Canine Volunteers Lend A Paw In Emergencies

One summer morning, a mother and father awoke to find their son missing. The boy’s bed had been slept in but, sometime in the night, he had vanished.

Fearing the worst, the parents summoned the police, who came and searched the surrounding woods for hours.

Nothing.

Then the police called the fire department, which in turn dispatched a special ground search team.

Using the tactics of trained professionals, the firemen searched everywhere. All through a tense night, powerful lanterns probed the darkness, but it was no use. The boy was gone.

After that, a different kind of searcher was called. This one arrived with a dog.

Susan Bulanda, a professional dog trainer in Pottstown, Pa., is a member of the volunteer canine search and rescue (SAR) unit that helped look for the missing child. By now, after a decade of doing SAR work with dogs, she’s as prepared as anyone for the unhappy endings such efforts can have. She knows all too well that SAR can be grim enough that searchers occasionally need stress counseling afterwards.

Even so, canine SAR so fascinates Bulanda that she has written an informative book about it. It’s called “Ready!” which is a fitting description for a type of dog work that keeps handlers and animals on constant standby. In addition to police units, at any time there are perhaps 300 of these unique volunteer dog-handler teams around the country, prepared at a moment’s notice to drop everything.

When an earthquake or tornado destroys a building, trapping survivors or bodies in the rubble, when hikers get lost in the wilderness or swept away by avalanche, when an “urban incident” sets police on the trail of a fugitive or hunting for victim remains, chances are a volunteer SAR handler and dog team will be within hailing distance, ready to come running. No charge.

An unbelievable sense of smell coupled with intelligence and cheerful willingness to serve humanity are what make dogs so invaluable for SAR work.

A SAR dog can smell life and death where a human wouldn’t suspect.

As Bulanda’s book points out, just about any of the working breeds can be trained to do the job, so long as they’re bred for brains, temperament and health. Meticulous early socialization is a prerequisite. And even after that, only the most skillful, inventive and ceaseless training can prepare dogs for the situations they will encounter.

Canine SAR work isn’t a hobby, and it’s not a sport. It’s a curious passion.

To do their jobs, well-trained SAR dogs will tread a scaffold, slither through a dark pipe, ford a stream, rappel over a cliff, or descend by harness from a helicopter. They can decipher scent signatures of bodies buried for many years. They can locate with eerie accuracy even a body hidden under water where current flows south and wind above blows north.

In the midst of pandemonium they will calmly give comfort to strangers. At a disaster scene awash in adrenaline, a SAR dog will attend only to its handler, as focused on its business as an emergency room doctor.

The dogs have such an ability to rise to demands made on them that even rescue personnel used to seeing them work are at a loss to explain it. Scout, Bulanda’s Beauceron (bo-sir-on), a rare French herding dog, is so accomplished in the field that rescue officials have used a surprising word to describe him: professional.

For their part, SAR dog handlers learn first aid, wilderness survival, the psychology of suicides, lost persons and criminals. They train their dogs constantly, both alone and with their SAR units. They plunk down $2,000 and more for expedition clothing. And then they wait to be called at any hour, in any weather, to scenes of worry, mayhem and misery.

When Bulanda’s SAR unit arrived at the home of the missing boy, they found grieving parents, and exhausted police and fire crews.

Working a magic known only to them, it took the dog and handler about 15 minutes to find the child. He was alive and well, still wearing the pajamas he ran away in.

Angry at his parents, the boy evaded the initial human search effort. In the end, though, as Bulanda says, “You can’t hide from a dog.”

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