The latest on-the-ground volunteer with Metchosin Search and Rescue has four legs but mostly uses her nose to do the work.
The three-year-old Lab is extremely friendly with zero aggression toward people or animals and a drive to work, with the energy and endurance to handle the task.
“She wants to be out there,” handler Sandra Hardy said. “They have to have the innate drive to want to go search for things.”
Hardy and her partner adopted three-year-old Lab Venna from a local rescue a couple of years ago with no intention of finding a working dog.
“She was going to be our adventure buddy, going out on trail runs and hikes. After we adopted her, I realized ‘I think I might have accidentally adopted a SAR dog’,” said Hardy, an eight-year volunteer with the Metchosin team.
Early last year, the government reopened the possibility for teams to have canine capability. Before that, unless teams already had active dogs, they couldn’t start a team.
Hardy saw all the qualities in Venna – confirmed during a BC Search Dog Association assessment camp in September 2024 – and the duo embarked on training immediately.
One year later, RCMP dog handlers at a similar BC Search Dog Association camp validated Venna. Hardy can’t say enough about the work the association does, with two “amazing” multi-day camps each year, affording volunteers an opportunity to work with good instructors and other handlers. For the local duo, that training served as a foundation for everything they worked on between the camps.
It was a team sport getting Venna validated, with volunteers helping to be “lost in the forest” along the way.
It’s been well over a decade since the volunteer Metchosin SAR, founded in 1989, had a qualified dog team, and it's the only one on the South Island – the next nearest is in Nanaimo.
The team provides SAR services for Metchosin, Langford, Colwood, Highlands, View Royal, Esquimalt, Victoria and Oak Bay, and serves as a mutual aid resource for other areas of the CRD and province, including neighbours Juan de Fuca and Peninsula Emergency Measures Organization.
“There are a lot of our groups working together. They have specialty teams that are doing rope rescue and swiftwater, where Metchosin doesn’t have that. So it’s amazing we can all work together to hopefully get people home safely,” Hardy said.
With certified searchers, team leaders and managers hailing from across the region it serves, Metchosin SAR responds to an average of 15 calls a year.
For Venna, joining the team is a joy, Hardy noted. She gets to go out and run around the forest looking for things. For Metchosin SAR, it’s another option to find people quickly and efficiently.
Venna uses air scenting, seeking out any human scent, either from skin or a piece of clothing.
“Because she’s so agile, she can travel through this terrain way quicker than we can. So she’s moving really quickly through the forest and she covers four or five times the distance doing her pattern work,” Hardy said.
While Venna was honing those skills, Hardy had to learn to be a handler – striking a balance where Venna can work independently off lead, yet under control and, most importantly, safe.
“It was like learning a new language,” Hardy said. “We were trying to learn to work together as a team.”
