L.A. rescue dog stars in new book

She came from the back streets, just another small-town runaway on the move and trying—unsuccessfully—to stay one step ahead of the law.

Now she’s hit the big time in L.A.

Her name is Pearl, and this 3-year-old Labrador retriever’s up-from-the-shelter life story is a real gem.

She’s a rescue dog, with a job and mission. This year, she traveled to Haiti to help find victims of the devastating earthquake as a member of the elite Los Angeles County Urban Search and Rescue task force.

It’s like something out of a storybook. And thanks to a teacher’s aide and a class of artistic second graders in Northern California, Pearl’s inspiring tale actually is one: a 24-page book called “A New Job for Pearl.”

The book was written by teaching volunteer Allyn Lee and exuberantly illustrated by Connie Forslind’s students at Rancho Romero Elementary School in the Contra Costa County town of Alamo.

“We’re really thrilled to be able to share Pearl’s story,” Lee says.

Pearl and her handler, Topanga-based L.A. County Fire Captain Ron Horetski, were part of the search and rescue squad known as CA-TF2, which spent 15 days in Haiti and drew widespread praise for its expertise and heroism.

But not so long ago, as the book notes, the 62-pound Pearl was just a hyperactive young Lab in the Eastern Sierra town of Portola, a serial runaway confined to the local animal shelter.

Identified as a potential rescue dog for her high energy and willingness to please, Pearl, or Black Pearl, as she was called, passed rescue-dog tests that earned a trip to the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation for six months of intensive training.

“She is a ball of fire with so much energy,” says the foundation’s executive director, Debra Tosch.

The Ojai-based non-profit group trains dogs for search and rescue teams around the nation, including all of the animals used by the L.A. County Fire Department.

Pearl graduated in 2008 and was teamed up with Horetski, a captain stationed at the county’s Fire Station 69 in Topanga. She lives with his family and commutes with him. Haiti was her first big mission.

Lee got the idea for the book after spotting media reports about the dogs of the CA-TF2 team in Haiti, where the task force was known as USA-2. The search dogs fit neatly with a lesson on wolves she’d just taught, says Lee, a former zoo docent who has taught a weekly animal-science lesson at Rancho Romero for 16 years.

“I’m always looking for news stories that say how important animals are to us,” she says.

Lee had written two earlier books with Forslind’s classes, telling made-up stories about animals who aided people after the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Those were fiction, but Pearl’s story was real.

Searching the Internet, she picked Pearl as the book’s protagonist not just because of what she did in Haiti, but also to focus attention on a shelter dog that could easily have been euthanized if it hadn’t been rescued.

“I really wanted the story to be about a shelter animal,” she says.

She phoned Horetski, by then back from Haiti, then wrote the story and assigned the illustrations to the students. By April, they’d finished. Donations covered the printing costs.

Horetski was stunned when he received a copy of the finished book. “I was expecting a bunch of pictures stapled together,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Holy smokes, this is really fantastic.’ ”

The class hopes to raise $10,000 from sales of the $10 book to cover the costs of training another rescue dog. So far they’ve raised about $6,000 since the book was published in early May. For more info please refer to their website.

The book only touches briefly on Haiti because the grisly work was too graphic for second graders.

As Horetski says, Pearl often had to work amid human remains. She didn’t discover any of the nine victims the team rescued, but worked at dozens of sites including once locating a living victim who died before rescuers could complete a rescue.

Last week, the second grade artists got to meet the star of their book when Horetski and Pearl flew north to Rancho Romero.

When the dog walked into the classroom, tail wagging, the second graders all screamed “Pearrrrllll!”

“They went absolutely nuts,” says Horetski, who showed off the dog’s obedience training and had her climb a ladder in the classroom before letting her play with the students.

“The kids were amazed by her energy,” Lee says.

Forslind, who is retiring this week after 39 years, says that because her students had never seen Pearl, it was only when the dog came to class that their storybook heroine became real.

“They were able to see that this really is a true story,” Forslind says. “My students were just thrilled.”

Posted 6/16/10