Mountain Canine Corps

MC²

Interested in becoming a member of MCC?

We are happy you are interested in joining Mountain Canine Corps! MCC members contribute in a number of ways to the team; some people function as support specialists and others as canine handlers of their search dogs. Yet others provide important practice, training, and testing assistance for our team members. All of these contributions are critical for our team’s success as they help our team members, both human and canine, achieve and maintain mission readiness. We are all volunteers.

Here’s some information to let you know what to expect from the team and what will be expected of you. Whatever your desire for your ultimate team function, you must minimally be willing to:

1) learn, improve, and share your knowledge of important skills for search and rescue (SAR), such as wilderness medicine, navigation, map and compass, clue awareness, GPS use, and communication,

2) if you will be going on missions, take and pass the PACE/ICS-100 examination,

3) become knowledgeable in canine search work and scent theory,

4) be physically fit in a manner that meets or exceeds your team functions,

5) equip yourself properly for your team functions, and

6) help others achieve and maintain mission readiness and contribute to team needs.

Each of these items is further explained below.

1) Learning, improving, and sharing your knowledge of SAR skills
To find out if SAR and MCC are a good fit for you, you are welcome to attend our team’s practice sessions. Not only are these sessions important for learning about SAR and continuing to learn and share new skills, but also regularly working with your teammates is critical for getting to know your fellow teammates well. If you are interested in training your dog, you must initially attend these sessions without your dog.

In whatever capacity you are interested in joining the team, please contact our current new member coordinator. The new member coordinator will email out practice and meeting information to team candidates. Once you transition to a provisional team member, you will become part of the team member email list and will receive team information via that email list. You become a provisional member with an application, which requires endorsement by two full team members, and positive vote on your application by the MCC board. This process helps ensure that you and the team have had the chance to get acquainted. To become a full member, after some time as a provisional member, another positive vote by the board is required. This allows time for all team members to get a chance to work with you and voice their opinion on your potential abilities to the board.

You will be expected to regularly attend team field practices and training functions. MCC trains together twice per week, on Sundays and Thursday nights. The team expectation of new members is that everyone attend a majority of these sessions and you can expect a good turnout of seasoned team members to learn from. Gaining skills, through self-study or assisted by a willing team member, outside of regular practice times is also encouraged. New handlers will frequently need to work with their dogs more often than just the training available through regular team practice. Sunday’s practice sessions tend to be longer problems. We split into two groups (group A and group B) at Sunday sessions, so we have enough space for Sunday practice. Also, we hold bimonthly team meetings. Practice is held at different locations around Los Alamos and, if you live outside of Los Alamos, you will have the additional burden of a longer commute to team activities. (We do have several team members in the Sante Fe area that you may find car pooling with helpful.) We train regardless of the weather conditions and, with this variety in weather and terrain, both the dogs and people stay challenged. And, by training under as many different conditions as possible, we are more apt to train under conditions we may meet on a real mission. We also periodically have classroom sessions, covering subjects such as coordinate systems, using a GPS, and radio protocol, where our newer members learn about the topics and our more experienced members brush up. All indoor meetings are held at the Civil Defense Building (CD-1) in Los Alamos.

In addition to MCC team events, our team members are always striving to learn and retain skills. We often attend state-wide and nation-wide conferences on search and rescue and canine search. Team members also participate in joint training with other SAR teams around the state, as we often work alongside many teams on real missions and getting to know our fellow team members better is beneficial for everyone.

We believe that a high standard of proficiency of the typical SAR person skills (map and compass, navigation, GPS use, radio communications, crime scene preservation, wilderness medicine, clue awareness) must be obtained and maintained by all MCC members, including canine handlers. The subject’s or an MCC teammate’s life may depend on any team members skills. One note: in general, because our team spends considerable energy on search dog training and competent technical rescue SAR teams exist in this area, we do not emphasize technical rescue. We do occasionally assist with litter evacuations and other needs when they arise on missions and practice these skills occasionally to meet those needs.

You can also learn many of these useful skills outside of regular team meetings. For example, having your HAM radio license can often be useful in SAR and, therefore, most of our team members hold a HAM license. You can get your license by learning through self-study of a book or through a class supported by a local amateur radio club. (In this area, the Los Alamos Amateur Radio Club and KM5P's web site might be helpful.) Wilderness medicine skills are encouraged and can be learned through classes offered by groups such as the Wilderness Medical Associates. Many MCC team members are Wilderness First Responders. Feel free to ask team members for information and assistance. We are happy to help as much as we can.

