The History of Search and Rescue Dogs
Dogs have likely been rescuing humans for hundreds of years—countless rescues of sailors lost at sea have been ascribed to Newfoundland and Labrador dogs—but the first organized rescue operations using dogs were described around 1800 by the monks of the hospice at Great Saint Bernard in Switzerland. Their Saint Bernard dogs rescued hundreds of people from the snow over the years.
Barry, the famous Saint Bernard that worked at the hospice from 1800 to 1812, is credited with saving the lives of forty people. In 1812 he was taken to a monastery in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, where he died in 1814. He then was stuffed and still has his place in the Natural Historical Museum of Bern.
Figure 1.1 Lt.-Col. E. H. Richardson deployed his ambulance dogs during the 1911 Riff War in Morocco.
(From the collection of Onze Hond)
Red Cross Dogs
The development of modern search and rescue dogs occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Before this, soldiers would often return to empty battlefields at night to retrieve wounded comrades left behind during the fighting. After the formation of independent medical aid organizations—the precursors to the Red Cross—that task was taken over by nurses. It soon became obvious, however, that war dogs, which had been trained to carry messages along enemy lines, could help in the search for wounded.
The Red Cross dog—in German called the Sanitätshunde—began to play an important role in searching for battlefield survivors. The German Association for Red Cross Dogs was established in 1890, and the first edition of the Manual for the Training and Use of the Sanitätshunde, written by Major A. Berdez of the Swiss army, was published in 1903.
The British Army also used Collies, Airedale Terriers, and Bloodhounds to search for wounded people. Most of these dogs were trained under the instruction of Lieutenant-Colonel E. H. Richardson. Many of his so-called “ambulance dogs” went on missions in Britain and other countries, including a mission with the Russian Red Cross during the war in Manchuria from 1904 to 1905.
Figure 1.2 The Malinois was a common Red Cross dog in the period before World War I.
(From the collection of Onze Hond)
Figure 1.3 Les chiens sanitaires were featured on the cover of the French magazine Le Petit Journal in April 1915.
Painterly Influences
The German animal painter and illustrator Jean Bungartz is often credited with the idea of training dogs specifically for use on and around the battlefield. In 1885 he started to select and train the best dogs for his goal. He found the Collie to be the most able and clever of all breeds, but he also wrote that the German Wirehaired Pointer was successful in locating wounded people.
Bringsel Technique
When Red Cross dogs located wounded people on a battlefield, they had to make their find clear to their handlers. At first they were trained to stay by the wounded soldier and bark until the handler arrived. The handlers soon realized that it was almost impossible to find the barking dog in the dark—and it attracted enemy fire. In response, they changed the alert method to have the dogs pick up something in the vicinity of the victim and bring it to the handler. The item could be a helmet, a gun or a shoe—whatever was close to the wounded soldier.
This method worked well in training because the handlers took care that something always lay in the vicinity of the training victim. On World War I battlefields, however, this method sometimes created problems. If the dogs couldn’t find anything to pick up near the victim, they took something from the body of the victim. Sometimes it was a bandage the soldier had used to dress his wounds because the bandage was strong with the odor of the wounded person. The dogs ended up doing more harm than good and were soon withdrawn.
It seemed that the use of Red Cross dogs was over, but the well-known German psychologist Oskar Pfungst found an easy solution. He affixed a small leather article—a so-called bringsel—to the dog’s collar and trained the dog to take this article in its mouth and bring it to the handler as soon as it found a sitting, squatting, or lying person. Equipped with bringsels, the Red Cross dogs resumed their work on the battlefield.
Figure 1.4 Mrs. Griffin with Crumstone Irma and Crumstone Psyche locating bodies in the rubble. Mrs. Griffin said the laid back ears were always a sign that Irma had found a dead victim. With living victims, her dogs always scratched in the rubble. (London, England, 1944)
(From the collection of Onze Hond)