Slidel

Training to be a SAR K9 team is a group effort.  You can’t learn it from a book or from watching a DVD.  You need mentoring from experienced handlers and from professional trainers. You also need your friends, to be subjects, to lay trails, to set up human remains problems.  It can’t be done alone.

So what do you do if you are the only K9 handler on your SAR team? In New York State anyway, one answer could be–Join the Federation.

April 18 and 19, 2009 The New York State Federation of Search and Rescue Teams held its first workshop for Trailing Dog Handlers and their evaluators (an evaluator is a dog handler from another discipline that partners with a trailing dog team to set up trails, observe and critique, provide moral support and perform a series of tests which prepare the trailing dog team for the certification tests that you need to be operational)

Kyle Warren and Lew Decker–the two operational trailing dog handlers in the federation– provided instruction to two groups of trainees. Pat Thompson from Amigo Search and Rescue is currently the Federation’s only trailing dog tester.  She spent both Saturday and Sunday with Lew Decker’s group, as did I.  We  planned trails, set out subjects, were subjects ourselves and had a great time watching good dogs work.

There were 7 trailing dog teams in training from across the state, in various stages of training.  Liz Dalton and her lovely little red bone, Slidel from our team, were among the most advanced of the trainees.  Liz had a lot of good advice for novice handler Fred Haley and his promising young golden retriever, Compass, as they ran their first, ever blind trail.

Several area search dog handlers also attended.  NYSFEDSAR’s goal is to develop at least one qualified trailing dog evaluator for  have at least one for each SAR team with a trailing dog.  On Eagle Valley, both Karen Pardini and I support Kyle and Maya.  While I attended the weekend as the K-9 coordinator for NYSFEDSAR, Karen attended as Kyle’s training partner. (In gratitude, Kyle set her out as a subject on Saturday and left her in the woods for 3.5 hours before running her trail.  But that’s another story )  Not to worry, we managed to squeeze out some time at the end of the day to work our own dogs.  Suki and Ripley both did a few simple human remains problems.

On Saturday evening, Kyle gave a wonderful introduction for handlers and evaluators alike.  All were great examples of what scent can do. You can read some of the content from that presentation on  Kyle’s blog.

It was the behind the scenes work that really made the weekend work.  Lower Adirondack Search and Rescue (LASAR) hosted the event.  Karen Major and Karen Jagoda, captain and training officer respectively, did a wonderful job getting us a place to meet, and feeding us.  They also corraled several LASAR members to serve as subjects.  K-9 SAR training lives or dies on the quality and quantity of its training subjects.

Bottom line–K-9 Search and Rescue training is a group effort. Don’t know where to start? Check out the National Search Dog Alliance.

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