Prepping pooches to find missing

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This article was published 21/09/2015 (3855 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kime moves purposefully down a foot path before making a sharp turn into a swath of knee-high prairie grass .

She stops pulling on the long lead abruptly and when she raises her head there is a navy blue rag hanging from her mouth.

“Good girl,” says Leon Flannigan, congratulating the German shepherd on locating the item he had planted in the field a half-hour earlier.

Kime and Flannigan are founding members of the Brandon Regional Search and Rescue Association, and on Saturday the pair practised their search techniques on the wooded grounds of Assiniboine Community College’s North Hill Campus.

“As a kid, I kind of liked the idea of being a dog trainer,” said Flannigan, who recently retired from a more than 30-year career with the Brandon Police Service.

During his time with BPS, Flannigan spearheaded the force’s first police dog unit and he has many fond memories of his furry partners Mac and Bobby.

“Both dogs, in essence, saved my life from people with knives and things like that,” Flannigan said.

Knowing the benefits of working with dogs in emergency situations, Flannigan saw an opportunity to bring canine searchers into the mix when he got involved with BRSAR three years ago.

Currently, three other members of the volunteer search and rescue organization are working to get their dogs certified with the Office of the Fire Commissioner’s canine program.

The dogs have to pass the certification test before they are allowed to assist on real-life searches.

“What I’m hoping to see in (BRSAR) is to end up with four certified dogs and maybe a couple of dogs in the wings…so we have a dog available for any search we have to go on,” Flannigan said.

Five-year-old Kime has been on roughly a dozen emergency searches, and when Flannigan first got her there were indications that she would be well-suited to intensive training.

“I’m Kime’s fourth owner … (the others) found her to be too much to handle,” he’s said. “Without training and without purpose (German shepherds) tend to be destructive, that’s just the way it is.”

Kime, whose name means “focused” in Japanese, comes from a long line of working dogs and has a high amount of “ball-drive.”

According to Flannigan, ideal search dogs will instinctively chase down a thrown ball with all their might.

Angie Eves and her small Welsh terrier Booker prove that “ideal” candidates come in all shapes and sizes.

“He’s not your standard breed,” said Eves, who has been training with BRSAR since last Sept. “But he has really high ball-drive … and we thought if we could do it we definitely wanted to.”

Welsh terriers were originally bred as hunting dogs, but now they are more common in the show ring.

During Saturday’s training exercise, Booker zips around the field and quickly locates several hidden items — proving that his ancestral hunting abilities aren’t that far gone.

While Hudson still has a long ways to go before he is qualified for a real search, Eves is looking forward to the journey.

“It’s nice working with your dog and it’s nice doing something for the community,” she said.

Shannon Brichon, on the other hand, is hoping to get her dog Booker, a Belgian Malinois, certified in the next month.

During the certification test, a judge from the Fire Commission will look at Booker’s obedience skills and sociability as well has her ability to track scents, locate items and people, and indicate to her handler.

“The dog has to indicate when they’ve found something,” Brichon said. “If they come running back and don’t tell me that they’ve found something it’s not (helpful).”

On Saturday when Booker completed a missing person search, she barked to tell Brichon that she has located the victim.

According to Flannigan, this kind of indication is a key difference in how police dogs work and how search dogs work.

“At the end of a track there’s a pretty good chance … that the (police) dog would go in and bite the person,” Flannigan said.

Police dogs are trained to track human scent to apprehend criminals — by biting and not letting go — whereas search and rescue dogs are strictly trained to locate.

Flannigan is hoping to get more dogs and handlers involved with BRSAR’s canine program, but he wants to make sure volunteers know what they’re signing up for.

“We want people that are interested in search and rescue, so they have join (BRSAR) and take the basic courses,” Flannigan said, adding that courses include things like basic orienteering and first aid training.

Anyone who is interested can call the organization’s administrator Wendy at 204-726-3967 for more information.

» ewasney@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @evawasney
 

Correction:

Three changes have been made to this article online after an earlier version misspelled the last name of one of the people mentioned. It is Shannon Brichon, not Bichon. The article misidentified the breed of a dog featured in one of the photos, it is a Belgian Malinois, not Belgium. The name of one of the dog’s was misidentified, it’s Booker, not Hudson.