SAN ANTONIO – Vonda and Raven are just two cadaver dogs with the Alamo Area Search & Rescue team that have been active the past few weeks searching in the Hill Country after the devastating Fourth of July floods.

“After the Fourth of July flood, Kendall County Office of Emergency Management activated us to come and assist them with their search and recovery efforts,” says Karen Prendergast, Vice President of Alamo Area Search & Rescue. The group, consisting of about 15-20 members with five cadaver dogs, were some of the hundreds of volunteers who participated in search & rescue operations in the days following the flood.

“Kendall County had us deployed for a week, and we searched the river area, from Comfort down to Boerne,” says Prendergast. Their job was to find the missing.

“A cadaver dog is a dog that is trained to sniff out human remains or human decomposition, whether it’s blood or trace materials,” says Prendergast. The dogs start training for this type of work when they are about 10-15 weeks old, and training takes about 18 months. They’re trained to sniff out smells.

“We pair the odor with the reward. The puppy goes to the reward, smells the odor, gets the reward, and then once they’re consistently going to the odor, we’ll remove the reward,” says Heather Stieler, a canine handler for cadaver dog Vonda. The search in the Hill Country was long and strenuous

“It was about five hours. So she covered about eight miles, which is a tremendous amount of terrain to cover. When it’s very difficult terrain, and in the heat as well, you take water breaks, you make sure that the canine is well cared for,” says Judy Mosely, canine handler for cadaver dog Raven. When the dog identifies an area where human remains may be, it alerts their handler

“Every dog has its own trained final response. So for me, my dog is a sit. We have dogs that bark. We have dogs that lay down,” says Stieler. Authorities pick up the investigation from there. And it’s not just for flood events, the dogs and their handlers work whenever there are missing people.

“This year, it’s been multiple times a month. We do serve many counties all the way to Austin,” says Stieler.

The search team is used to searching in terrain such as thick woods, but the search in the Hill Country along the Guadalupe River was the largest and toughest that they’ve ever had.

To learn more about the Alamo Area Search & Rescue team, or to volunteer, visit https://www.alamoareasar.org/