Rubble Search

Technology has tried to copy the excellent nose of the dog, and all sorts of equipment has been developed to try to trace people beneath rubble or dirt. However, this sensitive equipment is useless in the rubble of a major earthquake. Because of the inevitable dust, vibrations, noise, and electromagnetic fields that surround excavating machines, this detection equipment is easily disrupted. To search with this equipment, all rescue work has to stop in the surrounding area. This interruption is unacceptably impractical.

The dog’s nose is irreplaceable. A correctly trained search and rescue dog is not distracted by the surrounding activity, not even by spectators or other crews working in the disaster area. The training of search and rescue dogs is more necessary now than ever. Many victims, particularly after major earthquakes, owe their lives to the work of search and rescue dogs and handlers.

Trapped People

Earthquakes are not the only problem requiring search and rescue dogs. People can go missing in difficult or inaccessible terrain all over the world. A correctly trained search and rescue dog can be ready to track down a human in many emergency circumstances, such as an airplane or train disaster, where people may lie between the pieces of wreckage, or a collapsed building after a gas explosion. No country should neglect training search and rescue dogs. Where the government does not take care of it, private initiatives should step in to train reliable dogs and handlers.

Search and rescue dogs have to search very intensively for the odor of people who are trapped beneath rubble or covered by a variety of materials. The dogs can’t be diverted by anything or anyone—they have to work in almost every terrain and under almost all circumstances. A search and rescue dog has to communicate to its handler that it has found a victim by indicating the place where the highest odor concentration—the scent clue—comes out of the rubble. The handler must recognize, by the way the dog behaves and gives its alert, whether the victim is still alive or already dead.

Figure 9.1 It is important that dogs learn to work independently and at a distance from their handlers.

Types of Alert

For a reliable alert, it is important that the dog has a well-developed drive to find people. As shown in earlier chapters, the dog can develop a search drive for people with training that uses the hunting drive complex.

An alert always has to be chosen to suit the behavior of the dog and has to fit the dog’s character. The most important alerts used by search and rescue dogs working in rubble include the following:

• Barking

• Bringsel

• Recall

• Pawing

• Behavior and postures

Barking

Dogs that bark easy on their own may begin to bark at a scent clue. This barking often happens because the dog is irritated when it can’t penetrate to the victim quickly enough. Training the barking alert is described in Chapter 8, “Wilderness Search.”

Barking by itself is not enough as an alert for a real mission; the dog has to indicate the place of highest human odor concentration coming out of the rubble by pawing, scratching, or putting its nose in the rubble.