The Daviess County Search and Rescue (SAR) team, and especially the 11 dogs, put in hundreds of hours of training in order to provide capable and effective services. The SAR Team is certified to help locate individuals in distress, with scenarios ranging from a hiker lost in the woods to a missing child or wandering Alzheimer’s patient.
The team’s dogs are certified to do missions on both land and water, they serve across Daviess and neighboring counties.
Daviess County Emergency Management Agency Director Andy Ball said that most of the team is made up of volunteers aside from a few paid workers. The team is required to complete basic search and rescue classes, but has the opportunity to take more specialized training specific to their desires.
The dogs go through continuous training to refine their skills.
Each dog is assigned to a specific owner, whether before or after taking the classes, and they often undergo training together.
Tony Cilia and his dog Max have been trained for SAR for 9 years now, and Max has upwards of a thousand hours of training in his time.
“We usually go out at least twice a week, three hours each time, so we do a lot of training,” Cilia said.
And each training session isn’t the same.
The team uses each other and often their family members, pretend to be missing in different situations such as in the woods, in water, or even driving away vehicles.
Ginger Cain, one of the volunteers, said she thought it would be hard to put time into the organization while also having a family, but when she started to get involved she realized that she could engage her whole family in the experience.
“I don’t get to go to every call out. I don’t get to go to every training, but this team has done a great job of allowing me to bring up three kids at home and … allowing me to incorporate my kids into our training,” Cain said.
Ball said a typical month could involve no cases — which is good for the community, he said — while they’ve has as many as three in one month. When a case comes out, using self-submitted schedules, the team sends out a notification to all who are working and they respond as needed.
Even though they have about a 23-member team with 11 dogs, each dog is specialized in a variety of different skills including human remains detection, scent tracking, and others.
The team said that if anyone is interested in joining as a volunteer, they can head to this website to contact the team for ways to get involved.
