Search as you Train....

[oksaradt]

I’m heading out-of-county for a couple of weeks. (No, I’m not going to Texas.)
I was mulling over what cough hack wheeze sage words of advice I could leave to fill the void. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the honor, joy, pain, etc. of getting to work with various experience-levels of cadaver dog handlers. Regardless of the experience level, the biggest obstacle I saw with any of the dog teams was either being oblivious to or ignoring an essential rule. Even the most experienced dog handlers can get trapped into a mindset with issues they are experiencing with their dogs. That’s what keeps us humble. No matter how many searches we’ve been on with positive outcomes, there come times when we must consult with someone else. The less experienced will start out with, “my dog is broken and I don’t know why.” The more experienced will start out with, “I’m sure I’m doing something wrong with my dog.”……if WE KNOW the dog has all the right drives, the right temperament, and is healthy then WE KNOW the handler is to blame. It doesn’t matter if someone else is screwing with your dog when you aren’t looking. YOU ARE TO BLAME. (For those people that just decide to give their cuddly-wuddly a hobby, this might not apply.)

So, what’s the rule so many choose to ignore?

“Train as you search and SEARCH AS YOU TRAIN.” It’s a pretty simple statement and philosophy, yet few actually stick with it.

The implications of the statement are this:

1) The dog should come to no longer note the difference between training and a real search…because the handler acts the same during training and searching.
2) The set up for the dog to go train should be the same for searching as for training….So, if you don’t pump your dog up for an hour before going out to train, don’t do it before you go out to search. No excited talk through out the long drive. ….A lot of this is the “handler thrill”….THEY ACTUALLY GOT A CALL OUT! Get called out enough and your attitude changes to things like, “wonder if this is going to trash the vehicle and cost me $20 to clean? Wonder if the L.E. has things scoped out? Wonder what dangers I will be subjecting my dog to? I wonder if the scent conditions are decent. Hell, I wonder what I’m getting myself into?” My point? Searching should be ROUTINE whether it’s problems you’ve set up, a blind, a mock search, a cemetery, scattered skeletal remains because a foo-foo came back with a skull, or hoping to find clandestine graves to put some slimy pedophilic serial killer away for life.

Many dog teams migrate into cadaver work from area search. When I started in area search, it was popular to pump your dog up before you literally “launched” it out into the field to make the find. As the dog matured, it learned to pace itself, but I continued to observe the handler going through this ritual from puppy to field ready. If my dogs launched out on a search, there’s a very good chance they’ll miss something. My ritual? When I open the door of the vehicle, I tell the dog, “Let’s go to work.” The dog should be working as soon as I let it out. Yes, it’ll poop and pee along the way. Hunting dogs often do this to “lighten the load”. I take this as a sign that now we’re focused. Even if we’re going to walk 2 miles to our area in the boonies, I want the dog’s nose engaged. Who is to say the intelligence is right? (Am I going to allow my dog into someone else’s area? No. Will I make a point of telling base that I observed scent behavior in my dog going past an area…for what it’s worth? You bet. It will just be part of my report. It’s up to the IC to decide what to do with the information.)

3) Once you are past the puppy being imprinted, the umbilical cord needs to stretch if not snap. As I gain confidence in my dogs, the distance between myself, the dog, and the sources increase. I want the dog out in front of me, actively searching on its own. Dax has indicated a find to me over 200 feet away. Murphy is now at about 50 feet away. Do I want the dog to leave the source? Nope. I expect commitment to the source where the dog will stick with it until I release the dog. Why? So, we don’t have to find it all over again. Handlers that don’t trust their dogs to work farther than a leash length away from them are demonstrating they don’t have all the proper skills trained in their dog. I used to attend seminars where before you were allowed to play with the “smart kids”, you had to stand behind a line and send your dog out to make the find without you.
4) Have the fortitude to allow your dog to miss a source in training. There is a rule when working blinds. We all know (or should know) that whomever set up the blind will be able to work their dog must faster than the rest of the dogs. If nothing else, this handler knows what to ignore. If you’re given an area 0-2 sources and you haven’t found 2 targets, you’ll get out the nasal fine tooth comb before you say, “I think it’s clear or at least my dog doesn’t have scent.” So, in training problems where the handler knows where the sources are and the dog isn’t hitting, we often get to watch the dance of how the handler “guides” the dog into the source. If this is a new type of scent problem for the dog, that’s one thing. If the dog should already know how to work it, your presence creates a crutch for the dog. Why should the dog become a problem solver if Mama or Daddy always comes to their rescue? In a real search you have no clue where anything is if there is anything. My personal rule is the dog gets three passes at an area whether I know if something is there or don’t. I developed this rule because I realized if I stick around longer that I’m likely to talk my dog into something that isn’t there.
5) Rather than claim your dog is “broke” if it missed a source, analyze scent travel and conditions as to why the dog didn’t get into scent. Run another dog in the area if possible…..knowing that conditions can change in seconds. Use that miss to determine if you need to step back in your training expectations, if you need to develop a better search strategy, if the conditions suck for searching…..Like a handler with a solid black Newfie that searched a cornfield in the middle of summer at NOON…. From what I heard the dog was searching for shade instead of scent. Who was at fault? THE HANDLER. If he expects his dog to work in these conditions, I hope his logs show routine finds in 100+F weather in sunshine. (When I got called to work this, I told them the only way I’d work it is if they’d meet me at 0300 to work dogs. They had no problem with this request.)
Search as you Train and Train as you Search.
(Oh, and yes, I sometimes train at 0300 as well in the summer… laugh Hell, I sometimes do it in the winter if I can’t sleep. )

