Is Barking the Optimal Alert?

Almost all testing standards for search and rescue dogs, even the IPO-R (International Standards for Rescue Dog Tests), prefer dogs to indicate finding a victim by barking. It is the same with many dog handlers, trainers, and judges. However, we believe that barking alone is not an optimal alert for a search and rescue dog. Barking can work well in tests, but during real missions it can present problems.

In an area search, for instance, a barking dog can scare the missing person, especially a child or person with mental disabilities, and cause a state of shock. And hypothermia and shock together can cause a person’s death! A dog with a bringsel alert is much better, because immediately after finding the victim, the dog goes away and then returns with the handler. Many victims are not even aware the dog was there the first time.

From our missions in earthquake areas, we know that after intensive searching for about one day, dogs don’t bark anymore. But by their body language they always show us a find. Standing still on a certain place, deep sniffing and scratching in the rubble, or showing a characteristic body position always alerts us to the location of the strongest human odor coming out of the rubble (pin-pointing) and to the circumstances of the victim.

We also object to using the barking alert because dogs are trained with barking exercises in conjunction with displays of aggression. This sometimes leads to aggressive and unpredictable search and rescue dogs. Handlers (and instructors) who see barking as the ideal alert method will make a dog bark by any possible means. We have seen a training victim teasing a dog to get it to bark, with the result that the dog becomes aggressive. These dogs can become unsuitable for work as search and rescue dogs.

We also discovered in training that some dogs avoid the places where helpers lie. Although the dog’s body language told us that it could smell the helper, the dog walked away without barking. These were dogs that didn’t like to bark. Barking was not a part of their character, so they avoided situations where they had been trained to bark!

Why do so many people want the dog to alert using behavior it doesn’t, in fact, like? Because they don’t know their dog, don’t know much about its behavior during searching, and pay too little attention to it. Ethological—behavior—research is an area from which a search and rescue dog handler can learn much.

Looking for Solutions

In the mid-1970s, we were satisfied with any alert, and we were happy with every form of our dog’s barking, although we didn’t train for it. However, our results in finding people hidden beneath debris were worsening all the time.

To correct the problem, we tried to strengthen the goal of searching by using food, but we were lucky to discover quickly that food rewards created problems. You can imagine that a dog trained to search with food is no longer searching for human odor in debris, but instead for the odor of food.

Because our work at the end of the 1970s was strongly influenced by work with avalanche dogs, we also tried to build up the dog’s ability to search for human victims by searching for articles with human odor. Again we discovered quickly that this was the wrong approach, because a collapsed house is full of articles with a human odor!

Figure 2.2 The search and rescue dog, here a Golden Retriever, must not allow itself to be distracted, because it has to work in almost every kind of environment under all conditions.