In their continuing effort to better serve the citizens of Sunflower County and the surrounding area, individual members, as well as the Sunflower County Search & Rescue squad as a whole, are continually striving to improve.
Most recently, S&R President Stan Bennett and his K-9 companion, Budro, earned national recognition through the United States Mantrailing Association.
Bennett and his dog participated in a five-day evaluation at an Alabama state park and received certification for fulfilling the requirements of the Level I standards, which includes accurately completing an aged trail in a contaminated area and identifying the correct person at the end of the trail.
Of the 15 or so persons and their canine partners who took part in the certification trail activity, Bennett and Budro were the only ones who passed it.
Bennett said the trail they put his dog on was 23.5 hours old, but his dog ran it to perfection. “I trailed down a gravel road through a park where they had campers lined up, people camping and cooking on a grill, kids playing, dogs barking, trailed back up through some woods and found the person,” he said.
Bennett said the smell of grilling burgers was in the air as his dog followed the trail and even though Budro brushed up against a camper where some children were playing the dog never raised his head. “He just kept on going. They (the observers) could tell I knew what I was doing and the dog knew what he was doing,” Bennett said.
According to Bennett, the woman his dog successfully found had intentionally left her scent around two underground bunkers in an attempt to fool Budro. “She had walked all around that bunker and then she came around and jumped over the wall and got in here (pointing to a picture of the bunker where she was found) and got up next to the wall where you couldn’t see her.”
He said the dog checked both bunkers, but went into the one where the woman was hiding so he shined his flashlight into the hole, “And there she was,” he said. Bennett said all of the observers were amazed because typically bloodhounds will not enter dark spaces. He said they have a very peculiar nature and don’t like change.
He emphasized that each trail activity leading up to the certification trail was to see how well the dogs worked with distractions. “They evaluate the dogs to see if they are good enough to run the certification trail,” he said.
Bennett said the distractions included people jogging, a lady on a moped who stopped to talk to him and even a person scooping up horse poop in a barn and walking across the trail.
He was in Alabama from November 13 through November 17 for the evaluations, but was not told until Saturday that he would have the opportunity to certify.
The training required for bloodhounds to even get them to the level where they can be certified is arduous and involves a lot of repetition. And Bennett also mentioned that bloodhounds are “short-life dogs” with only about a 10-year life span so they are continually training young dogs as replacements.
