The rescue of Jasper the dog has prompted the public to give £24,000 worth of donations in less than a day to Wasdale Mountain Rescue - and counting. Great news, but the episode highlights wider issues around funding for rescue teams.
Update: as of 6pm on Friday November 7, just 24 hours after this article was originally pubished, the figure donated to Wasdale Mountain Rescue team on Adam Nolan's JustGiving page had risen to £42,064.64.
The Wasdale Mountain Rescue team are one of the busiest teams in Britain, at peak times being called out several times a week to deal with incidents on England's highest mountain or the surrounding hills.
Many of these callouts go largely unreported in the wider world, regardless of how harrowing, challenging or life-saving.
But their latest success has captured the public imagination and netted them a fortune in donations - and the rescued party isn't even human.
Jasper the dog went missing in the area of Cam Spout Crag on the Eskdale side of Scafell Pike on Sunday. During the four days he was missing, a campaign started by his owner Adam Nolan in a bid to find him went viral on social media.
Thousands spread the appeal by using the hashtag #findjasper on Twitter and sharing photos of the dog on Facebook.
Jasper was reunited with his owner in the early hours of this morning after being found at 2am near the top of the 978m (3,209ft) mountain by Geoff Horky, who had ascended the mountain in the dark after a reported sighting of the dog.
The Mountain Rescue team was then called and the dog was brought off the mountain.
By way of thanks to the team, owner Adam Nolan created a JustGiving page calling for donations. At the time of writing it had netted £24,000 - and counting.
Irony
The irony that the rescue of a dog prompts a huge surge in donations, but that many human rescues largely escape special attention from the public, will not be lost on the team members.
But episodes like this are positive if only for highlighting the range of work done by Mountain Rescue teams, a point made in this blog by My Outdoors.
It reads: "They have searched for and found missing children and vulnerable adults, on and off the hills, whilst administering sympathetic support to their families.
"They have searched river banks and swift water, aiding swimmers and kayakers – and a few who clearly never intended to get wet. And they've rescued a frankly stunning number of dogs, cows, sheep and any number of other animals, from all manner of inaccessible places."
As pressure grows on the ambulance, fire and police services due to budget constraints and other factors, voluntary Mountain Rescue teams - and their lowland equivalents, Lowland Rescue - are increasingly being called on as an auxillary to the 'main' emergency services.
In 2012, for example, volunteer rescuers gave about 13,400 hours, or about 1,075 days, to the search for April Jones.
Funding gap
This is one of the factors contributing to the widening funding gap being faced by rescue teams in general, and why Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW) are currently campaigning for the government to urgently review funding of the service they provide.
Mike France, head of fundraising, said: “There is a huge discrepancy between the financial support given by government to Scottish rescuers – about £16,480 per team – and the much more limited funding to English teams of just £2,246 per team.
"Welsh teams receive a small amount extra after recent decisions in the Welsh Assembly but we’re campaigning in Westminster for MPs to recognise the needs in both England and Wales.
"If government could guarantee a level of funding from the public purse closer to the Scottish figure, we’d be able to underwrite investments in vehicles and essential kit and subsidise essential training and insurance.
"We want to be able to ensure that our 3,600 or so volunteer rescuers across England and Wales can focus their time and resources on getting the job done rather than having to worry about fundraising.”
While English Mountain Rescue teams receive £2,246, it's worth noting that Lowland Rescue teams receive no funding from the government.
The task of fundraising for Wasdale Mountain Rescue team may have become a little easier today - but for the teams who didn't rescue a collie from the summit of Scafell Pike today, the job of fundraising remains as challenging as ever.
This article has been edited twice. The article originally incorrectly stated that Geoff Horky was a member of the Wasdale Mountain Rescue team - this has been changed.
It also referred to rescue teams in lowland areas as Search and Rescue teams - this has been changed to their preferred term, Lowland Rescue, and to include the point that they receive no funding from the government, unlike their mountain equivalents.
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