Where are the mountains in Berkshire?” and “Where do you rescue your dogs from?” are two of the questions that Daryl Toogood is asked most by curious bystanders and he’s very keen to set the record straight.
We’re out on Chobham Common, near Sunningdale, on a beautiful, crisp February morning with a dozen or so volunteers from all over Berkshire, from Newbury and Mortimer to Bracknell, and beyond, who are accompanied, most importantly, by their pet dogs.
“We’re a non-profit volunteer charity working 24/7, 365 days a year, helping Thames Valley Police and other Lowland Search teams to look for and locate missing and vulnerable people,” explains Daryl, who founded the team in 2002, with his wife Niki.
He had the idea when he was teaching outdoor pursuits in the Lake District and Wales. “I moved to Bracknell, but I could see the application of the idea, supporting the police,” says Daryl, who is a paramedic.
Members of the 20-strong team come from all walks of life, from legal secretaries and RP professionals, to architects and from paramedics to RAC patrol men.
In the last three years, the team has been called out between 20 and 40 times a year to help
locate missing persons in Berkshire and other counties in the south of England. Very often they are asked to search for elderly people who may have become disorientated and strayed from their home or hospital, or for vulnerable people who are likely to harm themselves. Before he founded the Berkshire group, Daryl was a member and founder of the Thames Valley Search and Rescue team, Lowland Search Dogs Thames Valley, that tragically discovered the body of Dr David Kelly, the government scientist at the centre of the controversial dossier on Iraq, near his Oxfordshire home.
Last summer during Royal Ascot, the team was called out to look for an elderly woman who had strayed from Heatherwood Hospital. While she was later found safe and well, the rescue dogs were searching the heavily wooded hospital grounds when they came across a race goer.
Recalls Daryl: “He’d been in some sort of altercation at the races and been chased into the woods. He’d been hiding there for hours and was in quite a state when the dogs found him. We helped him find his way out of the woods and took him back to the train station.”
Finding someone in a densely wooded area cannot be easy for a dog, even when he knows that person’s scent from an item of clothing but, as Daryl explained, the team dogs are trained to sniff out any human.
The average person loses 40,000 flakes of skin a minute and 80 per cent of these are carried on the air. Standing across the wind, the dogs scent this and follow the trail.
Pete Shepherd, from Borden in Hampshire, is the group’s training officer. “Our dogs are pets first and go through a rigorous training assessment programme before becoming operational,” he explains.
It’s his job to prepare a training plan for the dogs, which are all at varying levels of searching expertise. Briefly there are levels of training. Level 1 is for beginners, while Level 2 and Level 3 are fully operational. A Level 3 dog must search an area of around 40 to 50 acres of woodland in a 90 minute period. The dogs are taught to locate a person and then return to their handler. They repeat this, backwards and forwards, from victim to handler until he or she is found.
The dogs and their owners are expected to attend weekly training sessions, but must practice at home as often as possible.
Obviously the best-suited breeds for this type of work are working dogs, such as spaniels, retrievers and collies, but there are several other breeds that have proved adept, too. Take for example Sakari, a British Inuit, which looks like a wolf, but which, owner Mandy Partridge assures me, is very gentle. Daryl’s Border Collie, Guinness, is the most experienced canine team member.
Usually the dogs search for a person who has hidden in the woods for a period of time, or occasionally a dummy that’s been hidden the night before an exercise, but this time my 10-year-old daughter, Sophie, volunteered to be ‘found’.
She hid in a clump of gorse bushes, around 40 metres from a track on the common, while Guinness was about half a mile away. Yet after only three minutes of searching, the dog had located her and was alerting Daryl. After an exuberant licking on the face from Guinness, Sophie emerged safe and well.
In 2005 the team received a small grant from the National Lottery and they’ve recently secured sponsorship from Moor Cottage Veterinary Surgery in Bracknell, which means they get discounted vet’s bills, but volunteering still costs money.
Daryl estimates members shell out around £700 a year on heavy-duty clothing, two-way radios and other essential equipment. They’re also finding it increasingly difficult to find large areas of ground which are available to search.
“We do a lot of our training at The Look Out, in Bracknell,” says Daryl, but we’re really looking for landowners who’ll let us use their land for our searches sometimes.” The team is also looking for other sponsors who can supply relevant services, clothing and other necessary items.
Says Peter: “We do this because we enjoy it and of course, at the end of the day, when you do help find someone, there is a real feel-good factor.”
This summer you can catch the Berkshire Search and Rescue Dog team at several events, including the Highclere Country Show and Hurst Country Fayre.
For more information about
Berkshire Search and Rescue Dogs
visit http://www.k9-sar.com
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