West Licking Professional Fire Fighters Local 3025

My name is Mike Byrd, and I am a career firefighter/paramedic with the West Licking Fire District in Pataskala, Ohio. I am also involved with Canine search and rescue with bloodhounds, and have been for the past 12 years. At the present time I have 3 working bloodhounds: Daisy, Claude and Rose. Rose started working this spring. I train with the group Canine Search and Recovery, and I have recently hosted 2 week long seminars. This fall the group will be coming back to Ohio the first week in October to train at Canters Cave 4H camp in Jackson, Ohio. My dogs are scent discriminating, which means they locate a person by their scent. I obtain an article of the person we are searching for, and this article can be anything which has the subject's scent on it. Some of the areas we train in involve using decoys with runners, car trails, building searches, contaminated trails, in town work, and we also run trails across animal tracks to ensure that they stay focused on the subject and not other animal scents. We like to work them a lot with distraction techniques and loud noises to keep them focused on the search at hand. Training I have undergone with relation to the canines include: Search and rescue ground school, search management and planning, NIMS crime scene preservation, advanced K9 first aid, map and compass and lost person profiling. We try to attend as many seminars during the year that we can and like to visit nursing homes with the dogs. I can be contacted at mbyrd@westlickingfire.org with any questions you may have or to request more information. In addition, there is absolutely no charge for any of the services I offer.