Alerts with Body Language

An alert is how the dog makes it clear to the handler that it has located a missing or buried person during a search. Looking at the dog’s alert in the rubble or in an avalanche, we can always see a certain characteristic behavior. That’s how the handler can recognize that the dog has found the scent clue.

In practice it has been clearly proven that dogs react with a certain body attitude or expression upon finding a victim. This reaction is different for every dog. In general, a living victim will be indicated by the dog with an active, cheerful, and confident attitude; dead people will usually be indicated passively, and sometimes with a slightly uncertain behavior. In both cases we can see that the dog is clearly under stress at locating a victim. Search and rescue dog handlers must be able to read their dog’s body language well. Even after a long search under often stressful circumstances, a dog will still use its characteristic behavior to alert.

To read the dog, it is particularly important that the handler pay attention to all the changes the dog shows in its behavior. For that, of course, you have to know the dog thoroughly in normal situations, at home as well as during training. This knowledge requires long and close cooperation.

Alerts with Barking

Barking is the language of the dog. Dogs can produce many different sounds, from deep rolling barking to clear, high-pitched barking and crying. They use their voices to express themselves and change the pitch and volume of the bark to express their emotions and frustrations. Barking doesn’t always mean aggression; it more often means “Are we going to play?” or “Nice that you are here again.” Such “talking” dogs can easily develop the bark as an alert.

Barking in itself, however, is not enough as an alert. The dog has to indicate where the highest odor concentration is coming out of the rubble more accurately by pawing or alerting with its nose in the rubble.

Easy Barkers

During a training week we met a handler who was working with a Collie. The dog was showing remarkable behavior, which was making the handler a bit desperate. The moment he went to work with his dog, it began to bark at the rubble and continued to do so the whole time they worked. This was very confusing, because it was not clear to the handler if it was a real alert or if the dog was only barking out of enthusiasm. We taught his dog to scratch as an alert, and that gave the handler more confidence; later he could hear the difference in the dog’s bark at an alert.

We had experienced the same with our Welsh Corgi, which often barked out of enthusiasm when she just had begun to work. After a while, you learn as a handler, and also as a colleague, to notice clear differences between the barking when it is an alert and when not. With our Welsh Corgi, an alert was clear in her body posture and in the way she put her nose deeply in the rubble and began to scratch. Then we knew she had located a victim. Her alert barking was also different from her bark of enthusiasm. Handlers must “read” their dogs and correctly interpret their behavior.