A special member of Admissions joined the usual staff members and student tour guides welcoming prospective students at John Jay’s Fall Open House. With long, droopy ears and a wrinkly snout, Jameson, John Jay’s very own bloodhound mascot eagerly greeted attendees as they stepped foot into John Jay.
For the second time that weekend, Jameson was accompanied by his owner and handler, David McMorris, on his trip down to John Jay from their home in Union Vale in Dutchess County, New York. The pair had been at Homecoming the night before to cheer on the basketball teams in their first home games of the season.
Before Jameson, McMorris has visited John Jay with a bloodhound every year since 2013, but his journey with bloodhounds started about ten years before that.
After McMorris and his wife Melinda retired from breeding and training Irish setters, McMorris was ready to say goodbye to the world of dog breeding. That was until his son, a bloodhound handler in the New York State Police Department, brought up the issue of a bloodhound shortage in police departments. Roped in by his wife’s agreement, McMorris rescued two bloodhounds, Otis and Major Rudy, and the couple formed R-Dream Kennels.
McMorris partnered with 832 K-9’s Deputy Dogs, also known as the Kody Snodgrass Memorial Foundation, a Florida non-profit named after Deputy Kody Snodgrass. Snodgrass was a 24-year-old deputy and bloodhound handler at the Lake County Sheriff’s Office who was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Deputy Dogs’s programming involves breeding, raising, and training bloodhounds. It is a $15,000 endeavor per hound and is funded mainly by donations. The dogs are then given to police departments or offered at a very discounted rate.
Deputy Dogs sent Rosie Red to McMorris to breed with Major Rudy, which started the John Jay bloodhound line. The dogs were the parents of the college’s former mascot, Guinness, and therefore the great-grandparents of Jameson.
As the two started to produce puppies, McMorris devised a system to prepare the dogs for their future careers. McMorris and his wife bred the bloodhounds and raised the puppies for eight weeks. During that time, the dog’s mom would feed them, and then McMorris would feed them.
“This was so that before their eyes were even open, they were exposed to the smell of people,” said McMorris.
After eight weeks, McMorris took the dogs down to Florida to go through the training program. McMorris would return home with a bloodhound to train back in New York.
These bloodhounds were then fostered by volunteers, who were tasked with bringing the bloodhounds everywhere they went for six months. After six months, the dogs were returned to Florida and placed in bootcamp, where they spent anywhere from six months to a year honing their skills until they were ready to work for the police. McMorris and his wife bred over 70 bloodhounds in their 20-year bloodhound-raising journey.
As Chief Officer of the Union Vale Town Constables, the town’s volunteer police department, McMorris collaborated with the bloodhounds he brought back to New York in search and rescue missions in the 400-acre park that encompasses most the town. Major Rudy was one of his partners, until he was employed by the New York State Police.
After Major Rudy became too busy with his new job at the police department for breeding, Deputy Dogs sent Madison, John Jay’s very first bloodhound and Jameson’s grandmother.
Madison made her debut at the annual Athletics Banquet at John Jay in May 2013 after then Athletic Director Carol Kashow reached out to McMorris seeking a real-life bloodhound for special events.
Madison’s presence became more than just a treat at special events, it became a way for students not necessarily used to encountering such large dogs to engage with them.
“A lot of students in the city see more little dogs than large dogs, so we jumped at the opportunity to educate people on the dogs that do so many amazing things,” Kashow said.
After bringing new energy to the athletics department, McMorris and his bloodhounds began making appearances at Homecoming games and Admissions events as well, a tradition that has only been broken only once during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that has brought a lot of joy to John Jay.
“When I think of the bloodhounds, I think of how much fun they are and how much fun we’ve had with them,” said Kashow.
In between her newfound responsibilities as a college mascot, Madison had puppies with Guinness, the son of Major Rudy and Rosie Red. One of these puppies was Jameson’s mom, Mary-Ellen, from the Walton litter, named after the 1970s television series.
While Madison balanced her roles as a mom and John Jay mascot, Guinness inherited his father’s role as McMorris’s partner in Union Vale, aiding in finding lost children in the woods.
When Madison passed away, Guinness assumed the role of the official John Jay bloodhound and carried out the duty until his death in 2019. On occasion, Guinness’s brother, Fredricksburg, or Freddy, for short, would come down to John Jay with him.
“Freddy was one of the best dogs we ever put out,” said McMorris. “He had a natural instinct.”
That instinct was the unique ability of bloodhounds to differentiate scents.
“Most of the dogs we used were 99% accurate,” McMorris said. “We could take a dog up to a house where we suspected a bad guy went in, and we didn’t really have to wait for a search warrant, though we always did, because we had probable cause.”
In Union Vale search and rescue endeavors and training exercises, Guinness and Freddy were often at odds with each other.
“We’d have them both together and put them on a trail, and if Guinness got in front of Freddy, Freddy had to get in front of Guinness, and it was a race to see who found the guy first,” McMorris said.
Freddy, however, was not the only successful bloodhound of the bunch.
“We’ve had dogs all over the world, actually, but a lot of them throughout the country,” McMorris said.
One of McMorris’s bloodhounds even worked for the FBI in Quantico, and McMorris accompanied them in the training exercises.
“We had someone walk out into the woods, picked her up with a helicopter, and brought her out a week later, and the dog picked up the trail and found her,” said McMorris. “Another time a guy set off an IED, and we brought the dog out to sniff around, and he found a piece of shrapnel or something the guy had touched, and the dog found where the guy was sitting.”
In the end, Jameson’s family wound up working in police departments all over. His aunt, Callie, worked at the Yonkers Police Department. Two other bloodhounds, Hudson and Earl, worked with the New York City Police Department. His brother, John-boy, worked in the New York State police, following in his great-grandfather Major Rudy’s footsteps.
McMorris worked with Deputy Dogs until around five or six years ago, when he felt he was too old to keep training. Jameson, however, remained with him, and has continued to make appearances at John Jay since inheriting the job from his grandfather, Guinness, in 2019.
Ashley Paradis, a graduate student studying International Crime and Justice, was pleasantly surprised by Jameson’s appearance at the Fall 2025 Open House.
“It’s a momentous occasion,” said Paradis. “You so often see the fake, for lack of a better term, bloodhound, you know the mascot, so it’s actually kind of crazy to see an actual bloodhound, the face of our college, on campus.”
Sabreen Abuzahriyeh, a junior studying Fraud Examination and Financial Forensics, was also delighted by Jameson’s presence and disposition.
“He’s really friendly,” said Abuzahriyeh. “Anytime you approach him, he cuddles you, and I don’t expect that from random dogs.”
For McMorris and Jameson, the trips have been just as memorable.
“I just love bringing the dog down and letting people play with the dog,” said McMorris. “And Jameson loves it — he can tell as soon as I’m headed toward the city where he’s going.”
