Hi {{first_name}} ,

I sat down and had a conversation with Mandy and Denise from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, based in Santa Paula on 125 acres that includes a simulated disaster neighborhood, a collapsed freeway prop, and three retired train cars set up like a wreck scene. 

They take the dogs nobody could live with and train them to find people buried alive. 

This conversation reminded me of something I say all the time in a completely different context.

In This Issue

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Labs. German Shepherds. Belgian Malinois. Border Collie mixes. The dog that was obsessed with his tennis ball to the point of being unlivable. The dog that tore apart furniture because he had nowhere to put that energy. The dog that ended up back at the shelter because nobody knew what to do with him.

That is the dog Mandy and NSDF is looking for.

She is the canine training manager at the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation. She gets her dogs almost entirely from shelters and rescues. The specific profile she is screening for: high toy drive, bold, confident, no nerve issues, no dog aggression, not afraid of new environments. The dog that will hunt for a hidden ball for twenty minutes without giving up because he knows it is out there somewhere.

That dog, in the wrong home, is a disaster. In her program, he becomes something else.

Out of every hundred dogs they evaluate, they bring about fifty to campus. Of those fifty, roughly fifteen enter the training program. Those fifteen become disaster search dogs. They go to earthquake sites, building collapses, hurricane aftermath. They find people buried under rubble. They worked in Haiti 2010. They worked 9/11. They worked in Oklahoma City.

The dog that was returning furniture to its component parts is the dog that finds your family member under a concrete slab.

That is what drive looks like when he has a job.

They start with the bark.

The dog loves his toy. They put him in a harness, show him the toy, get him to bark. Multiple barks. Lots of repetitions. Reward every time. Then they take a person and put that person inside something called a bark barrel, a barrel with a lid. The dog learns that the person in the barrel is connected to the toy. He barks. He gets rewarded.

That description takes three seconds to read. It takes about three months to actually build.

Once the bark alert is solid, they introduce multiple bark barrels, only one with a person inside. The dog approaches the first empty barrel and starts to bark because that is what he has been doing. Nothing happens. Then he catches something. A smell. He redirects. He sniffs. He barks at the barrel with the person inside. He gets his toy.

Mandy said watching that moment happen in real time is one of her favorite parts of the job. The dog figures it out on his own. Nobody told him to use his nose. His nose just became more useful than his eyes.

Then they move it all to rubble. Unstable terrain, broken materials, scent traveling in unpredictable directions through gaps and channels. The dog has to find the strongest concentration of odor and hold his alert for a minimum of thirty seconds. The search team cannot always get to where the dog is indicating. The bark tells them where to start.

They train something on campus that stuck with me.

Using a scent tubing system, they can pump human scent through the walls of a building and have it emerge from an electrical outlet. The outlet is on a wall that is clearly too thin to hold a person. A handler watching that sees a false alert. He is wrong.

The dog is right.

The scent is real. The person is somewhere else in the building. The odor is traveling through the wall and coming out at that outlet. The dog found the strongest concentration of that scent and he indicated on it. That is exactly what he is supposed to do.

Handlers have to learn, sometimes the hard way, that the dog is not wrong just because the alert does not make sense to a human brain. The dog is telling you something. Your job is to trust that information and then work backward from it to find where the person actually is.

I have said this about corrections for twenty years. The dog is always telling you something. The question is whether you are listening.

They do not go back to the shelter. Mandy was clear about that. Once rescued, never returned.

Some go into other detection work. Bat conservation detection. Cell phone detection. Narcotics. Dogs with slightly lower drive that were not right for disaster search but still have a nose and still need a job. Some go into pet homes with owners who understand what they have. And some stay on as what the foundation calls lifetime care dogs, dogs that did not complete the program but are looked after for the rest of their lives.

None of them go back to the cage.

The foundation retains ownership of every dog it places with a handler. The dog goes home with a firefighter or a task force member, works a career, and when the handler retires, the dog retires with him. The foundation covers veterinary care for life.

That is what it looks like to actually be responsible for an animal you trained.

I have been saying a version of the same thing for over twenty years in a different setting.

The dog that is tearing up your house is not broken. He is bored and he has nowhere to put what he is built for. The dog with too much energy is not a bad dog. He is a dog without a sufficient outlet. Structure does not suppress drive. Structure gives drive somewhere to go.

The dog that ended up in a shelter because a family could not handle him is the same dog that will work twelve hours in a rubble pile in Haiti looking for a heartbeat.

He was always that dog. Nobody gave him the job.

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Until next Tuesday,

- Robert