Posted: May 22, 2014
EUGENE, Ore. – Four-year-old Maile vom Banach is one of the newest members of Lane County’s search and rescue team.
Both Maile and her handler Amy Hisaoka went through nearly a thousand hours of training to become a certified cadaver dog team.
“They can smell a lot more than we can,” Amy said. “They can pick up things that aren’t even on our radar.”
Search and rescue canines are used to help find missing, injured and deceased people on land and in the water.
“To them it’s just a game,” Amy said. “But to us it’s really important to, for to help that family get their loved one back.”
Search and rescue dogs are known to have found human remains from cold cases going back 20 years.
John Miller with Lane County Search and Rescuce said canines like Maile and Diesel save resources and shorten search times, usually finding subjects in urban, rural and wilderness areas more efficiently than large groups on foot.
“If somebody’s down, they can normally pick up the scent cone or the smell and find the subject fairly quickly,” he said.