MARK9 is a charitable, non-profit volunteer search and rescue unit dedicated to the training of search and rescue dogs, handlers and support personnel in order to provide professional and highly-skilled search and rescue canine teams in the event of an emergency response event.  The first priority of MARK9 is to save lives.

MARK9 will seek to certify canines that assertively seek out human scent, reliably follow that scent to source and independently indicate the find.

MARK9 encourages the training and deployment of strong, confident, independent, hunt-driven canines by drawing from such working breeds as the German Shepherd, Belgian Malinois and Doberman Pinscher, with consideration of other working breeds at the discretion of the Charter Members, so as to make more likely the rapid resolution of missing person searches.

MARK9 requires its wilderness search dogs which are cross-trained for the FEMA National USAR program to stay with the victim and perform the bark alert.  Search dogs which are used exclusively for wilderness may elect whether to use a bark alert or an active refind (ie, dog must perform a clear signal upon returning to the handler), but are not permitted to cross-train in both alerts. MARK9 imposes these requirements on its members because MARK9 believes that few search dogs can be trained to effectively perform both the refind-behavior and the bark alert without some deterioration of one or both of the learned behaviors.  As MARK9 strongly supports the use of the bark alert in the FEMA National USAR program, and as it firmly believes that disaster dogs which train in rugged, backwoods terrain can make superb wilderness search dogs, MARK9 therefore believes it illogical to deprive the public of a valuable emergency response resource because of the alert system the dog may happen to use.