| About us | Call-Out | How to Help | Site map |  

  

Massachusetts Rescue and Recovery K9 Unit

MARK9 is a charitable, non-profit volunteer search and rescue unit dedicated to the training of search and rescue dogs, handlers and support personnel in order to provide professional and highly-skilled search and rescue canine teams in the event of an emergency response event.  Our main focus is on response to missing person incidents. The first priority of MARK9 is to save lives.

MARK9 is not a dog training club or social organization.

MARK9 will seek to certify canines that assertively seek out human scent, reliably follow that scent to source and independently indicate the find.

MARK9 encourages the training and deployment of strong, confident, independent, hunt-driven canines so as to make more likely the rapid resolution of missing person searches.

MARK9 requires its wilderness air scent search dogs to have a strong trained indication. Most MARK9 air scent dogs perform a trained indication at the handler and refinds to the subject. Any which are cross-trained for structural collapse with a USAR team are expected to stay with the subject and perform a bark alert as their trained indication. Search dogs which are used exclusively for wilderness may elect whether to use a bark alert or a trained indication at the handler along with a refind. Dogs are not permitted to cross-train in both forms of trained indication, as our experience is that training both a refind-behavior and a bark alert at the subject causes some deterioration of one or both of the learned behaviors.

 

                                                        

 

 

 

MARK9 is an all volunteer, non-profit 501 (c) 3 organization.

 

Home | About Us Callout | Sitemap

Copyright © 2007, Massachusetts Rescue and Recovery K9 Unit, Inc. All rights reserved.

Questions or comments about the content or usability of this site? Contact us.