2) Take and pass the PACE/ICS-100 examination
The State of NM has a very basic exam (the PACE/ICS-100 exam) that you must pass before you can go out on missions with our team (in any capacity as a support specialist or canine handler). With the high level of proficiency of skills that our team promotes through our large number of practice and classroom sessions, this exam is easily passed.

3) Become knowledgeable in canine search and scent theory
In addition to the typical SAR person skills, all of our team members learn how search dogs work and about scent theory. Our support specialists can be more knowledgeable about search dogs and scent than the canine handlers as they spend a considerable amount of time observing different teams working. Therefore, in addition to being excellent SAR personnel, our support specialists are valuable as experts in canine search and as secondary dog observers to handlers.

As for dog training, the process is involved and requires a high level of commitment from everyone on the team. The good news is that MCC is an extremely competent team with numerous experienced dogs and handlers for you to observe and learn from. We all help each other train.

If you plan to train your dog, you should be aware that you and MCC will be making a large time commitment in order to train your dog. MCC has a mission readiness examination for dogs, which a dog might be ready to take after 1 1/2 - 2 years of regular search training with the team. Dogs naturally rely heavily on scent from the beginning of their life and the dog may seem to know what to do fairly quickly. But, you have to teach them to follow the scent you want, and not Rocky the Squirrel or Bart the Moose, and to clearly alert their find.

We ask that new people do not bring their dog to MCC functions until they have attended a minimum of 10 practices. After a new person spends some time with the team and is sure they want to train their dog for search work, we assign a mentor for search work when one becomes available. Also, we have an evaluation that your dog must pass to begin training with the team. This evaluation examines many aspects that, in MCC’s experience, we have found useful for determining if a dog is ready for search training.

For those who want to train their dogs, you might be wondering, "Why can't I immediately start training my dog with the team?" There are a number of practical reasons- from optimizing your dog's training to the team making sure you are truly interested in search and rescue long before the team makes a large investment in training your dog. Related to optimizing your dog's training, one reason that it takes so long for a dog to become mission ready is that the handler takes a few months to screw their dog up - and we write this only partially in jest. Invariably, all handlers make mistakes while training their dogs. For example, the dog will be correctly telling a handler where the scent is located, but the handler will think the scent should be elsewhere and pull the dog off the track. Or, you might praise your dog for going down a path because you see a similar boot print to that belonging to the person who set your track, only to find out later that the print belonged to someone else. The best way to start training your dog for search work is to not train your dog for searching. Spending time observing experienced dogs/handlers work helps you learn about scent and scent’s behavior and is really crucial to learning how to train your dog. If you've taken the time to observe many canine/handler teams, you will likely make fewer "new handler" mistakes, resulting from a poor understanding of scent, and, thus, optimize your dog's training, once that begins.

Observing many different dog and handler teams is also helpful so that you can see the different ways people work their dogs. No dogs are exactly the same; they may be motivated in a certain manner or respond more readily to certain types of training. Seeing a variety of techniques for training as well as dogs at different levels of training will help you figure out how to best train your dog and what you might expect to see from your dog.

Without this observational period, you are likely to spend far more time untraining bad habits that you taught your dog than it would have taken to take the appropriate amount of time upfront and train correctly from the beginning. Besides the wasted time, your dog might not achieve their potential or may even become frustrated to the point where they will never work as a search dog. The bottom line is that most handlers, in retrospect, wish they had spent more time observing before they start working their dog.

Also, learning SAR skills itself will require considerable energy, and, even if you plan on ultimately becoming a canine handler, you will find that training yourself, before your dog, will make your progress much easier. Before your dog is mission ready, you should also be willing to function as a support specialist when you have achieved the necessary SAR skills. Your exposure to real missions will prove valuable for your first mission with your dog.

