Readers know that I believe all dogs are working animals and thrive on a job to do.
For family pets, that means sitting for all good things – food, treats, petting, toys, games, the leash, a walk.
Some lucky dogs get to do agility, herding, Dirt Dog, flyball or freestyle.
And then there are the true working dogs, or what we all know as service dogs.
I just read a book calle
d Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson (Houghton Mifflin, 2010).
Not only did I learn about the requirements, training and work of Search and Rescue (SAR) dogs, but I am in awe of the language this woman uses. Here are some choice – and memorable – phrases that I wish I had written:
fetch therapy
laissez chien
petitioning with a ball
dogs that stomp off, posture stiff with scorn
an old dog “demonstrating a bottomless bladder and a genius ability to meter his pee”
And did you know that, at any given time, there are over 100,000 missing person cases open and waiting to be resolved?
I had no idea that there are multiple types of SAR dogs: cold scent dogs that can follow a smell that is days or weeks old; cadaver dogs; air scent dogs that are used at disaster sites and in wilderness scenarios; tracking dogs like Bloodhounds, and trailing dogs like some Golden Retrievers. And nearly all of them are volunteers, as part of emergency response teams.
The book is beautifully written, with tangible suspense, visceral details, and bits of the author’s personal experiences that both enlighten and warm the search vignettes.
I love her respect for the dogs’ innate abilities to do things we humans can’t, how dogs listen with all of their senses to scent, sound, and the movement of air. Amazing stuff. She has such pride in her own dog Puzzle that she bemoans how others can treat these animals as “accessories.”
The training of her dog to become an SAR dog is really about the process of human and animal building trust to become a team. And really, isn’t that what all of us are doing with our own dogs every day?
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