Search and rescue dogs serve on the frontlines locating people missing after natural disasters, lost children, injured hikers and others, being ready at a moment’s notice to bravely endure the elements and save lives. Supreme Master Ching Hai, world renowned humanitarian, artist and spiritual teacher, speaks of her admiration and concern for these devoted canines.

And I saw many dogs, you know, they used for rescue mission. Oh, they just walk in like nothing, but I feel so bad about them.

The dogs walk in the sharp, broken glasses or anything like that, even chemical leaking or anything, or germs or danger.

And these are precious dogs. They have been trained for years. And they even lay down their life for anyone at command. You have to protect that dog.

To show Her loving support for search dogs and their human partners, Supreme Master Ching Hai has generously contributed over US$80,000 to search-and-rescue teams in 18 countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Panama, the Philippines, Slovenia, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.

Today’s program features Search and Rescue Dogs Ontario, a courageous non-profit organization from Ontario, Canada, whose human volunteers and their superbly trained canine partners are always available to assist police agencies in saving lives. The group’s Coordinator and Training Director Dave Walker describes how a dog becomes a member of the group.

Usually, we acquire the dogs when they are around a year and a half, two years of age and we rescue some dogs from situations that weren’t good for the dogs. But most of these dogs were in homes that just didn’t fit them. They were getting stressed out from not working. (Okay). And so people would contact us and we would test the dog out.

Mr. Walker next explains the extensive training and testing required to be certified for search-and-rescue missions.

We train over a thousand hours a year. We have our full-time jobs that we do. Each one of us has our own careers that we are in. And we spend all day Saturday for eight, nine, 10 hours, and every Monday night we practice training for five, six, seven hours, plus there is maintenance of the dogs every day. There’s 24-hours a day.

And we have to certify every year to the provincial standards, which are governed by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and they have a two-day certification that we have to pass in order to use our dogs with the OPP.

The dogs are trained to conduct different types of searches; one is called “area searching,” in which a dog locates a person in a wide outdoor space by detecting the airborne scents emanating from them.

Area searching is when we hide a person out in a field up wind from the dog and we bring the dog out and we tell them to find a human. So the dog will search the field in a grid motion, back and forth, back and forth into the wind, and you’ll see the dogs alert and he will start pulling strongly and the partner lets the leash go and they go, and they find, and they bark. They stay with the person, bark, bark, bark until we come up. And then they get their reward.

We use the wind to help us because our body scent is in the wind. While we’re sitting here, we’re shedding off pieces of our skin whether we realize it or not. There are personal smells to each one of us and the dogs can actually pick those up in the air.

A second type of search is known as “article searching.”

We throw an article out with human scent on it. We will scent the article up against our body. We will throw it out there and then we will grid the same way. We will give the dog a different command to look for articles. He is not looking for a human. He is looking for an article with human scent on it, and so that’s what we grid. The dog, you saw from the alert, his nose comes up and he breaks away from the partner, and finds the article and brings it back to him.

We work down to metal objects, things like that. A lot of people, when they get lost, the first thing they lose nowadays is their cell phones. They drop it or lose it or something. So the dogs have to indicate on] metal objects, too, and they don’t hold scent as well as a cloth. Human searchers, searching fields like that, looking for an object like that, probably would never find it. But with a dog you can cover a thousand square meters in 10 to 15 minutes.

In search and rescue training the dogs are trained to use their noses to track where somebody has walked on the ground. They can smell the actual footprint on the ground. They can smell hundreds of times stronger than humans can, their sense of smell. So we can cover a thousand square meters in minutes with a dog, whereas with human searches it would take quite a number of them to do the same distance.

We will pause now and when we come back, we’ll see another training exercise that shows the superior search skills of these capable canines. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants featuring Search and Rescue Dogs Ontario, a group of five dedicated humans and their equally devoted canine partners. They provide no-cost assistance in locating lost or missing persons to any police agency in the province of Ontario or Canada, 24-hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

We can get called in the middle of the night. We can get called during work, when we are at work, our employers give us the time away to go. We have to use vacation time usually or something like that and take a day off work. We show up and we’re deployed with the rest of the police officers that are searching.

There are specialized search teams on the police departments that are trained and the search managers that manage them are specially trained on how to locate people quicker, scientifically. So Alzheimer’s people walk, for example, into the Sun, There are things like that, that we know from lost or missing people, their behavior, that allows us to find them quicker if we can narrow down the area or direction they took.

Let us now see another amazing training exercise which again shows that canines are truly blessed with extraordinary gifts from Heaven.

We use the toonie (Canadian $2 coin) as just an example of how keen the dog’s smell is. I mean, you threw it out there the first time and you wanted to go and find it again, you couldn’t see it out there. So it would have taken you probably an hour to find that out there. This is for when we are looking for small objects in grass like this. A victim may have lost jewelry or something and we are looking for something real small and we will grid back and forth. The dog is searching for small, small objects and because we don’t want them to pick them up and swallow them, like we do the big objects, we get them to down on it.

The next generation of search dogs are being trained today. Dave Walker now introduces us to some of the canine heroes of tomorrow.

This is the future of Search and Rescue Dogs Ontario right here. This is the little female I have. She is replacing Wile E. Wile E. is 12, so she is going to start training. We will probably try to certify her by this time next year. Hetty (Abma) has the two males and she is going to select one of those to replace Ryker who is due to retire in a year or two so it takes a year and a half to two years to train and certify so we are being proactive here. She’s got two males. One is Bronte and one is Neeko.

Safety of the canines while they work is of utmost importance. Proper training is vital to ensure their human partners can keep them away from dangerous situations.

Obedience is very important for the dogs. They must obey us when we are out in the community searching. We are working around roads with cars, distractions of other animals and things. They must be very obedient to our commands so they are not distracted. For safety reasons too they must come back when they are called immediately, that sort of thing because we are out working around traffic and cars and different things so obedience is very important.

As part of her ongoing, compassionate mission to ensure the well-being of all search and rescue canines, Supreme Master Ching Hai recently contributed US$1,000 to Search and Rescue Dogs Ontario for the purchase of needed canine protective gear.

I would like to thank Supreme Master Ching Hai very much for her generous donation for our safety vests and safety collars for the dogs for when they’re working at night.

The new vests will be of Gore-Tex material, which is high-visibility. We work the dogs at night a lot and they are searching off-leash, and sometimes they come out onto traffic or near roads. And it’s important that we be able to see them at night for safety, and also that other people and vehicles see them. So this high-visibility Gore-Tex material is going to replace our vests that we have for the dogs. It also helps in all weather that we work out in, all climates, in the rain and the snow.

And we also have a glow collar that’s going to be included with that. And this is battery operated, and it glows on the dogs at night so we can see the dog when he/she works at a great distance from us. So we really appreciate the donation from Supreme Master Ching Hai, the generous donation. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

Our gratitude Dave Walker and the other human and canine team members of Search and Rescue Dogs Ontario for selflessly devoting your time and energy to protecting the lives of others. May Providence always keep you safe, and bless you for your noble endeavors.

For more details on Search And Rescue Dogs Ontario, please visit

Thank you for joining us today on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. Up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News. May your lives be filled with ever greater peace, love and understanding.