ELLIE MAE
Ellie Mae
THE SERVICE DOG OF THE YEAR 2007
ELLIE MAE RAILSBACK
SEARCH & RESCUE BLOODHOUND

Ellie Mae is a successful Search & Rescue Dog.  Ellie is the
only Bloodhound with the incredible famous non-profit
organization Texas Equusearch.   She has proven her abilities
and training over and over again in tracking criminals, children,
mentally challenged  and the elderly.  Ellie is well deserving of
her honor as The Service Dog of the Year 2007.   Ellie’s success
stories are too numerous to tell.  Perhaps Ellie will write a book
one day.  If she could, what stories she could tell.  In the words
of her handler, Cheryl Railsback here is Ellie Mae’s story:

Ellie Mae’s Story
My son , who is a Texas Game Warden,  and I began working
with Joe Tackett, President and Training Director of The Good
Shepherd Schutzhund Club,  training Ellie Mae in tracking last
year.  Trying to work each week with Joe was difficult with my
son’s job as he would have to go out of town or something
would come up and with my recent back injury, I really wasn’t
able to work much with her.   I could see that Ellie wasn’t getting
very far very fast in her training skills.  I spoke to Joe about taking
Ellie home with him for intense training and get her ready to be
certified as we were anxious to get started in our Search and
Rescue efforts.  Well, as Joe will tell you, she is a true well-bred
bloodhound and a very stubborn dog making training very
difficult.  He was about to give up on her when his wife, Victoria,
said let’s try one more day.  Well, I guess the light came on for
Ellie that day as she showed promise.  The weeks ahead Ellie
Mae made dramatic progress.  Ellie Mae received her
certification in December of last year.  
Since my son’s needs for Ellie were few and far between, I
decided that we should Texas Equusearch after hearing of all
the good things they were doing.  We joined them in about June
of this year and it wasn’t long before Ellie got called out on her
first assignment with them.  It was a young man in Pasadena
that went missing.  It had been 3 weeks that he was missing
when they called me to go out and see what we could do. Now,
as any of you know, 3 weeks is a very long time and it was
during that very raining time we had this past summer.  I
thought, this is great…our first time out and it is a pretty old track
and we are going to look like we really don’t know what we are
doing.   I took Ellie out anyway thinking the experience would
help us if nothing else.  They sent us to the park where the
young man was last seen (we found out later that it involved
illegal drugs).  Ellie took me from the picnic table area through
the grass and out to the street.  At that point she basically looked
at me and we checked in both directions (at that time, I really
was just starting to read her and didn’t know what everything that
she did meant).  In speaking to the police later that afternoon,
they indicated that they suspected that the two guys were doing
their swap at the picnic area and the missing man was walking
away to go home and that the other guy and possibly 1 or 2
others grabbed him on the street and put him in their vehicle.  
On a recent search, we were in a heavily wooded area with a
firefighter searching some areas we had previously seen from a
helicopter.  The firefighter thought that he would be able to find
his way back out with no trouble, however, when we got in there,
it all looked the same and we were both confused as to which
way to go to get out.  Ellie, however, knew exactly how we got
there and when I said to her “Ellie, show us how to get back to
the car”, she took us out exactly the way we went in.  She
proceeded to do this two more times in other areas of these
same thick woods.
I am a little worse for the wear though, as on our last search in
Shepherd for an elderly man with lots of medical conditions, we,
once again, found ourselves in a heavily wooded area.  It was
actually land divided up into several deer leases so it had roads
(if you want to call them that) between sections.  Well, long story
short, Ellie and I were going through a part of the woods where
the man’s son had walked through just a short time before we
got there, and she was hot on the trail.  There was a lot of
underbrush and thorny bushes, etc. and she is going through
this stuff like it is nothing with me on the other end of the leash.  
She goes through this one area and I just got caught up in some
of the thorny stuff and couldn’t get my foot loose and Ellie just
kept on going.  Well, I went down (but I never let go of the leash)
and both of my legs were bruised from the knee down and I hurt
my wrist from not letting go of the leash.
We have been on approximately 12-15 searches.  We get called
out only on special searches, such as Alzheimer patients,
mentally challenged people, people with medical conditions that
need their medication or children.  Ellie has always proven to be
on the right track, as we would find out after the missing person
was located, usually in the hospital, picked up by the police or
found their way back home.   With 3 searches ending without
finding the person or knowing what has happened to them.  In
all 3 cases, the police have indicated that they feel foul play was
involved.  This is disappointing to both Ellie and I, but we must
keep going with the knowledge that we will keep helping find
people and return them to their families.
If we do not have searches to go on, Ellie, being a house dog
and sleeping on our bed at night and the couch most of the day,
needs her exercise or she will destroy something in the house
to get back at me for not letting her get out and work.  
Ellie absolutely will not give up…she just keeps on going until I
finally make her stop and rest.  She loves what she is doing and
it is so fulfilling to me to see the results of all of our hard work
and efforts.  Now that we have been on several searches, she
and I have learned to communicate and we understand each
other on the trail.  Thanks very much to Joe Tackett (who we still
try to work with 1 to 2 times a week) for being persistent and
being more stubborn than Ellie to get her trained and certified.

Cheryl Railsback
Award January 12, 2008
Service Dog of the Year
Judge Joe Tackett training Ellie
Mae in tracking footprints.