Step 10

The last step in training is to range in a grid pattern without helpers on the sides. It is important that the dog first be able to make nice curves in the area and doesn’t directly break out of the pattern to alert for victims. If that happens, then have the helpers first stand in the area where later they are to lie down. The dog is not allowed to alert on these standing helpers. As soon as the dog searches properly and comes near, the helper can sit or lie down.

Build your dog’s skills step by step. Never introduce two new steps at once, whether it be new circumstances (new search area, new helpers), increasing distances, or the next step in training. If something is not going well, then go back to the beginning and repeat steps until the dog can progress.

Case Study: Rescue Workers on Four Legs

The Austrian journalist Monika Rittberger published the following article in an Austrian dog magazine and the Dutch dog magazine Onze Hond (Our Dog). We reproduce it here with permission.

A passenger car has just crashed in the dark night. The car shows serious damage. Traces of blood are found in and around the car, but there is no trace of the driver, a good reason for the Austrian Police to immediately call out the search and rescue dogs of the Austrian Red Cross. If the driver has not fled the accident scene, it is possible that he walked away and lies wounded in the surrounding area, in shock after the accident. In that case, he has to be found quickly. At this time of the year, it gets quite cold at night, and hypothermia and shock are life threatening.

Intensive

In a quarter of an hour, seven handlers and their dogs from the Red Cross are on the scene. The first handlers immediately try to find a track in various directions, but they are not successful. Too many people have walked over the area, as has happened on many other occasions. The handlers decide to perform a corridor search over the area with their search and rescue dogs.

Thorn shrubs, slivers, stones, and barbed wire are no obstacles for the teams. Two kilometers from the accident scene, one of the dogs is successful. By bringing the bringsel on his collar to his handler, the dog tells him that he has found the wounded driver. The handlers immediately give the confused man first aid, which is, of course, another skill of the Red Cross dog teams.

Searching for lost people, missing hikers and climbers in the Alps, and avalanche and other disaster victims are the most important tasks of the Austrian Red Cross’s search and rescue dog handlers. Fortunately, they are usually successful. But success with search and rescue dogs does not happen by itself; it must be trained for. Each year every handler of the Red Cross volunteers about 550 hours (more than ten hours a week) to train his or her search and rescue dog.

Figure 8.15 At examinations and trials, a dog must correctly retrieve the bringsel for its handler to be judged fit for operations.

Work Without Stress

“Intensive training, but particularly purposeful training methods, are the key to the success of our dogs and their handlers,” says the chief of the Red Cross Dog Teams in Wiener Neustadt. “We have to train regularly in varying circumstances to keep our dogs at the same high level. In an avalanche or earthquake mission, time is the most serious enemy of rescuing people alive. The better the dogs are trained and the longer they can work, the better the chance for survivors. That means that our dogs always have to be in very good search condition, physically and mentally. Everywhere they say that dogs can search intensively for only fifteen to twenty minutes, but we have several times proven, for instance during big practices with INSARAG, the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group of the United Nations, that our dogs can search on the rubble intensively and consecutively for more than three hours,” he says with justifiable pride.

When I ask him the secret of their success, he says, “Ask the two Dutch there.” I look at him a bit incredulously, but he is already pushing me in their direction. In front of me stand Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak, who have been training search and rescue dogs for about thirty years. Many years ago they were, because of their experience, asked by the Austrian Red Cross to train and assess their operational search and rescue dogs. Their methods and results had become known during their cooperation with the Austrian Army at the Armenian earthquake disaster in 1988…. In the beginning the Austrians were a bit skeptical, but that soon disappeared when they saw that these Dutch people were fully experienced in wilderness searches, as well as disaster searches and avalanche searches. And what was perhaps most important, they could teach their Austrian colleagues what they knew very well.

Going back to the question about the secret of the success of the Austrian Red Cross dogs, I get this answer from them: “Yes, it’s thanks to our purposeful training method and the fact that our dogs are working without pressure. A dog gets the most tired when he works under pressure. When he has to work because it’s what the handler wants or when he is constantly encouraged and corrected, that’s asking for the dog to get tired. Of course, search work is very intensive for a dog, but when the dog may work for his pleasure, or even better, when he, so to speak, asks to work himself, he can work for hours. Our method is designed to allow the dog to develop his enjoyment in searching, without any pressure. He has to work everything out himself, step by step, each time a bit more difficult, without realizing it. That way, he learns to develop himself further and because he enjoys it, he is able to extend his limits, including his stamina.”

Figure 8.16 Dr. Resi Gerritsen (pictured) and Ruud Haak have regularly won the World Championship for Rescue Dogs and they have been Hungarian and Austrian champions several times.