Amber - Search & Rescue

Not the kind of breed that you would expect to be good at this! The breeds most people think about doing Search and Rescue are the Border Collies or German Shepards. Well amber and I are here to prove them wrong. Amber is the first fully trained and operational search and rescue (Lowland) dog: and yes, she is a registered Northern Inuit with the Northern Inuit Society.

Amber isn’t the only pup from her litter to be famous, her brother is the one and only Rolls from Outlander (see below)!

A little bit about Amber … She was bred by Snowy Peaks Northern Inuits, her mummy is the very well-known girl Mountain Milly. I actually bred Milly and was very keen to have a pup from my own lines.

Ok, so I hear you ask how you actually train a search and rescue dog. Firstly, any training you are doing should be fun. we started a sport called "Man Trailing”, where someone leaves scent behind (like with a glove or scarf) and go and hide. The dog would then track that person and amazingly find them, even with all those other scents around. It really is amazing to see! From that game we trained for over 100 hours to get our Advanced Handler Award and then an additional 150 hours to become fully operational.

We run through so many situations with the dog and their training, including different scenarios and locations. For example, tracking a scent from a car in a village along country paths. This would normally be very difficult as without an item to keep scent resetting, however Amber just keeps going no matter what!

We are part of a search and rescue team up here in Scotland called Response Rescue International Scotland, who have assisted the Police multiple times on searches. Hopefully you’ll never need us, but we are here to help 24/7 no matter the situation or weather. Amber and I love to do this and she’s always up for it.

One last mention - Amber and her team mates helped do a book all about Man trailing to teach others, and both of us being part of it was an amazing honour.