Dogs' noses are used to search for many things from medical conditions to bed bugs. Their abilities are very amazing to me every time I watch them. I volunteer with my labs to find people in wilderness situations. I will be writing from my experiences in Wilderness work. My first lab, Phoebe, and I learned from the start together. She is now gone and I am working with Freyja, now twenty months old.We have quite a few breeds in our organization that generally fit into the herding or hunting groups. Dogs that will work for search and rescue need to be confident, fit and agile, willing and wanting to work for long hours and still remain focused, and able to work out problems on their own but still work as a partner with their human. The bond of trusting, working together and reading each other I find quite important.
Most of us prefer to start with a puppy, as I have with both of mine, starting at twelve weeks old. First time handlers can expect to train hard for three or more years before certification because there is so much to learn. Take a walk for an hour in a park and notice the shifting breezes and winds, along with terrain changes and woods to meadows. Then add the sun and how it heats up the air and causes it to rise, the cool night air drops down into the low points. Now imagine how smoke would travel through the space, swirling about. That is how scent moves. A river can show that movement in a more 2D space. We need to learn what could happen so that we can both, train the dog how to move through large spaces, linking the information together and also if we lose the scent, we can make an educated guess as to where we could move to pick up the scent again based on earlier information.
Our group starts with Trailing and then most move to Air Scent. We can add specialties later like Water, Avalanche, and Human Remains. Trailing is similar to tracking where the dog follows the path the person took. Air Scent is the scent that is wafting in the air directly from the person. Trailing training starts with very short trails with the puppy watching the person run away like a fool and hide behind a blade of grass. It starts a game of hide and seek that progressively gets harder. With Trailing we can watch the dog's behavior to different scent pictures easier since they work closer to the handler. Trailing is very meticulous work as it gets harder and you will see most dogs move to Air Scent. Moving the dogs to Air Scent is fairly easy and fun. The dogs get to move out looking for and then following the scent as it gets bent around hills and trees. Again we build up the difficulty teaching them new situations. Sometimes you think that you are in a washing machine as the scent appears to be going in all directions at once. With either work we want the dog to be excited to want to work. If we work a dog on a very hard problem one day we will generally have an easier problem the next time so it remains fun. When the dogs find their subject it's a big, happy party. For some dogs all they want is treats and others have to have their favorite toy thrown wildly about.
Search work is hard on the dog's bodies. We need to be able to travel whereever the scent takes us. They are running through all sorts of terrain, jumping over dead fall, hot days, cold days, cactus and avalanche debris zones that resemble boulder fields. Our dogs are hard workers that don't always tell us they have been hurt. Twice with my old dog, it wasn't until we got in the car after training that I realized she had a large puncture wound in her back leg. Keeping them healthy to start, helps them stay healthy and recover faster.
Our guest expert this month is Paula Bindrich. This is how she describes herself and experience:
I am an Emergency Medical Technician who started in Search and Rescue (SAR) sixteen years ago and started my first dog, Phoebe, for search in early 2000. It has been an amazing journey. Not only is it fun to watch these dogs, you develop a very tight partnership with them. I must say though, your life becomes search and rescue in time (and money, it is all volunteer) spent in training and missions. It allows me to be out in the wilderness, with my dog, while helping someone having a bad day. I learned canine massage from Sue in 2001 to help Phoebe for SAR. The massage helped two-fold, it brought me closer to Phoebe (now Freyja too) allowing me to be able to know every inch of her body and help recognize issues and fix them. Wilderness search dogs are everywhere in rugged terrain. I guess I can say three-fold, I have the skills to help others too!
Paula belongs to Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado and Alpine Rescue Team. Visit their websites for more information and some great photos.
This article originally appeared in the May 2013 edition of the Holistic Touch Therapy Newsletter.