Lots of organisations prepare dogs to search, but the dogs used by Mountain Rescue (MR) are trained and operated by the Search and Rescue Dogs Association or SARDA. The dogs used by MR teams in North Wales come via the folk at SARDA Wales.
Like the MR teams they work with, SARDA Wales handlers are all volunteers and the organisation is funded by charitable donations. The majority of handlers have a background in MR and belong to a MR team as well as SARDA which makes for a large time commitment. Just like the MR teams they work alongside, SARDA dog teams may find themselves not only operating in the mountains of Snowdonia, but also involved in urban and low-land rural search and rescue operations.
As a broad simplification, in MR there are essentially two types of search dog: air-scenting and trailing. Air-scenting dogs are able to locate humans in their search area by following the scent coming on the wind from the casualty or casualties. They can work at long range and are able to cover large areas that would take human searchers a great deal of time to clear. When they find a casualty they make an indication, usually a bark, then run back to their handler and indicate again to make sure they know. The dog then returns to the casualty, then back to the handler, then back to the casualty etc. until everyone is in the same place, after which the dog gets its reward and the casualty gets rescued. The dog will indicate on any human in the search area, and bring the handler in to have a look. This may or may not be the missing person, as many a “courting couple” and red-faced handler have discovered to their cost. This works well in the wide open and sparsely occupied mountains, but a non-specific air scenting dog is of limited use in a heavily populated environment like a beach or country park.
Trailing dogs work on a long lead rather than running freely, and follow a specific scent which has been shed by an identified individual and has fallen to the ground. Due to bacterial action, the strength of the scent trail increases over the first few hours after it is deposited, before slowly decaying over the next few days, so there is a good window of opportunity for searching for a missing person. The dog can follow a specific trail through a heavily populated area, so this type of dog is ideal for busier environments. In order to teach the dog just who it is looking for, it must be provided with a scent item; a piece of clothing or bedding that the person has used. Obviously not everyone who gets lost in the mountains has taken the trouble to leave a scent item behind, so these dogs are not of use where people report themselves lost.
Somewhere between the two camps sit scent-specific air scenting dogs, which are open area air-scenting dogs but looking for a specific individual as identified by a scent item. It seems that these are particularly hard skills to teach a dog, and operational dogs with this capacity are rare.
Looking at the call-out history of our MR Team, we get fewer people completely lost, year on year. They certainly still get lost, but with increasingly good mobile phone coverage, they are able to phone in to ask for help. This enables us to talk through where they parked, which path they took, what they can see etc. which often gives us a fair idea of location. If the phone signal is good we can also quiz their smartphone for location information. All of this means we can get a fairly accurate picture of where they are, so it is unusual for us to be involved in wide area searches on the mountain. The biggest searches now tend to centre on people missing from home, where scent items are usually available. With this in mind, it would seem that a trailing dog would be of most use to the team and region, and that is what I’m hoping to do with Venn.
The SARDA family is made up of handlers (trainee, operational and retired) and “Dogs-bodies.” The latter are people who volunteer their time to provide the dogs with search targets for their training. This will often involve sitting hidden under a boulder in remote spots in poor weather for long periods of time while the dogs follow the trail or methodically start to clear the search area. To join SARDA, a would-be handler has to first serve 6 months “bodying”, which lets everyone get to know them a bit better, gives an understanding of the commitment involved, and provides an opportunity to see the dogs in operation. I’ve bodied a couple of times over the years, just out of interest, but my formal 6 months started last weekend. Yay.
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