Matt Cooke and Cassie (Chairman)……click to read more

Matt has a degree in International Disaster Engineering and Management (Hons) with experience in NHS emergency planning and security management. It was during a field skills survival module during the second year of his degree that he witnessed, first hand, the value of search dog teams.

“As part of an exercise, I had to gather information from a key witness and use several search teams to find a missing person somewhere within a huge mountainous area. I was able to narrow down the search slightly but was still left with a huge area which needed covering in a very short space of time. Technically we could only use human searchers, but knowing that one of my assessors had a search dog, I invited his dog for a ride along and a ‘walkies’. Once we were at our area, it was literally a case of following the dogs nose! I was suitably impressed and passed that element of the course with flying colours.”

He started training his own dog, Charlie, with the Hampshire based search dog team. Matt and Charlie progressed through the ranks until to become a level 3 handler and dog team, allowing them to quickly search large areas at a time.

In February 2006, Matt set up Dorset Search Dogs. With just a handful of members, the team located several missing people, pushing the team into the lime light.

With his experience of training several of the teams dogs and as a national assessor for LSDogs then ALSAR, Matt wrote Dorset Search Dogs beginners and intermediate course. The intention was to recruit new dogs and handlers, giving them a good platform to start their training and to raise much needed funds for the team.

Matt is  the Chair of Dorset Search Dogs.