Brindle + Black

 Its been awhile since the last episode , so i thought it was time to bring you all up to date with our latest Search Dog adventures.
Things have been pretty busy for the unit with the weekly training sessions and we're all head down, tail up!! There is a big training exercise coming up on the horizon later in the year, so getting the more experienced K9's prepared for this is a primary focus. Coupled with the constant importance of bringing new dogs into and through the program, life is never dull. As an association, we have had afew hiccups with a couple of the youngsters from the recent batch of interns resulting in withdrawals from the training program. As devastating as this is for the handlers and pups involved, the call has to be made preferably sooner rather than later. As a huge amount of effort and resources goes into getting these dogs to the stage of becoming operational, it is crucial they have the intensity of drive, emotional and physical makeup to progress through the training stages. One of the withdrawals is young Zak, a Christchurch based K9 who currently is looking for a new forever home (check out the usardogs.org.nz website for more info on this cutie!) and the other is my black bullet, young Tama. He will excel i am sure in other fields of work, just not as a USAR search dog. He won't be going anywhere though, as i (and of course big brother Bryn) have grown very attached to this bundle of mischief!! I will keep you all informed as to where his skills take us, new challenges await....

The annual NZ USAR SDA Operational handler weekend was held recently, down in foggy Christchurch - the atmosphere was awesome and one of the highlights for me was the Crane exercise. As the pic above indicates, individual teams consisting of handler, K9 and a NZUSAR Taskforce technician were 'crated' across a site by crane and landed on a huge pile. Once lowered onto the top the K9 and handler were deployed to find a hidden subject. Once the objective had been attained, back into the crate and another airlift across the site back down to terra firma - AWESOME fun !!! Its interesting to see how the individual dogs react to these new and confronting experiences, but in the case of a true deployment this could well be our reality to gain site access.

We worked at various senarios, all of which were designed to test the teams, late into the night and then all the next day following. The beauty of these exercises is that brings the entire unit together as a team and this year, we were fortunate to have a group of Taskforce technicians along side throughout. As they don't get alot of exposure to working with the dog teams, it was a great way for them to get a deeper insight into how important our K9's are to the area of subject detection and SAR work. On the Saturday we practised high line work, always one of my favourites, which we got to indulge at the Woolston Fire and Emergency training center - Bryn chilled out and enjoyed the ride, as the pics below show.

We have to be comfortable negotiating both above and below ground, so where possible tunnel work is incorporated into the training senarios at some point. At the training center there was ample opportunity to undertake this, so the dogs got lots of practise being raised and lowered as the pic below highlights. This exercise involved crawling through a short tunnel system - nice and wet - then climbing back up into another part of the building and undertaking a search - so very realistic !!

One of the last senario of the weekend involved a massive rubble pile search. For the USAR K9 teams, this is the gold standard. As important as all the other facets of training are, it all culminates on the rubble - this is where they excel.
On this particular pile, the biggest distraction was the fact it was alongside the working runway of Christchurch airport, so while the dogs were working there was a constant thunder of passenger aircraft taking off and landing. It was great distraction practise as the dogs are trained to be focused on their work no matter what is going on around them. With most of these dogs its not hard to do as they live to work. Once we had had our briefing and decided on our search plan, it was down to business . Due to a time constraint of 30 minutes maximum to search the pile , which was approximately 150m x 150m , we decided on running 2 K9's simultaneously. Not normal practise but it was the only feasible option.
By the time the 30 minutes were up, 13 hidden subjects had been found by 2 very tired dogs! A very successful exercise for everyone concerned.

The planning and execution of these weekend exercises are huge - A major thanks go out to all those working behind the scenes to create these training opportunities for us, the organisers and army of subjects who give up their time to hide down holes, get buried in rubble for hours and then jumped on by excited K9's who want engage after the find. We couldn't do it without you !!!