Who do SARDA Dog Teams help?

• Lost hikers and walkers
• Accident or Crime Victims
• Confused and disoriented people
• Sick and injured casualties
• Avalanche or landslide victims

Our friendly and highly trained dog teams will help find people lost virtually anywhere including mountains, hills, fields, and bogs; forestry and dense cover, waterside and seashore; and also urban areas.

• Confused, distressed or disoriented people who may have wandered away from homes or hospitals
• Mountain hikers and climbers trapped on the mountains due to injury, navigation failure or weather
• Accident victims
• Victims of natural or manmade disasters such as avalanches, floods, explosions and fires

Callouts

Our qualified Search Dog teams can be tasked nationwide by the Gardai, fellow Mountain Rescue Ireland Teams, or The Irish Coast Guard.

Public requests for SARDA Ireland assistance on a missing person search should be made through the Gardaí (112/999 as usual).

Deployment

During a search, SARDA dog teams are directed by the lead search and rescue agency responsible for operational control of the incident and work in close cooperation with all state and voluntary services involved.  Through the Gardaí, the Irish Coast Guard and the Irish Air Corps, dog teams may be flown to distant search sites if necessary.

Operational Considerations

Area coverage

On arrival each dog/handler team is assigned a search area. Handlers work their dogs into the wind or cover the area in a way that provides dogs with the best scenting opportunity. Handlers map out the area they have covered and report their probability of detection (POD) to the overall search coordinator on completing their assignments.

Terrain coverage

Search dogs will quickly search large areas of ground and can reach areas inaccessible to humans. They are extremely effective in the very situations where human sight is most limited: in the dark, in dense woods or heavy brush, in debris and even under snow cover.

Weather conditions

The dogs can work anytime, day or night, in all kinds of weather.

Visibility

Since the dogs use their noses not their eyes, they can search effectively when other visual resources are hampered by dark or foggy conditions. 

Duration

The dog teams will work as long as is required, with regular brief rest periods in between. The temperature, the handler and dog’s endurance, the type of terrain etc, can all affect how long they work. 

Scent contamination of area

Other people who have been in the area and have since left will have little effect on the dog’s effectiveness (e.g. previous search teams), but since the dogs detect any human scent they will find any person who is currently in the area. The dog is merely rewarded and sent off to find anyone else in the area.

SARDA Ireland is focused on training and deploying search dog teams to search for missing people. We are sometimes confised with a dog rescue or dog training ordanisations, however, we operate as a mountain rescue team, and volunteers are team members and dog handlers are expected to qualify a dog and be on-call for missing person searches across Ireland. Some things we do not do:

• We are not a dog training club or facility
• We do not rescue or rehome dogs
• We cannot respond to callouts from private individuals – the public should call the Gardai in all missing person incidents