Our search and rescue dogs are trained to perform a wide area (wilderness) search as well as confined (rubble-disaster) area search with an active indication. Years of experience in the training of SAR (Search and Rescue) dogs has provided us with a solid system of teaching our dogs and their handlers.   Why deploy dogs for Search and Rescue? Until today there is no kind of equipment nor technology that can be compared to the power of a dog’s olfactory system. That said, the use of a highly trained SAR dog is extremely efficient and helpful during a search and rescue operation because it speeds up the search for up to 20 times faster compared to a man powered search. A SAR operation is a fight against time, as the person in distress can be in critical condition, every second matters and there is where the dog is irreplaceable. In Search and Rescue operations there are many ways that a specialized trained dog can be deployed and be of significant help to the rescue teams. Our working dogs are trained based on the air-scent way of searching in which the olfactory system of the dog is capturing the trained odour particles through the wind flow and turbulence.   Wilderness Search Greece is the third-most mountainous country in Europe with some 80% of its landmass covered by mountains and forest. Each year many individuals like climbers, hikers, hunters, elder people and kids are getting into life-threatening situations in the wild and the Greek hard-to-access terrain is a challenging factor for their safe recovery. Our teams operate in all kind of terrains all year round following our organization’s animal welfare-protocols and always in cooperation with state and volunteer rescue teams.   Rubble/Disaster Search The sight of a disaster location after an earthquake or a flood is for the most of us terrifying and thats for a reason, usually in disasters like these the volume of people in distress is enormous and time available to recover them safe is very short. Thats where specialized SAR dogs are totally irreplaceable since they provide extreme speed and accuracy compared to a man-powered search. Our “noses” are highly trained to locate the living person’s odour in every possible crack on a collapsed building or opening in the ground in order to indicate the exact spot of the person in need to the rescue and medical teams.