Another dog comes to the rescue! This time it’s for two lost young ladies who are both 16 years old. When on any trip it’s always important to stick with your group or family. Always have a plan, and did I mention always stick with your group? That’s one lesson these girls had to learn the hard way.
Around an hour and a half subsequent to beginning the search for the two missing 16-year-olds, who had been missing in Ontario’s Algonquin Park since Thursday, Zoe started giving obvious indications that she had found a trail.
“That’s what you want to look for when the dogs acquire a track. There’s a physical cue, or a difference in their behavior,” said Scott Gannon, an officer with the Ontario Provincial Police Canine Unit.
For our hero pup Zoe, an over two-year-old Labrador retriever, she’ll bring her nose down to the cold earth and begin sniffing quite a bit. Once she shows interest in one region or trail, she’ll begin to sway her tail and get excited, Gannon said.
Zoe, Gannon, and two other individuals from the Emergency Response Team made up one of the four search and rescue teams (SAR). Canine groups had been flown in on water-planes to help find Marta Malek and Maya Mirota. The young teens had neglected to keep up with their camp in the commonplace park’s western area.
"*" indicates required fields
The four groups were assigned to follow a hiking trail where the young ladies were last seen. Search canines were searching for a human scent, said Clifford Samson, a coach in the OPP Canine Unit.
At the point when the controllers are given a search region, they start downwind, and move the canine in hopes that they’ll be able to sniff out and lock onto a trail, Samson said. During their pursuit, “you could see where Zoe became excited,” said Gannon.
At the point when Zoe hasn’t had any luck locking onto a trail, she remains nearby Gannon. In any case, when she gets that track, as she did Monday, she’ll go on, and “she beelines it toward that source,” Gannon said. “She became excited and we watched her and then she proceeded to go down the trail.”
With our hero dog Zoe heading out ahead, Gannon and the team started calling the names of the young ladies in hopes to get a response. Eventually, their hopes were met with the girls blowing an emergency whistle multiple times.
The authorities shouted out and asked the girls to announce their names.
“They gave us the correct names, because we wanted to make sure it wasn’t someone else on the trail just hearing us yell,” Gannon said. “We told them to stay put and we followed the dog.”
They were successfully able to track down the young teens, and assess that they were also in good physical condition, albeit covered with bug bites and a little dehydrated, said Gannon.
Everyone was happy to see each other. The rescuers were happy to have found the missing teens, the young ladies were happy to have been found, and were equally happy to see their hero swoop in – Zoe.
The young ladies had camped out for three days, attempting to stand out enough to be noticed by plane. However, they were not in an open region where they would have been spotted very easily, said Gannon. They strolled the young ladies back to around 1.5 kilometers, where a plane showed up to return them back to the OPP garrison – safe and sound.