I wrote a short piece last week entitled “The POD of a Search Dog is 100%” and promised to give my thoughts on the subject at a later date. It is interesting to note that the two commenters – Daryl Toogood and Johnnie Walker – highlighted the two main issues I wanted to cover with regard to calculating PODs for search dogs.
Essentially I see two issues here.
The first is whether searching to 100% is a useful tactic, or whether as Johnnie noted “that it has slowed people down”. If you, as a dog handler, are trying to ensure you do not possibly miss the misper – do you spend too much time in any one area? Remember that search, like many other things, complies with that pesky law of diminishing returns. For each unit of search you put in, you get less out each time in added POD.
You would often do better (find more mispers!) by travelling further at a quicker rate.
The second issue here is calculating the POD of a search dog. As Daryl Toogood stated;
I would challenge any dog handler that gives a POD for their dog no matter whether it be 1% or 100% as I am not confident of the system for calculating the POD of a Dog. [Read more here...]
But this leaves search management and the search planning team a very large problem!
In order to best utilise their search resources search planners are required to decide whether to re-search a search sector, or put it aside for now and search somewhere else. Get it wrong and they potentially leave the misper to die in an area that could have been searched. How can we expect them to make such an important decision with so little clue!
I think that I will be revisiting this – both of these issues need discussing in further detail – but feel free to add your thoughts.
