"That Others May Live"

Meet Our Team : Lisa Kakavas

Position : K9 Handler

K9(s) : Cleo and Zildjian

Lisa joined MDRD in June 2001 with her K9, Cleo. At that time, her husband was actively involved with MDRD and it seemed like she was missing out on a lot of fun. Since that time, Lisa has become very passionate about Search and Rescue and has been very active in the administrative duties of running MDRD. She has also coordinated Preventive Search and Rescue demonstrations with local Elementary Schools. Lisa and K9 Cleo have attended numerous searches and have successfully located two elderly persons on separate searches. They are working to become certified in both water search and human remains detection. Lisa has attended classes in Search Management, is a SARTECH II, and K9 Cleo has earned the AKC's Canine Good Citizen as well as Therapy Dog International's Therapy Dog certificates. In February 2008, Lisa and Cleo re-certified to ARDA standards for wilderness airscent search. Even at age 9, Cleo shows no signs of slowing down! But just in case Cleo wishes to retire some day, in June of 2007 Lisa brought home a sable German Shepherd puppy whom she named Zildjian (a.k.a. – Z). This remarkable puppy is making extraordinary progress and is proving to be a suitable second partner for Lisa. Zildjian will be trained for wilderness airscent search, cross-trained for human remains detection, and hopefully will be talented enough for disaster search. Zildjian has passed the AKC’s Canine Good Citizen, and Lisa expects to begin his field assessments in Spring ’09.