When disaster strikes in Nova Scotia, a specially trained team of dogs and their handlers is ready to answer the call for help.
This elite K-9 unit can sniff through rubble and wilderness to find survivors and save lives. There’s only a handful of these teams in Canada.
Agile, energetic, playful and hardworking, these are the qualities that make Labrador retriever, Vaz, stand out as a member of Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 5.
Russell Brown is the K-9 team lead, and says their dogs are trained to detect a human’s scent, searching with their noses in the air. They’re equipped to sniff out survivors buried beneath rubble after a building collapse. They’ve also added wilderness search and rescue to their portfolio.
“If there have been a lot of people who have been searching the area already, it doesn’t affect our dogs because our dogs are trained to ignore residual odour,” he said. “They don’t find articles. They don’t care if there have been 100 people in the woods looking before us.”
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Russell calls the work a longtime passion, having studied animal behaviour before becoming a firefighter.
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