However, this does not mean that, during your observational period, that you should not be training your dog outside of MCC. Having a good working relationship with your dog is important and you should always be working on obedience and socialization of your dog. And, there is no guarantee that your dog will become a search dog. This does not mean that your dog is not “smart”, is lazy, or that you failed as a handler. Search work just simply, for one reason or another, may not be a good fit for your dog. Also, your dog must be physically sound, of good temperment (be well socialized with dogs and people), and fit to withstand the rigors of search work.

4) Be physically fit in a manner that meets or exceeds your team functions
The canines are not the only ones that need to be fit! While our human members contribute to the team in many ways, we all must be physically able to perform our chosen functions. (And, human team members should also be of good temperment!) Lives depend on our ability to perform our duties. Of course, you don’t need to be a champion body builder or marathon runner! But, our missions are often physically challenging, occurring in rough terrain, in bad weather conditions, and at high altitude. A mission where you hike continuously throughout the night, carrying your heavy pack, covering ridgelines between 10,000 and 12,000 feet, is not uncommon. Of course, you don’t have to be ready for such activities when you come onto the team. Also, since we are a volunteer team, you decide what type of missions or activities you would like to participate in. For example, some team members have good winter skills and participate in missions requiring these skills. Not everyone wants to, or needs to, slog up a ridgeline in 5 feet of snow with the winds howling and the temperature hovering at 10 degrees Fahrenheit. As you expand your role, you are responsible for making sure you are healthy and physically ready to perform your functions. (But, we do have some marathon runners, road and mountain bike cyclists, and triathletes on the team. If you are involved or interested in these activities, you might even find some new training partners or pick up a new sport by joining MCC!) Participating at a level that exceeds your current capabilities puts you and others at risk. You are ultimately responsible for your own safety.

5) Equip yourself properly for your team functions
MCC has extremely limited monetary resources. We are a nonprofit organization that occasionally receives donations and some support through the Northern New Mexio/Los Alamos United Way, for which we are grateful. Therefore, we do not have the funds to equip members and everyone purchases equipment for their use. If you don't have the necessary equipment, you will eventually be buying gear for your functions. We do have a small amount of team equipment to help out during your initial training with the team, so that you do not have to make a large monetary investment to decide whether or not SAR is for you. (Of course, you will be making a large investment in time.) Equipping yourself properly is not limited to physical gear- you should have medical insurance. Many of MCC’s medically trained members also choose to have medical liability insurance to help protect themselves in the event that they are sued after administering care.

If you hike in the outdoors, you may already have much of the equipment, such as a backpack, appropriate clothing, a two-way or HAM radio, compass, and a GPS. In any case, you will find that much of the equipment will also add to your comfort and safety in your more leisurely enjoyment of the outdoors.

6) Help others acheive and maintain mission readiness and contribute to team needs
No matter where we are in our experience level on the team, we all assist both the human and canine members become mission ready and maintain mission readiness. This might mean setting a practice track, sitting out in a field to be found by an airscent dog, doing runaways to help train a dog for clear alerts, assisting a handler while observing a practice track by picking up articles or flags left behind by the subject, coordinating practice, showing someone how to use a radio properly, or teaching a new member the UTM coordinate system. Several other important responsibilities exist on the team, such as being a callout officer (or making web pages ;-) ).

As you gain SAR experience and skills, your role in teaching SAR skills will increase. We all help those learn who follow in our footsteps. After a while with the team, you will be amazed at how much you have learned and can share.

You’ve read this far- come meet the team!
We hope this information helps you assess whether or not you are interested in becoming a member and, along with information from the new member coordinator, gets you off to a smooth start with the team. All of this probably sounds like a lot of hard work for volunteering to become a team member. We really do appreciate your interest. Because of the nature of SAR, we have to protect the team on both safety issues and confidentiality. For example, MCC does not want to send mission reports that might contain relatively sensitive information to people who we haven't had the opportunity to get to know well. Our lives (and livelihoods) can depend on one another, which results in us being a bit more selective in MCC membership than your average club. We hope you understand and think you'll appreciate this aspect once you become a full team member. Search and rescue, and, in particular, canine search and rescue, is a challenging endeavor, not without risk, that requires a lot of hard work. Despite the hard work, we are all on the team because we do, in the end, find that search and rescue is also highly rewarding.

Note: This page is a work in progress by Cyndi and is intended to be helpful for those interested in becoming an MCC team member. Please send contributions/comments/corrections to Cyndi.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.