My story with Airedales starts in 2021 when I brought home my first, Aldo. I grew up hunting and wanted a versatile hunting dog for fur and feather. We have had a lot of fun training together over the years. The first title we earned together was a Junior Hunter (upland) with AKC. After that I continued to train Aldo lots of tricks for fun. He LOVES to learn new things.

I began searching for something else to train him for and landed on bite sports. He just so happened to be from German lines with three of his grandparents being imports from Germany. In Germany many handlers and kennels train and prove their Airedales working abilities in IGP, formerly known as Schutzhund. I couldn’t find an IGP club in the area I was living in but found a group training for APA which is modeled after KNPV (the Dutch Police certification program). It included a lot of different events like obedience on and off leash, heeling next to a bike, food refusal, climbing a wall, jumping over a jump and ditch, staying quiet and calm during cheering and gunshots (not an easy thing for a hunting dog!), finding and retrieving dropped articles like keys and spent casings in a field, transporting a suspect and picking up dropped keys, finding a suspect in the woods and alerting handler, finding and guarding a box in the woods and alerting handler (again, not an easy thing for a hunting dog).

It wasn’t perfect, I made a lot of training mistakes, but I had a smart, motivated and forgiving partner in Aldo. I knew I wanted another Airedale like him, but the German line dog I had grown to love came from a one-time breeding. I also frequently had people asking me where to find Airedales like him. So, I decided I would get a female so I could try to breed more Airedales in the states with the drive and temperament for a variety of work.

Eventually, I landed on importing a female puppy all the way from Germany and was fortunately matched with my amazing girl Carry who will be the foundation of my kennel!

Hailey Johnston