As an organization intimately involved in First Responder Certification, we often encounter Agencies (Law Enforcement, Fire Service, Emergency Management) using K9s who are not certified competent to conduct whatever the specific discipline desired. We also see this in the Search & Rescue community. SAR volunteers are outstanding people who often spend long hours training their K9 partners in their discipline. And then they often don’t certify, or claim to “have certified” by testing within their own team. Many agencies (AHJ – Agencies Having Jurisdiction) often have no familiarity with valid training programs and/or credible (testing) certification organizations.
More specifically, this article discusses training and certification requirements for a relatively young discipline – CIRT K9s. In the last 3-5 years, this discipline has “exploded” as agencies recognize the need for critical incident stress intervention. This intervention includes the agency’s personnel and local citizens impacted by the event. As you might envision, this requires select K9s, specific initial and on-going training, and credible criteria based testing to validate the Handler and K9 competency. And this training and testing must be repeated on scheduled time frames (AERIE states its CIRT K9 certification is valid for 12 months) or the AHJ has no measure to verify not just competency but an assumption of proficiency.
AERIE is proud to have been selected as the (national) certification provider by K9s For Freedom and Independence and a multitude of response agencies. It is our honor to assist those in the CIRT K9 community differentiate themselves from “therapy dogs”.