Very honored and excited to meet up with a team of warriors, the K9 Rescue Dog unit when I was Travelling to Bangkok, Thailand. This is absolutely an eye opener experience of my life time.
Thai Rescue Dog Association is an all volunteer, non profit organisation proud to serve and save life during nature disasters. This K-9 unit is also recognise as a member of the The International Rescue Dog Organisation (IRO).
The IRO is the worldwide representation for 116 national rescue dog organisations from 41 countries on all continents providing the frame by setting up events, activities and trainings within which its members can achieve their personal goals: from the easygoing dog owner wanting to train with his best friend to the highly specialised deployment task team wanting to practice for the case of emergency.
The Unforgettable Experience
Knowing that training a good and professional emergency rescue personal is difficult enough, what about training a normal dog to be as professional could be even more difficult. Nothing is better then experiencing myself, hands on to the rescue training to know more.
In this Search And Rescue (SAR) Training experience training, I am glad to be given a chance to team up with a handful real life of volunteers, Mr.Moo (President of SAR Thailand), Soo (Experience SAR Rescuer), and few other newly joined volunteer team. Together with us will be the K9, Zambezi (English Setter), Rockie (Doberman), Savannah (Golden Retriever), and Kiwi (Chihuahua).
Recruiting volunteer to such Organization is never easy. Many volunteer come and go as this is not a routine things we though as easy. Only few stayed for the very passionate and mission oriented person. Those who committed fully knows that this is never a heroic task, because Volunteer does not necessary have the time, they just have the heart.
During the two days training sessions, few disaster situation was created to be as real as a happening disaster to train both SAR Dog and its handler to face difficult situations at all time. Includes Collapsed Building and Missing Person. Success rate can never be guarantee, only constant training and deployment experience improve each K9 and Handler during each Search and Rescue missions.
So training hard and training smart is always the key for K9 SAR Team to constantly improve themselves as a team between the Handler and K9. Rescue Mission is always a dangerous games, each mistake is a closing to fatal. They take no chance for error.
Every training is important to get both K9 and their handlers to be physically and mentally prepared while Every real mission and deployments are unique and never the same.
The Rescue-Dog Competence
Being a professional partner of the UN who gives the directive for deployment of search and rescue dogs at big disasters, IRO not only guarantees the quality of training of them but is also able to quickly react to problems in practical experience and effectively realize improvement. These teams have already proven themselves in numerous missions.
What Does It Take To Be Part Of A S.A.R. Team?
There is no rules stated that who can or can’t be a S.A.R team. If this post trigger your interest to be one of them, my advice is just remember to ask yourself :
- Are you willing to sacrifice your every weekend to train with your dog for 4-5 hours?
- Are you ready to get your hand dirty to search in mud, to work under extreme situations like under the hot sun, to soak in your own sweat continuously for long hours?
