Training the Natural Way
After many years of training our dogs in the Schutzhund program, in the 1970s we decided to start training search and rescue dogs as well. Based on decades of study, we have, together with our Austrian colleagues, developed a new training method for search and rescue dogs, which, of course, can also be used for other dog-training purposes.
When we began our search and rescue training, we asked ourselves why so many handlers had problems with searching and tracking. We quickly realized the dogs didn’t enjoy our training model, and we found that it was because we didn’t take the dogs’ drives into account.
The Origins of Our Method
Let’s first have a look at how our new method developed. We have to go back to 1980 following the major earthquake disaster in southern Italy, when our search and rescue dogs located many dead bodies during their search for survivors. At the time we said to each other, “If we can come up with a way to teach dogs to differentiate live people from dead human bodies by special training, that would be the crown on our work with search and rescue dogs.” If a search and rescue dog could indicate the difference between dead and living victims beneath the debris, this would be of decisive importance for the salvage. Otherwise, while handlers can get an indication from their dogs of a human odor emanating from the rubble, they don’t know whether the human is still alive. When choosing where to dig first, handlers have to rely on luck to choose locations with live people.
New Insights
For many years dogs have been trained in several different ways for different tasks. Until recently, this training often lacked the support of any theoretical background. In the 1980s, we changed this for search and rescue dogs with the publication of our book The Search and Rescue Dog: Training and Mission. But time doesn’t stand still, and neither did our research into smell and search tactics. In our continuing studies during actual missions and training sessions, new insights were regularly gathered and, of course, used in training our search and rescue dogs.
At that time, we were already getting from our dogs a reliable indication of whether victims were dead or living. Our mission after the earthquake disaster of 1988 in Armenia provided convincing evidence of that. But our research continued and we sought to bring more precision and perfection to our training method.
Mechanical Training
Many handlers still train in a mechanical fashion. For example, when teaching the dog to sit, they lay their left hand on the rear of the dog and pull the dog up high with the leash while giving the command “Sit.” For that you don’t need any knowledge of dogs, you only have to listen to what the instructor is telling you.
Such training is also possible with search and rescue dogs, but this sort of mechanical approach leads to frustrations for the handler and dog. Mechanical training does not use the dog’s curiosity for search work. As soon as the dog has found the victim and doesn’t know what to do, we say: “Good boy. You have found him. Speak.” If the dog barks, it is praised. But for what? For barking, not for finding!
These types of exercises seem right from a human perspective. However, such training ignores important behavior patterns that the dog has inherited from its ancestors. Thus, when the dog is trained in a mechanical way, which provides only intermittent moments of searching, one might possibly get a dog that can search and track. But such a dog does not feel happy and will quit working quickly during a real search. Instead of purposefully working with the dog’s natural drive stimuli, one reduces it with ritual proceedings and often places an enormous value on peripheral matters. Dogs trained in this way visibly lack the intensity and passion to search and the drive needed to carry out a longer search.
Figure 2.1 The search and rescue dog, here a Malinois, must give its handler a clear and understandable signal that it has found a victim where the human odor concentration is highest.