Ground SAR South Africa

Come and say hi - we will be there!

Join us at Broederstroom for the trailblazing Outdoor & Adventure Expo: 16-18 August 2024! Forward this email to a friend Having trouble viewing this? Best venue for an Outdoor ExpoSA's Hottest NEWOutdoor and Adventure Expo16-18 August 2024Broederstroom near Hartbeespoort Dam Calling all outdoor enthusiasts and aspiring adventurers for a revolutionary experience that promises to reset all...

This week GroundSAR was privileged to be able attend a SAR workshop given by Miguel Carbajal and his international team.

Thank you Miguel, Louis and Eddie for your passion while teaching us the fundamentals of not only rubble search, but also on how to motivate a working dog. We have all learned an extraordinary amount in just 2 short days!

A big thank you also to Clinton Cilliers for facilitating the workshop and to the mine for not only allowing us to use their premises, but for even building us a rubble hiding hole.

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Our team has been busy sourcing disaster training sites and starting disaster training. Our dogs are already trained to find people in wilderness areas - disaster searches are a little different...

We also have a new kid on the block: Michelle's pup Vulcan is starting his journey as a SAR dog!

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A huge shout out to all supporters of K9 Search and Rescue, we appreciate each and every one of you💙

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Making new friends and keeping our dogs entertained at Outdoor X - we will be there again today and have some demos lined up too, so come and find us!

A special thank you to Micon Coatings for our beautiful branding!

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We are at the Outdoor X with K9 Search and Rescue Association of South Africa . Come and meet us and our dogs!

A special thank you to Micon Coatings for our beautiful branding!

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In reference to the social media post about K9SAR dogs and depression- Smart Tac Search and Rescue we think it is important for everyone to understand that whilst dogs do have emotions, the situation that is in the original post and the 911 dogs, is unlikely to be ptsd or depression from finding deceased victims. To that point, the picture in the article on social media is not of a dog that has been hospitalised, none of the South African Police Service Sar K9’s, Smart Tac Sar or K9 Search and Rescue Association of South Africa k9s were hospitalised. They are all home happy and being trained, relaxing, working etc.

When we train a sar dog we are training it to look for odour, in the same way a detection dog is trained to search for drugs, explosives etc. The dog is rewarded for getting as close to the source of odour as it can and then telling us with a trained alert. There is no reason for a dog to get depressed for finding the odour of live or deceased. Now, where sar dogs can be impacted is if they have not been trained properly environmentally I.e used to the sounds, sites, terrain, long hours, living in unknown conditions, meeting lots of people etc. We are very diligent about ensuring our dogs are used to all of this and for that matter it’s a very good reason why people should NOT take a detection dog, imprint it to human odour and then call it a sar dog. The other thing that could happen is the dog getting demotivated. If a dog is used to a one to one relationship on finding odour and receiving reward, it can get demotivated on scene. When you are searching in a situation like the George collapse, there are times when the dog alerts and you can not reward it in the same way it is used to or maybe at all. In addition we often ask the dog to re check its work asking for repeat alerts with no reward until the end of the checks. In these cases it’s very important for the handler to ensure they do a find and give a huge reward maybe away from the disaster site and have trained the dog on a variable reward schedule so it does not expect to get rewarded each and every time. This way the dog does not get demotivated, it’s just happy to get rewarded when it does.

Sorry for the long reply we just feel it’s important to help friends and supporters of our K9’s understand better.

Please feel free to share this if you feel it will help.

A relaxed and happy Chaos the morning after arriving back from George.

We are very excited that we will be at the Outdoor X with K9 Search and Rescue Association of South Africa . Come and meet us and our dogs!

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Don't forget to join us tomorrow 😁🐶

Dust off your tekkies - only 2 weeks to go!

Ground SAR South Africa

Our volunteer hiders really do go the extra mile!

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How exciting!

Wierdabrug Animal Hospital

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We pay our volunteer hiders in rainbows, sunsets and dog cuddles - thank you Kati for the beautiful pics!

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There's a moment of connection between a dog and handler that is magic, and that is the moment when a dog returns to its handler to "tell" them that he has found a missing person, full of excitement and anticipation.

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🐾 Visit www.gsar.co.za to see how you can get involved.