BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. – At one point the dog Stella was adopted, but her energetic nature would become too much for her adoptive family.
So she came back to the Humane Society of Broward County, where they found a way to use her personality for good.
The Labrador retriever mix is now a search-and-rescue dog.
It's not that no one wanted Stella. The problem was she was too much to handle.
But volunteers found that instead of trying to make Stella fit in with a family, they decided to let her embrace her talents.
She's quite the rambunctious dog.
The 1-year-old Labrador retriever mix is full of energy. Finding a place where Stella belonged was a challenge. She was adopted and brought back to the humane society a couple of times.
"Even running around she just gets more and more excited," volunteer Cherie Wachter said.
That is until one day, a volunteer did some research and found that Stella's high energy and obsession with tennis balls would actually make her a good search-and-rescue dog.
“For her, it's second nature,” Jinette Pantalone said.
An evaluator came to meet Stella and did some preliminary test, like searching for a tennis ball in a concrete rubber field and walking across a ladder with no hesitation.
The National Disaster Search Foundation in California accepted her into their program.
Stella has finally found a place where she belongs. She is off to California, where she will undergo eight to 10 months of training before being placed with a handler.