How our best animal friends sniff out the lost

Since a visit to the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America from canine search and rescue group Search One Rescue, I’m considering a new hobby – being lost. Not forever, only until a big friendly dog finds me somewhere in the woods. Mystery Writers programs are always fascinating to writers with a taste for noir, but add a really cute dog like Duke (pictured in the illustration for this post) and I can’t tear myself away. So when Search One Rescue speaker Audrey Wilson told her audience there were openings for human “victims” to help train Duke’s search dog cohorts, I mentally started arranging my schedule to volunteer.

OK, maybe you don’t have a wild desire to spend hours sitting in some bramble- and bug-infested Texas forest while dogs sniff you out. Maybe you just want to know how the whole canine search and rescue stuff works in case you need it for your crime novel. 

First of all, don’t expect your neighbor with a canine SAR dog to show up in an unofficial capacity.

Duke & friend Colbie Lake

Having spent decades (the group was founded in 1983) working with law enforcement and disaster-aid agencies means they need to follow protocol to keep from jeopardizing those working relationships. Law enforcement officials will also be able to determine when – and which kind of -- canine searches are most likely to be useful.

What dogs track,” Wilson said, “are skin rafts,” the bacteria-laden dead skin cells all of us shed constantly. 

If the person being searched for is on foot, rafts will be available, at least as long as time and weather permit. Cool and wet weather mean the rafts will stick to the ground. In hot weather, skin rafts rise and are disbursed with changes in humidity. And the longer the person has been missing, the more time there is for the rafts to become dispersed or degraded.

“The ideal situation for us (to search) is early in the morning,” Wilson said. “With cool air, scent sinks to the ground where the dog can find it.” 

Generalized live find dogs (Duke’s specialty) will search for any living person within a designated area. Best for known general locations in lightly-populated areas (such as the brambly woods I imagine myself in), dogs such as Duke will find any person whose scent they encounter. 

Live find dogs can also be trained to search for specific individuals, matching ground scent to samples of the victim’s odor. Some dogs are also specially trained to find human remains. (And call them HR, not cadaver, dogs.) 

Even though dead humans don’t smell the same as live ones, it’s not always easy to determine when the odor change occurs, especially if there is a possibility that death has been recent. For this reason, some dogs are cross-trained on both live find and HR finds. 

It’s not something every dog can do. Loveable Duke, for instance, “has no interest in you if you’re deceased,” his owner/handler, Mary Hargrove told us.

And unlike live find dogs, which may work off-leash, depending on their rate of travel, and return to alert their handlers to a find, HR dogs must remain with their finds. Dead bodies, especially long-dead ones, may be surprisingly difficult to detect either by scent or human visual inspection, so that the dogs are trained to stay with the remains, often staring intently at them, while waiting for their handlers to arrive if they have become separated.

Although Wilson stated that there is no best breed for SAR work, for field work, dogs must be large and strong enough to cover the terrain. Before undergoing training, they are also screened for sociability toward both people and other dogs; strength of nerve to withstand such trials as loud noises, closed spaces and wobbly floors; and hunting drive. 

People interested in applying for SAR work, with or without dogs, are invited to visit three times and if still interested, serve as a training “victim”. Applicants also must demonstrate a certain amount of physical strength and fitness. Places are available for those without dogs. Check with the Search One site for details.

And it’s also possible to be on call as a perpetual training “victim.” Which is probably as far as I would get.