K9 Spotlight: What is Blueline K9 Conference?
Aug 12th 2021
Matt Nero and Joe Lutkowski are joint-owners of Blueline K9 Training, a K9 training facility designed around K9 handlers teaching K9 handlers. Matt has 18 years of law enforcement experience and is partnered with his third working dog. Joe has been working with K9s since 2002 and has 23 years of law enforcement experience.
Be sure to watch the full video to hear their incredible stories of working as K9 law enforcement officers.
What Does K9 Mean To You?
For us, K9 is life. We eat, breathe, and live all things K9. Joe’s first experience was more a matter of circumstance, when his department got a grant to launch a K9 unit program. His first dog was a bomb-sniffing dog and it changed his life forever. He knew immediately that working with dogs was what he wanted to do for the rest of his career.
Matt’s life-changing experience with K9 is strikingly similar to Joe’s. He was working on Wall Street during the 9/11 tragedy and got into law enforcement because of this. When he saw all the working dogs deployed with their handlers, Matt knew immediately that he wanted to focus his career on working with K9s.
Matt and Joe began working together right after Matt joined the force, and they’ve been business partners and good friends, ever since. Blueline K9 Training is the result of their shared experiences working together in the K9 unit and getting to a point in their careers where they want to give back to the K9 community.
What Is The Blueline K9 Conference?
Blueline K9 Training’s mission is simple: For Handlers, by Handlers.
When we first started, there wasn’t anything like the Blueline K9 Conference. There were small seminars, but for the most part, K9 units were isolated from the rest of the K9 world, in their own local bubbles. As we’ve grown in our careers, we realized how valuable sharing information is, especially in the community, where knowledge can be the difference between life and death.
Really, we built Blueline K9 Training for K9 handlers. As active handlers ourselves, we realize how important it is to support our community. We know that a lot of handlers don’t have a lot of support and like most of us, they are only able to learn through experience, or if they can find a reliable source of information.
Today, there’s a lot more support for the K9 and working dog community, but that’s honestly a relatively recent network in our field. Twenty years ago when we started, it was nothing like this. And that become our goal - to connect handlers with the rest of the world in a way that wasn’t just meaningful to careers, but to share invaluable information that can save lives.
That’s why we get the top handlers in the world to participate in our Blueline K9 Conference events. Attendees are able to get an education that simply isn’t available anywhere else.
That’s also why our vendor show is a critical part of this conference. We get handlers all over the country face-to-face with the folks making their police K9 gear. We know how important it is to see, in hand, the equipment you rely on for deployment. To be able to test the quality before you buy, while simultaneously exposing people to the best working dog products in the world is one of the highlights of our event.
What Does Equipment Mean To You?
Equipment is EVERYTHING. Literally, everything to us. When you deploy you’ve got to have the reliable gear, and you’ve got to have it on you at all times - ready to go. You never know what you’re going to encounter when you deploy.
That’s why we feature the top-of-the-line vendors here at the conference. As handlers ourselves, we simply can’t afford to have anything less than the best K9 equipment. There’s always a risk that an equipment failure could literally mean the difference between going home that day or not.
At Blueline K9 Conference, you can get nearly anything you would ever need when it comes to police K9 equipment. We make it a part of this conference’s mission to provide everything and anything a K9 handler working in law enforcement would need.
This is just one of the many reasons why we love working with Ray Allen Manufacturing. We know that their equipment won’t break down in the field, no matter what a deployment situation might throw at us.
Not to mention their industry support is second to none. We know a lot of these guys personally and they are just as dedicated and serious about K9 as we are. We use and recommend their USA made K9 equipment and gear all the time.
Check out the full interview by watching the video above.
Find more K9 and working dog industry expert interviews by searching K9 Spotlight in the dropdown of our blog menu, or watch all of our K9 Spotlight features on our YouTube channel.
ONLINE
Learn more about Blueline K9 online. Register for their next event to join in and participate in one of the largest Police K9 and working dog conferences.
