Search and Rescue dogs in the Netherlands

Er is ook een Nederlandse versie.

Search and Rescuedogs

in the Netherlands

Ben de Lange 06-55895961

There are several groups active with search and rescue dogs in the Netherlands.
Most of them train for missing persons and disaster work but also some do tracking and water work.
The use of rescue dogs has become more widespread lately but the authorities are in general quite slow in requesting the help of dog teams. Most of the times it is more then 24 hours after a person is missed that the dog teams are called. Since the Rescue dog teams are all volunteer organizations there is no cost for the requesting party.

Recently the government takes a more active role. This was triggered by the Turkish earthquakes where no "official" Dutch sardog team was active. There were however 2 private Dutch teams and one Belgian-Dutch Sar team. Also more recent there was a fireworksexplosion in the city of Enschede (18 people killed) where no civil sardogs were deployed. Now a Urban Search And Rescue team is created of 150 people that will be operational in 2003. This team will get high tech stuff to locate people like camera's, sensitive microphones. The national police will provide dogs for this team. Unfortunately there are no plans at the moment to use civil SAR-dogs in this team. Unless there will be a national SAR-dog organisation in which all the local groups will cooperate there is not much chance that this will change in the future.

On December 19 2004 the first official Dutch test for Urban search and Rescue dogs have been held.
Three of the six teams succeeded for the test and will be called by the national police in case of a disaster, gasexplosion or alike.
It is the first step towards more use of volunteer rescue dogs by the police.

Disaster work	Area search	Tracking
Avalanche training	Water search	Pictures from a search
SAR-dog art	SAR Puppy	Recent training
Interesting links	Literature	History
New searchdog Chanouk