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Avid outdoorsman
Rodney Ley tells you how to have an excellent adventure, whether
it's in your own backyard or atop a Fourteener. His column runs
Wednesday.
Dogs trained
to find victims of avalanches
The
human-dog relationship has worked out well, especially for
people. A dog's urge to hunt, guard, herd, and interact in
family groups is a great opportunity for people and dogs to
become friends
A fascinating
non-human ability that dogs demonstrate is their acute sense
of smell. Search teams have used scent dogs to track and
locate lost hikers for decades. Not being able to smell as
well as dogs, we humans can only marvel at what must be going
on in the minds of dogs as they locate scents, identify their
origin and pinpoint the
source.
These skills all come into
tight focus for dogs trained to locate buried avalanche
victims. Training a dog to recover humans from avalanches is
especially difficult because the training must proceed in a
step-by-step process which ultimately concludes with
live-human burial in snow. The risk of doing this type of
training is high, and not all dogs are suited for
it.
The first training step is
basic to all scent-dog training: teaching Fido to locate an
object with his nose. This training must be done carefully and
slowly to build up the fundamentals of scent location. Any
setbacks here will interfere with the dog's success later. The
second step is to associate the hidden object with a person so
that the dog learns that a human scent is a clue to the
object's location.
At step No. 3,
the serious training begins and the trainer needs assistants,
avalanche rescue gear as well as radios and warm, protective
clothing. In this step, the dog is allowed to see the person
climbing into a snow hole or snowcave while the entrance is
blocked with snow.
A well-trained
dog should have no problem with this step. The real motivation
behind this process is to familiarize the dog with the snowy
environment. When a dog is successfully locating these easy
burials, the final step is to perform a rescue-burial without
the dog watching the person being buried. This is when the
months of training should pay off. While even a well-trained
dog may faltered the first few times, ultimately a good dog
will locate the person.
So now your
dog is an avalanche first responder? Unfortunately not. There
are many more months of practice, real-life accident scenes to
visit and other tasks that need to be accomplished. But for
the dedicated search professional, there are few rewards
greater than watching your dog do a successful
recovery.
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