A Scottish mountain rescue team near Edinburgh have announced an important new recruit.
Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue respond to emergencies and carry out a specialist search and rescue services, covering Edinburgh, the Pentlands and some of the borders.
To help them with their searches, along with their volunteers are search dogs, and one is set to begin its crucial training.
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Ragnar is just eight weeks and will be trained by John who is an existing search dog handler with the Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team, well as the SARDA Southern Scotland team.
The adorable Ragnar will join John's current search dog Rauour. As SARDA explained on their website: "Dogs are trained to use their acute sense of smell to detect human scent in the air. We all lose 20,000 to 30,000 dead skin cells every minute and this makes up our ‘scent’.
"A dog’s sense of smell is thought to be a thousand times more sensitive than our own; they have over 200 million scent receptors compared to our own five million."
Taking to social media, Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team wrote: "We’re delighted to welcome eight week old Ragnar as our teams newest trainee.
"Ragnar’s handler John is an existing search dog handler with Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team and SARDA Southern Scotland; John will be working hard to train Ragnar who will be following in the pawsteps of Johns existing search dog Rauour.
"I’m sure you’ll join us in wishing both John and Ragnar the best of luck as their training begins."
They added: "Search Dog Fact- Did you know it takes about two years and many hundreds of hours to train a puppy to become a fully operational Search Dog."
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