Department of Natural Resources honors it own

An 11-year officer in the South Carolina DNR received the Officer of the Year Award in Region 1. He’s Lance Corporal Brian Welch, who is assigned by the state to Pickens County. A member of a newly re-formed K-9 team, Welch and his K-9 Max deployed 51 times this past year, resulting in 30 cases. Those cases are typical of a DNR officer’s daily grind: trespassing to hunt, hunting from a public road, failure to tag turkey, hunting out of deer season, over the limit of trout, and hunting on state park land.