Platte County As Loyal To Pancho As He Is To Them, Raising $10K For K-9’s Surgery

When one of their own needed help, people in Platte County, Wyoming, rallied to raise $10,000 to get Pancho the surgery he needed to return to work in the community — even if, yes, he’s a dog.

Pancho’s a police dog who’s about to retire from the Platte County Sheriff’s Office, but not before the people he’s served so loyally cold come through for him.

The Wyoming PBS series “Wyoming Chronicle” recently featured Pancho’s story, which also can be viewed anytime on demand on the Wyoming PBS YouTube channel, website or app.

Pancho’s story made for a compelling first episode for this year’s 10-episode series, and is the type of “real people news, or in this case, real dog news” that host Steve Peck said he seeks out.

“It’s hard to beat a good show about a dog,” Peck said. 

As if the $10,000 raised in his honor wasn’t indication enough, Peck said it was obvious how beloved the Belgian Malinois is in Platte County after the “Wyoming Chronicle” crew spent a day with the pooch and his handler, Capt. Will Kirlin.

Peck got a glimpse of Pancho’s popularity during a lunchtime trip for a sandwich near the office. 

“There were half a dozen other people in there, and every single one of them came up and asked how Pancho was doing,” Peck recalled. “He’s very, very popular.”

Pancho’s Pain

But this feel-good story is tinged with lingering pain. Pancho is still suffering from the degenerative disease that necessitated the surgery in the first place, and now it’s moving down his spine, Kirlin said.

Pancho has been off duty since spinal surgery performed by veterinarians in Denver last fall, and his condition is slowly getting worse, which is why he now spends his days at Kirlin’s home rather than at his side on the job.

“He’s bored at home without me,” said Kirlin. “He sees me put on my uniform and he gets excited, and then he sees me leave and he gets depressed.”

Despite the change of pace, Pancho is still a happy dog and can be a “goofball,” Kirlin said. And he hasn’t given up some of the lessons of the intense training given to K-9 dogs, including identifying narcotics.

Pancho can’t walk by a car, for example, without resisting the urge to sniff it, Kirlin said, adding that, “I don’t think that’s ever going to leave his personality.”

While Peck was impressed by Pancho’s “almost unfathomable sense of smell,” Kirlin said that in working with a K-9 unit for almost 15 years, he’s never had a patrol dog like Pancho.

“He’s super friendly and then when it’s time to go to work, a flip switches, and then he’s right back to being calm again,” Kirlin said. “That’s very unusual for a patrol dog to do.”

Part of the reason why the community may have rallied around Pancho with such tremendous support was that Kirlin took him everywhere and the dog had done a lot of good for the community. 

Support From Near and Far

Leah Maguire, who grooms Pancho, organized a GoFundMe campaigned that raised more than $6,500, while additional donations came into the sheriff’s office from as far away as Texas to cover the cost of the surgery. 

Kirlin said he’s very thankful for Maguire’s help, along with others in the community and the neurosurgeon veterinarians who operated on Pancho. The support from near and far was “really great,” he added, especially because the sheriff’s office doesn’t budget for spinal surgery for a dog. 

“I couldn’t even count how many donations came in for him,” he said. “People are still calling to ask to donate, but I put a hold on that because he’s going to be retiring.”

Even though it’s been difficult to watch Pancho’s health deteriorate, Kirlin said it’s his duty now to ensure that Pancho is happy and healthy. And the relationship he has with Pancho will always be different than his other two dogs, who have always been pets. 

“I always felt more secure when Pancho was with me,” Kirlin said. “He’s very protective over me.”

Coming Up on ‘Wyoming Chronicle’

When Peck read a story about fundraising efforts for Pancho in The Platte County Record-Times, he knew it would resonate with viewers.

The former newspaperman of nearly 40 years is now in his fourth year of hosting the show, and seeking out similar stories of interesting Wyoming people, places and history.

Peck shared a preview of some other upcoming episodes.

In February, Peck said the TV crew spent a “very cold” day at the Lincoln Monument along Interstate 80 to learn more about efforts to add the monument to the register of historic places — which would be unusual since the list currently doesn’t include a piece of art.

Viewers will also get to meet a “pretty hardcore birder” who is in his 80s and has the verification to prove he’s identified nearly 7,000 different birds from his travels to nearly every continent. “He’s a tremendously gregarious, outgoing guy,” Peck said. “And he’s an extremely well-known person in the birder community.”

Finally, Peck will take viewers to Cody to meet Brian Beauvais, the archives curator for the Park County Historic Preservation Commission, who has been trying to recapture the exact same setting for photographs of the area taken some 100-plus years ago. 

Some landscapes have been changed by avalanches, floods, fires and other natural disasters making it “really, really hard” to figure out where the original photographs were taken.

“It was interesting,” Peck said. “That’s shaping up to be a really good episode.”