This dog’s favourite game? Finding people
MEET Rowan. He is a lively, frisky mongrel with more than a trace of collie in his make-up. He has that endearing habit some dogs are blessed with of looking at you with one ear up and one ear down. He is a high-spirited scamp and an accomplished catcher of the tennis ball which owner Sheelagh O’Malley throws for him. He is also a potential life-saver.
Rowan has been enrolled on a course to become a search and rescue dog, locating casualties in remote countryside or on far-flung coasts. It is not a commitment lightly undertaken as it will take maybe two years to make the grade. And the reality is that most of the mutts which embark on the course do not reach the required standard.
Following the loss of Lilly and Hugo to illness in the past year, there are just three dogs in all of the Republic of Ireland at present which are qualified. One is in Kilkenny, one resides in Clonmel and the other is even further away, in West Cork.
This highly motivated, highly skilled trio is on call with their handlers to respond whenever anyone, anywhere in the country, from Carndonagh to Carnsore, goes missing.
Sheelagh is optimistic that Rowan will joinn the elite ranks, though training has only recently commenced. Thankfully, there are a number of other dogs almost ready for their assessments.
The Roundwood woman is an experienced member of the Glen of Imaal mountain rescuee team. As such, she appreciates the worth of a good canine nose, not only on the hillsides nearr her home but in any open country.
She came frustrating ly close h-to bringing another dog up to the mark, ton ly for Mani to drop out after three years of training. At the end of that time, he had all the skills but his hips proved not up to the task of covering the great swathes off open country the work demands. So now he stayss at home in Round wood,t.a much-loved family pet.
Instead,e it is Rowan that takes part in the weekly training sessions around the old leadd mines below the Wicklow Gap. He has beenn scanned to be sure that his pelvis is sound enoughh to take the strains of the work. However, there is still no guarantee that he will not follow his house-mate into early retirement as there are many pitfalls to be negotiated along the way.
Not only has Sheelagh confirmed that his hips are OK but he has also ticked another very important box: he has no interest whatever in livestock – sheepsheep, cattle or even goats – which would distract him from whatever more important task is in hand. His mind instead focuses entirely on what he thinks is a game, played with Sheelagh, of search and discovery. The training is supervised locally by Henry Smith, chairman of Search and Rescue Dogs Association (SARDA) of Ireland and a former member of DublinDublin-Wicklow mountain rescuerescue.
The acronym SARDA has a nice ring to it and looks especially well when laminated on to a dog’s coat in lettering similar to that used by the Garda Síochána.
Henry pioneered the use of dogs in Ireland when he brought Morse into the country in the 1990s after attending a conference in the UK. The
import became something of a legend in rescue circles during a career which extended to more than a decade of searches.
The protocol among the members of the various rescue teams dictates that they are reluctant to talk about the details of their various missions. Successful searches promptly accomplished may never attract any publicity while they prefer to respect family privacy in higher profile cases.
Nevertheless, Henry reveals that it was not unknown for him to be swept off with Morse at short notice by helicopter to Donegal or some other far-off destination in emergencies.
These days, his role is confined to training as he has not discovered a replacement, though he has come close. He coached a collie-cum-springer known as Nemo for the work, only for his wife Debbie to insist that Nemo is a pet and not a working dog.
Henry and Sheelagh agree that collies, or collie-crossbreds, are the most likely to make good candidates though there are no hard and fast rules. Labradors or German shepherds may also pass muster but the larger breeds are slower to learn, are more prone to hip problems, and do not live as long.
When Mani was obliged to drop out of conten- tion earlier this year and revert to the fireside at the O’Malley house in Roundwood, Sheelagh put the word out on social media that she was looking for a replacement.
A reply came in, not from any specialised breeder, but from a woman who had seen an abandoned one-year-old which was in line to be put down at a pound in Kilkenny. Sheelagh’s first sighting of this unlikely candidate was on a Facebook video where Rowan showed off in front of the camera playing with a ball. His cavorting indicated that he was obsessed with the ball and ‘obsessed’ is a quality which SARDA members recognise as valuable.
‘ They have to be ready to go all the time,’ explains his owner. ‘ They have to live for doing the work.’
SHE guesses that he may have been put in the pound because of his relentless energy, which some owners might find impossible to live with: ‘He never stops. He does not have an off button. So he needs a job.
‘Rowan is a very fast learner, a very clever dog. Three months on and he is already barking at a ‘find’. Next he has to learn to come back to me and bark when he makes the find.’
The discipline demanded in this line of work is completely different to that of a perfectly behaved guide dog or of a head-down tracker which follows a scent. The commitment of mountain rescue volunteers, who operate under the Red Cross umbrella, goes beyond the merely admirable.
Henry came to the work after enjoying the hiking and camping side of scouting. Sheelagh, who lists hill running among her hobbies, is employed selling walking holidays. Both have a natural affinity with the outdoors but on to that they have grafted high standards of first aid qualification which could prove vital when a casualty is located.
They pay tribute to their spouses (Debbie Harvey-Smith and Ciarán Hughes respectively) who have accepted that their loved ones will spend long periods working on their skills or called out at short notice. Maybe it is not just the dogs that are obsessed! To an already stiff volunteer workload is added the SARDA training programme, with regular runs around the slopes and old mines on Camaderry Mountain most Saturdays.
It is a team exercise under Henry Smith’s supervision, conducted with permission from Parks & Wildlife. Local farmer Martin Stacey provides sheep on some days and Rowan’s reaction to the flock is assessed by Seán’s colleague Seán Nolan. Most important members of the team are the ‘dogsbodies’, such as Alan Saunders from Bray and Tom McNamee, who travels from LaoisL to take part.
Their role is to lie concealed for hours on end ini undergrowth or behind a rock for the trainee tot sniff out. They pass the time, the long periods ofo stillness wrapped in a bivvy-bag, reading a bookb or listening to podcasts on headphones whilew waiting to be discovered.
The most important factor in a search is likely to be the direction of the wind. It is quite possible for dogs to pass within a few metres of casualties when the breeze is not favourable, but they are capable of making the find from long range if downwind.
Also starting training at the moment are Simba, with Glen of Imaal rescue team chairman Brendan Byrne, and Ella, a puppy owned by Martina O’Kearney Flynn who lives in Glenmalure. SARDA stages nationaln training meetings every six weeks where a dozen owner-and-animal pairs may be present from all arounda Ireland.
‘As far as the dogs are concerned, it’sit a game,’ muses Henry.
The business of search and rescuer has been transformed by mobile phones which often allow injuredn mountaineers or lost hikers ring for assistance. A phone signal is the most reliable way of finding someones in distress.
Nevertheless, there is still a demand for canine skills: phone coverage is patchy in remote areas; phone batteriesb may go down; or injury may preventp a casualty making a call.
Increasingly, rescue services are called in to locate Alzheimer patients who have gone missing.
The dogs are ideal for combing large areas of undergrowth where two-legged personnel find the going tricky. They can work at night in circumstances when other rescuers are stood down because of the darkness.
Henry reckons that Morse, his former partner, was responsible for saving at least three human lives. Sheelagh hopes that before too long Rowan will be following in his noble paw prints.
Whether he graduates with full SARDA honours remains to be seen but his owner is already devoted: ‘He is very cute and I am mad
about him.’