We recently had Lowland rescue Ground Scenting dogs into our premises to help them train their dogs. They are a volunteer organisation who are on call 24/7 to assist the Police in the search for missing vulnerable people.
Lowland rescue work with missing people and are funded by the People’s Postcode Lottery Dream Fund, and a have launched a national initiative, known as the Search Dog Heroes project.
The Search Dog Heroes project will deliver awareness to thousands of families nationally whose loved-ones are living with dementia, learning disabilities or mental health problems; all of which are linked with high risk disappearances, by delivering educational tools to advise on how to prevent disappearances and how to prepare for them. This includes how to capture a person’s scent and safely store it in case the worse happens, through a designed scent toolkit.
As part of the 2 year funded project, their aim is to train 100 new search dogs and handlers, many of the dogs being ground-scenting who can drastically reduce search areas and quickly find a missing person using articles of scent. The project will ensure an improved national response to high risk missing persons by working with agencies involved in responding to a disappearance to work better together to improve referral process, response rates and awareness.
Volunteers from all over the UK including Northern Ireland and Jersey have travelled to take part in a number of training workshops with a highly respected instructor.
Joanne Armstrong, from Search Dogs Heroes Training team said - "In order for these workshops to take place we require a variety of training areas, different terrain and environments to cater for each dogs development needs and rely heavily upon goodwill from private individuals and entities such as yourselves to provide such areas.
Henley College not only allowed the use of land and woods for training the dogs but also allowed access to car parking facilities for which we are exceptionally grateful. Your generosity made the running of our workshop very straightforward and provided some exciting trails for some of our more advanced dogs.
Thank you on behalf of all involved in the Search dog Heroes project"
Click here if you'd like to visit the Lowland Rescue website to find out more.
If you are interested in finding out about hiring our facilities, visit our facilities section of the website
