When you're out hiking and you realize you've passed the same dead tree for the third time, and sundown is 20 minutes away, a dog looking for a game of tug-of-war might be your best chance at making it home. Search-and-rescue dogs are smart, agile and obedient, but their high "play drive" is what makes them look for a missing person through snow and rain, down steep rock walls and in crevices that would make a claustrophobic run screaming.
At its most basic, the job of a SAR dog has two components: Find the origin of a human scent and let the handler know where it is. In this article, we'll learn what SAR dogs do and how they do it, see what SAR training entails and find out what a real search-and-rescue mission is like.
Experts estimate that a single SAR dog can accomplish the work of 20 to 30 human searchers. It's not just about smell, either -- dogs' superior hearing and night vision also come into play. Time is always an issue in search and rescue. In an avalanche situation, for instance, approximately 90 percent of victims are alive 15 minutes after burial; 35 minutes after burial, only 30 percent of victims are alive. While most avalanche victims don't survive, their chances increase exponentially when dogs are in on the search. Even in cases where victims are presumed dead, dogs are invaluable assets -- they locate the bodies so family members can have closure and give their loved one a proper burial.
SAR dogs can do a lot of amazing things, including rappel down mountainsides with their handler, locate a human being within a 500-meter radius, find a dead body under water, climb ladders and walk across an unstable beam in a collapsed building, but it's all toward a single end: Finding human scent. This may be in the form of a living person, a dead body, a human tooth or an article of clothing. SAR dogs find missing persons, search disaster areas for survivors and bodies and locate evidence at crime scenes, all by focusing on the smell of a human being.
Not all SAR dogs perform the same type of search. Some dogs are tracking (or trailing) dogs, and others are air-scent (or area-search) dogs. The types overlap, but the distinction between the two guides are the training process and how the dog participates in missions. Tracking dogs work with their nose to the ground. They follow a trail of human scent -- typically heavy skin particles that fall quickly to the ground or onto bushes -- through any type of terrain. These dogs are not searching, they're following: Tracking dogs need a "last seen" starting point, an article with the person's scent on it to work from and an uncontaminated trail.
 Photo courtesy CCSAR Tracking dogs are most useful in wilderness searches. |
For tracking, time is an issue. If a child disappears from a school playground or a inmate escapes from a prison, a tracking dog might be called in to follow the person's scent immediately after the disappearance, before other search groups and law-enforcement personnel contaminate the scent trail.
Air-scent dogs, on the other hand, work with their nose in the air. They pick up human scent anywhere in the vicinity -- they don't need a "last seen" starting point, an article to work from or a scent trail, and time is not an issue. Whereas tracking dogs follow a particular scent trail, air-scent dogs pick up a scent carried in air currents and seek out its origin -- the point of greatest concentration.
 Photo courtesy CCSAR Air-scent dogs pick up human scent carried in air currents. |
Air-scent dogs might be called in to find a missing hiker located "somewhere in a national park," an avalanche victim beneath 15 feet of snow or people buried under a collapsed building. Air-scenters might specialize in a particular type of search, such as:
 Photo courtesy CCSAR |
 Photo courtesy 911BC K9 Search and Rescue |
 Photo courtesy FEMA, photograph by Andrea Booher Searching for survivors in the World Trade Center wreckage |
Cadaver and water-search dogs are the only types specifically trained to scent for human remains, although all SAR dogs will alert to remains if they find them. In major disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001 and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, air-scent dogs in all specialty areas assisted in the search for survivors. This actually led to problems for some of the dogs, because SAR dogs trained to find living people can become discouraged when they find only dead bodies. The dogs understand that live finds are preferable, partly due to their training, partly due to the reactions of their handler and partly because live people can usually give some form of feedback -- and the dogs crave feedback. At Oklahoma City and Ground Zero, handlers and firefighters hid in the rubble to give the dogs a living person to find so they could feel successful and get their reward.
In urban disasters, where people are trapped beneath precarious piles of debris, a dog's strength, confidence and agility are key. Even more important, though, is obedience: An out-of-control dog is a liability in search situations. This is where SAR standards come in.