A group of people who all share a common interest i.e. the training of dogs to work for them and are already established handlers in the disciplines of working trials, obedience, agility and field trials, have recently all got together and started to train their dogs to help locate missing people in and around the Lothians and Borders area.
Why you may ask as there are already mountain rescue search dogs in the area but, the words say it all they spend most of their training time working open searches for people missing in the hills and the handlers must be mountain rescue members which precludes a great number of talented dog handlers.
After having seen the work of the Welsh dogs and having been teaching urban search abroad for many years I mentioned that a group in this area would be beneficial and it all stemmed from there.
People from all walks of life had expressed an interest and initial training has been started.
It is the aim of the group to train until a high standard has been achieved and then get an accredited Home Office Instructor to test their skills in finding in Urban and lowland situations, once this has been achieved then they will offer their services in any search for a missing person to the Police as a highly creditable unit.
|
The scenting of articles by a trailing dog.
Already the new group of trailing dogs and handlers are starting to build up a profile of what is needed in order to provide a useful service to any Search Manager and the dogs are starting to be able to discriminate and find the correct scent among many distractions with apparent ease.
BUT we have found that the dogs were becoming so excited at this new game that they were not taking a good smell of the scent article so we have had to insist that the dog lies quietly on the ground at our designated start and waits patiently WITHOUT the harness on.The article is then placed by the dog and the dog encouraged to scent strongly, then and only when the handler is sure that the dog has scented sufficiently is the harness put on and the dog allowed to search to find the trail.
On locating the trail the dog then either sits or lies and the line is clipped to the harness and the team are off on their way to trail the victim to his hiding place where a nice reward is always waiting.
This method has improved the efficiency of the seek and locate portion by at least 50% making everyone extremely happy.
|
