When Someone Goes Missing: For CARDA Dogs, Searching Is a Labor of Love

Raezor on a wilderness search in the Northern California mountains. photo: Kristi Moutard

The call for a search can come at any time, day or night, for a CARDA dog handler. Time is of the essence when a person goes missing. Both handler and dog must be ready to respond.

CARDA stands for the California Rescue Dog Association, an all-volunteer, nonprofit, mutual aid K-9 group. Established in 1976, it’s now one of the largest search dog organizations in the country, with nearly 125 certified dog teams ready to respond to missions anywhere in California and sometimes beyond. 

Teams are certified in a variety of disciplines such as area, trailing, cadaver, water, and avalanche search.  CARDA members must be ready to leave their families and often take time from their paid professions to answer the call to search for a missing person.  

This time, the call is for a missing woman with dementia who walked away from her home the previous morning.  A CARDA trailing dog team, trained to follow the specific scent of the missing person, has tracked the woman into a drainage area. Now area dog teams, trained to find a missing person in the wilderness, are being used to help find the woman. 

The hundreds of hours of training required for certification, as well as time spent on searches, creates a strong bond between a search dog and a handler.  This love, trust, and respect is what makes the team flow together in the field.  Handler and dog communicate during the search effort, often without words, as the handler reads what the dog is saying while it traverses through the vegetation ahead of the handler.  A slight head turn can mean the dog has gotten a whiff of the missing person.  A hard turn in one direction or another likely means there’s a strong scent of the person and the dog will take off to follow it up, prompting the handler to abandon their search pattern and follow their dog.

In today’s search, an area dog team is one of several teams searching in the drainage area, hoping to find the missing woman.  Paired with a ground team member from the local county search team, they head out on their assignment. Raezor, a black-and-white dog with both herding and hunting ancestry, diligently ranges ahead of her handler, looking for any trace of human scent.  CARDA dogs include a wide variety of dog breeds, from mixed breeds like Raezor to purebred dogs such as Labs, Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, and Border Collies, to name a few.  All CARDA dogs must have stamina and a drive to work, among other qualities. 

As the search goes on, Raezor covers the ground, checking through brush, traversing hillsides and large rocks to try to find the missing person. Her primary search discipline is for live people, but she’s also passed a test showing that she can find a missing person even if they are deceased, a sad outcome but always a possibility during searches.  A search dog team is one of many tools used to help bring a missing person home or at least to bring answers to their family.  

Continuing the search, Raezor and her handler find the entrance to a mine.  Mines are a known hazard in this area, and they can be dangerous. Raezor carefully checks the entrance, looking for human scent that would tell her that the missing person might be inside.  She is thorough in her sniffing, and once satisfied, moves past it without going in. The handler marks the mine on the GPS and map for the debrief that will happen with the command team later and, trusting the dog, moves on to finish covering the rest of their assigned area.

Nearing the border of their area, they receive a radio call from the command post advising all teams to return to base.  The dog handler and the ground searcher teammate look at one another knowingly.  This call often means that the missing person has been found. The drive back to the command post is quiet as they wait to learn the outcome.

In the debriefing, the command team downloads the GPS tracks from the dog’s tracking collar, which creates a colored track on a computer map to show what that team covered, a helpful record for future assignments.  It isn’t until the teams step away from debriefing that they are told the missing person has been found and is safely enroute back to base.

The CARDA dog team stands by as the missing woman is brought into base to be reunited with her anxiously waiting husband.  She is helped out of the vehicle and, seeing her husband, exclaims, “There you are!  I’ve been looking for you!”  Her husband melts into tears and embraces her.  The handler and Raezor quietly make their way to their vehicle, the handler wiping tears away as well.   

As Raezor loads into the truck, her handler hugs her and whispers, “You did a good job today. I love you.” That’s all the reward a CARDA dog needs.