Search And Rescue Dog Association

SARDA England's search dogs are trained to 'Air Scent', this means they do not as a general rule track the missing person. The dogs will react to a human scent being blown towards them by the wind or air currents. This means that as long as the dog is searching downwind of a casualty, or items which have human scent on them, they should find them.

In bad conditions a dog can cover large areas of ground in the search for a missing person. The dog is very sensitive to any human scent it finds and will immediately follow that scent to where a human is located. It will then indicate to its' handler to let them know it has had a 'Find'.

It matters not whether it is dark or very poor visibility, the dog can search just as well as if it were a clear day.

If there is no wind or it is storm force the human scent will not carry as far, before it is recognised by the dog. The handler will then compensate for this by shortening their sweeps of the area. This will take more time to search an area, to get a high Probability of Detection.

There are no substantial POD (probability of detection) figures for search dogs but in excess of 96% of the dogsbodies on assessment are found.