Nancy Hook is a Canine Behavior Specialist. She began working with dogs professionally in 1983, with a lifetime of study of canine behavior and a 10-year career in counseling human adolescents and their families in crisis. The two fields have proved to be very similar.

Nancy has titled 4 of her dogs in AKC obedience trials, as well as coaching many of her students to successful competition levels in obedience and conformation. She has competed in terrier trials, assisted in hunting retriever tests, and organized and evaluated AKC Canine Good Citizen tests.

On the working dog side, Nancy is a Search and Rescue (SAR) K9 Trainer; training trailing dogs, cadaver dogs (land and water), and their handlers. 

She has also worked training law enforcement canines under a Master Trainer. Nancy is certified in K9 Unit Management and as a SAR K9 Training Instructor.  She has trained and evaluated water search and wilderness canine/handler teams at seminars in many eastern states.

Since starting in SAR in 1993, Nancy has trained and handled 4 of her own wilderness SAR K9 partners and one cadaver K9.  Though retired from search and rescue work, she continues to train scent specific trailing dogs and cadaver dogs (land and water) and their handlers privately.

Nancy is a past member of the Durham Search and Rescue Team, NC Search and Rescue Dog Assn., Dunn Rescue Squad STAR (Special Tactics and Rescue) Team, and the R.E.D.S.(Rescue, Extrication, Delivery Specialists) Team in Garner, NC, serving on both the search and technical rescue divisions.  She is a certified Rescue Technician and a NASAR certified SARTech II.  

Lindsay Hook Cooper has been working with dogs her entire life. She was handed a leash with a puppy attached at the age of two, and hasn't looked back yet.

She socialized not only the Rottweiler puppies Nancy bred, but was also called on by other breeders to help with their puppies. She showed her Border Terrier in conformation shows and terrier trials. She has laid trails for search dogs since she was 7 years old, thinking nothing of sitting in the woods in the dark for night trails, waiting for the sardog to locate her and bring its handler in. She also trained her own trailing dog, a Belgian Malinois named Kanani.

These days she helps out when I yell "Help!" and allows me the occasional time away from here by taking over all of my many dog and critter responsibilities while I'm gone. When I was incapacitated for three months with an injury, she took care of everything, including me.

Lindsay’s son, Sean Hook, is a (nearly) grown man now, and is the fourth generation of this family to work with dogs.  He started as a toddler wanting to “work” our pet dogs. As a youngster, he came to all of my training classes, first as a distraction, and as he got older, he helped students with their dogs. And was still a distraction! But in training, you know distractions are a necessary tool. (Not so much at home.) 

He also loves to hang out with Boot Camp dogs and developed a dangerous throwing arm—who knows how many balls are still lost over the fence in the woods.

Norah Cooper, another of Lindsay’s offspring, of course has been immersed in dogs and other critters since birth.  She’s great at leash handling with dogs who need to understand that children are still pretty much human, and need to be respected. Sean lost this role when dogs started seeing him as an adult, so Norah has taken over. The pipeline is shut, I’m told.  I’ll have to import youngsters when Norah gets older.