WHEN:
Dogs needed to begin training by Oct 1.

WHERE:
Seeking volunteers throughout the state of California.

WHY:
America needs more than 450 certified Canine Search Teams to adequately respond to disasters in our country, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and landslides. Right now, there are less than half that many, and experienced teams are retiring every year.

CONTACT:
Terry Miller, program director, National Disaster Search Dog Foundation via phone, 888-459-4376 x 109, or e-mail: programdirector@ndsdf.org

ABOUT THE SDF:
Founded in 1996, SDF addresses a critical gap in America’s emergency response network by producing highly trained search and rescue dog teams to find people buried alive in the aftermath of national disasters ranging from earthquakes and mudslides to collapsed buildings, such as the World Trade Center rubble after 9/11 terrorists attacks.

Headquartered in Ventura County, California, SDF is the only organization in the U.S. that recruits rescued dogs, gives them professional, ongoing training, and partners them with firefighters and other first responders at no cost to their departments. The organization obtains the dogs from shelters and breed-rescue groups, and currently has over 60 teams located in California, Florida, Oklahoma, New York, and Baja California.

For more information, visit http://www.searchDogFoundation.org

The study focuses on 27 dogs that assisted in relief efforts at the site, many of which remained deployed throughout the 37-week cleanup operation. Both short-term and long-term health assessments were conducted.

According to the study, about 63 percent of the dogs had some type of health disorder during the first week, including fatigue, eye irritation, respiratory tract problems, decreased appetite, dehydration and cuts.

What surprised the study’s authors, however, was that only mild and infrequent health conditions were identified during the 5-year follow-up period.

None of the dogs, according to the study, was identified as having chronic respiratory tract disease or any type of blood disorder.

Nineteen of the 27 dogs were still alive and apparently healthy five years later. In fact, the 5-year mortality rate of the 27 working dogs examined in the study was similar to the rate for a control group of household pets and law enforcement dogs that had not been dispatched to the site.

“The general good health of the dogs studied was an unexpected result,” said Philip Fox, DVM, the study’s lead author and director of the Caspary Research Institute of the Animal Medical Center in New York City. “The dogs appeared to be unaffected in the long term by their exposure to the smoke, dust and toxins they encountered while working at the World Trade Center site.

The findings are in contrast to some human emergency responders who worked at the site, as various studies have identified increases in the rates of illness and the severity of various symptoms of respiratory tract disease.

The reason that the dogs appeared to suffer so few long-term health conditions may be due to differences between human and animal airways and differences in lung defense mechanisms.

In other words … dogs are tough! /Gary