ST. GEORGE — The Washington County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team recently accepted a donation that will help reestablish its K9 program.

Gathered at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Hurricane on Aug. 2, the search and rescue team was presented with a $15,000 check from the Dixie Elks Charitable Foundation. The funding will provide a jump-start to the county’s efforts in bringing back what Sheriff’s Sgt. Darrell Cashin called a “needful asset.”

“We have found that by going back through our rescues over the last several years, about 40% of the time we could have used a really good K9 to help find people,” Cashin said.

Cashin later told St. George News that the search and rescue team had a trained K9 and handler as one of its volunteers for a time, but that ended when the volunteer moved away over three years ago.

The search and rescue team plans to have a member of the team become certified through the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training program for search and rescue K9s, and then have that individual come back and train others.

A reason the Sheriff’s Office wants the search and rescue K9 program to become certified through the state is to create a standard for recognized training and certification in an area where multiple standards of training and certification from differing organizations already exist.

Their hope is to have up to four K9s that are POST-certified in tracking and cadaver retrieval, Cashin said.

Some of the advantages of having K9s on a search and rescue team, according to a post from Hill’s Pet Nutrition, include:

• A superior sense of smell and ability to catalog recent scent profiles that can help lead rescuers to missing individuals when GPS and other means of location are not working or available.
• They have a sharper sense of hearing than humans do.
• They can move faster and cover more ground quickly than humans can.
• They can enter tight and cramped areas where their human counterparts cannot.
• The dogs can bring a sense of calm to those who become lost once they are found.

Cashin added that the dogs can also help provide a sense of closure for the family of a missing person who is found dead, thereby not leaving their fate a mystery if not found otherwise.

While the advantages of having search and rescue K9s are evident, Cashin said, the search and rescue team initially lacked the funding to get a new program off the ground.

That’s where the Dixie Elks Charitable Foundation comes in.

Since 2020, the foundation has donated up to $35,000 toward the county’s search and rescue team, foundation president Charmain Omara said. This included a $10,000 donation in 2020 that provided funding for an additional drone for search and rescue needs.

While not directly connected to the local Elks Lodge, the Dixie Elks Charitable Foundation is composed of volunteers who are members of the lodge, as well as those who are not. Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the charity, Omara said.

The general purpose of the foundation is to find needs in the community that could benefit others, yet are not being met due to a lack of funding. This includes raising meaning for groups like the county’s search and rescue team – which receives a sizable amount of its own funding through donations – as well as law enforcement and public safety groups, Make-A-Wish Foundation endeavors, school programs and similar pursuits.

However, the Dixie Elks Charitable Foundation requires that the recipients of donated money be in Washington County and the surrounding area.

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