A police dog and her handler based in Camborne placed among the top 1 percent of dogs and handlers in the country after winning the Regional Police Dog Trials.

PC Ben Jobes and his dog Ash were only one of 21 dog pairs across the country to qualify for the national trials in London. They have been recognised for their excellent policing work in the past, and PC Jobes was awarded a Superintendent's Certificate for risking serious injury whilst saving a young family from a violent man in 2016.

PC Jobes said: “I always wanted to become a dog handler but it is very competitive. It is the best job in the world, Ash is very much part of the family and I spend virtually every waking hour with her."

Ash has already saved numerous lives during her career. Ben said: “On one occasion we had been searching for a high risk missing person for five hours on a cold winter’s night. It was just amazing when Ash found him down a mine shaft – he was suffering from hypothermia but there was no doubt she saved his life.”

Ash is also very good at catching criminals and finding discarded weapons. Ben said: “We got a call to a break-in to a builder’s site in the Four Lanes area near Redruth during the early hours of a morning. Ash picked up the scent at the yard and tracked the offender across fields to a nearby housing estate where she found him in a back garden.”

This is the first year that the pair have entered any sort of trial, and they had to get through a number of regional trials to make it all the way to the national competition; starting off with the Cornwall dog trials, then the Devon, Cornwall, and Dorset trials, and going on to win the regional trials against teams from Avon and Somerset, Wales, and Gloucestershire.

Competitors at the events are judged on all the skills that police dogs are expected to have, including tracking, finding property, searching buildings, chasing criminals, crowd control, obedience, and agility.