DJ Holmes

Darren “DJ” Holmes has seen the dogs of war– they worked off-leash in some of the most dangerous places on earth, ahead of US Marines. DJ began his career in working dogs more than 20 years ago as a professional bird-hunting guide and amateur competitor in UKC Hunter Retriever trials, titling Labradors in tests requiring precise control of highly-motivated dogs working at long distances from the handler over difficult terrain and through water. Subsequently, DJ was one of the pioneers of the most significant military working dog innovation of the last 40 years– the fusion of North American field trial retriever training technology with traditional explosives detector dog training, resulting in the Improvised Explosives Detector Dog, or IDD. Working as a civilian defense contractor, DJ prepared numerous handler-dog IDD teams for Operation Enduring Freedom, providing handler instruction and sophisticated dog training from schoolhouse through pre-deployment training and testing, and eventually serving overseas himself in 2014 as a Field Service Advisor. In Afghanistan, DJ provided K9 expertise supporting route clearance combat missions for the USMC 2^nd Combat Engineer Battalion, advising and supporting young US Marines going into harm’s way with little more than the dogs DJ helped to train shielding them. From this searing experience DJ acquired a single-minded and uncompromising focus on excellence, and doing what works and nothing except what works with detector dogs that deploy with careers and lives in the balance. In the course of his K9 career, DJ also performed extensive Military Working Dog research for the Office of Naval Research in the areas of canine emotional reactivity, conditioning, cognition, and olfaction. His efforts helped develop and establish best-practice IDD and MWD training methods, and assisted in creating an IDD program of record for the US Marine Corps. DJ also has law enforcement k9 experience. From 2020 to 2024 he was a Deputy for the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office in Canon City, Colorado, eventually becoming the Canine Program Director and a SWAT Operator and re-establishing a detector dog program there. DJ procured, trained, certified, and handled both narcotic and explosive detector canines for Fremont County. Dog training is a hard craft to make simple, but DJ is a skilled and highly experienced instructor. His approach to detector dogs is sophisticated when it needs to be, stripped-down where it can be, and is always based on the handler-dog relationship—because DJ believes that is what works best in the long run to get the job done, and because he loves a good dog as much as the rest of us do.