feed them, and they climb all over him,” she laughs. “He just goes from this super intense, working, strong dog into just a lovely animal to have around the house who is calmly protective of everything. To me, he is the whole package for a GSD, everything a shepherd should be.”
Their training is built largely on consistency and trust. Michelson notes that dogs’ training has to be maintained, not just when they’re young, but continuously throughout their lives to keep them sharp and focused. “He has to trust me that if I send him somewhere, that it’s okay for him to go there, no matter how dangerous,” she notes. “He trusts me as much as I trust him.”
Flint’s Final Certification
At the end of December 2025, Flint will turn 10. Certification lasts for three years, and Flint was recertified in October 2024. “I expect this to be his last [certification], so it’s a little bittersweet,” Michelson says. And she’s thrilled to honor his career so far with the Award for Canine Excellence. “I seriously didn’t think that we’d win,” she says. “I think he absolutely deserves to be celebrated, so I’m so thrilled that he approaches his tenth birthday and get this accolade.”
Michelson feels so lucky to have had such fantastic SAR partners in her career. “I knew he was special as soon as I brought him home,” she says. “And I’ve always felt this way. He’s so driven to work.” Michelson currently has three other dogs: “Cierno,” “Remus,” and “Bear,” who is Flint’s son.
“I’m sad about having to retire him at some point, because he’s not going to live forever,” she says. “But I do have one of his babies, and I’m super grateful that I get to see how his son turns out as a search and rescue dog.”
Michelson recognizes that all dogs are different, and she’s already experienced a range of differences with the GSDs she’s worked with.
Whatever their strengths, the “enormous amount of time training them” leads to a very deep bond between dog and owner. She hopes that Flint will also be able to help train Bear to some extent, emphasizing the importance of search-and-rescue dogs, especially in times of crisis. “It’s a deep connection,” she says. “If you want to be in canine search and rescue, it’s truly a lifestyle. It really is your life that you’re putting on the line, too.”