6) Once your dog has the essentials and maturity, start working blinds once every four training sessions. Go into the blind with the ethic that you are going to work it as you would any training. Go into the blind that this is where the dog shows you what you’ve created. If you miss source(s) in a blind, take it as an opportunity rather than a personal affront to your ego. This is not AKC obedience. I don’t care how crisp you or your dog look. I care that you place flags very close to the scent sources based ON WHAT THE DOG DID. This means no analyzing who set up the problems as to how they think. This means no visual searching by the handler. This means you practice 3-in-and-out giving your dog ample time and availability of the area to give it a good scent once over. This means when your dog indicates/alerts and targets, that you place the flag based on how you read your dog. This varies with every dog, so why should I care (or you) if our dogs don’t look the same. You (should) know your dog better than anyone else (if you were paying attention), so go by how you read what the dog is trying to tell you. If your dog shops through out an area, you should be able to tell me every place you saw your dog exhibit change in body posture due to scent. Then I’d be happy to let you go back to those specific locations and rework the dog however you choose. (That your dog shops means you have a commitment weakness, but if you can still work through it with your dog, I can live with it. Our goal is to find the dead stuff for family and L.E. If you were on my team and your dog shopped without your intervention, I’d never deploy you though.)
7) Last and maybe the most important. Don’t do searches that you haven’t trained for. The search should not become a training exercise. If you make a find, you’ll be questioning yourself the entire time because you have no experience to base your findings on. Your dog may give you totally different responses than you are used to. Is it wrong? YOU DON’T KNOW.
This also means it’s foolish to go work a search in swamps when you only train in mountains or visa versa. If you want to be that dog team that can go anywhere in the world then get out your visa card and start attending seminars all over the world; Otherwise, you aren’t cheating yourself, but you are darn sure cheating the victim.



Train as your search and search as you train.


jim

[terrierlvr]

Jim, as I usually do, I am going back and rereading some of your posts to refresh my memory and build on things I didn't know then, but do know/understand now.
I don't believe I have asked you this question or seen you post this before. In a real life scenario, using not historic but HRD as an example, what is a realistic geographic area, size wise, that an individual dog would be expected to search? I realize this would vary some, depending on the scenario, but could you give a best/worse case scenario? Thanks. Bonnie

[oksaradt]

Jan 13, 2009 21:54:51 GMT -5 terrierlvr said:

I don't believe I have asked you this question or seen you post this before. In a real life scenario, using not historic but HRD as an example, what is a realistic geographic area, size wise, that an individual dog would be expected to search? I realize this would vary some, depending on the scenario, but could you give a best/worse case scenario? Thanks. Bonnie

Well, this subject can fill chapters. There is no easy answer. The dog handler has many factors to take into account Studying basic scent SAR techniques you learn how topography can make scent and rise with the sun. Studying the chemistry of taphonomy, you learn that many of the chemical compounds we have our dogs find drop instead of rise up in the air as most teach. Unfortunately, much of the information out there is based on live subjects or on Syrotuck's skin raft theories. The "old school" instructors swear by this like it is a religious convction rather than experiment or study chemistry.
The weather becomes so important, not just today's weather but the past few days such as if you expect to search for buried and you hope for the soil to be warmer than the air so scent can rise.
Moisture levels can both help and hinder you. High humidity can weigh the scent down if it's tissue-based, but it can help amplify skeletal-based scent.
The sun can mess up your search as it can cause scent to rise where it's caught by thermal wind currents then drop it when the scent goes into shade. So, on sunny days the handler looks (or should) for shady spots for scent to collect. The dog learns this as well and experienced HRD dogs often go from shade to shade rather than burn themselves out in the open sun. This isn't where the dog is overheated and searching out shade to cool, that's handler ineptness. The dog is actively moving to locations it has learned scent often collects in the hunt.
Knowing what you are searching for is essential. If you are looking for old skeletal remains on the surface, it's going to be a very long day. Depending on the situation it can take an hour per acre to search adequately.
If you are searching for recent dead with lots of tissue, the HRD dog often works this (or can) like an area search dog would, wide grids and moving fast. The HRD dog should actually be more sensitive if trained right and cover more area for fresh, but many HRD dogs are trained (by their handlers) to stay close to the handler and this slows them down.
If you are lucky enough to know there are remains somewhere in the area because someone's "foo-foo" walked up with a human bone, then you want to know if that bone was white (sun bleached) or not. Was the bone covered in mud, so you are possibly looking for shallow buried or recently uncovered remains?
Was there any tissue left on the bone or is it greasy (archeologist term for saying it still has some adipose tissue decomposed into it) to suggest this was recent, (or could have been coated in adipocere so all bets are off as to age)?
If the bone is sun-bleached then you expect to search for bones exposed to the sun and they could have been there for months to years to decades depending on how nature distributed them.
To estimate how long this is, you basically learn to calibrate your dog and yourself as to how the two of you work scattered skeletal remains. One of my favorite methods is a blind where I pick five acres with the terrain, vegetation, environment in mind. I ask someone else to pick an acre within the five acres and distribute ten bones out in that acre as they see fit, close, far, in a line, circle, a cone...whatever meets their fancy...the point is you just don't know. Your first goal is to find that first bone in the five acres. Your second goal (as a handler) is to see if a pattern begins to show itself so that you can assist the dog in how it searches; otherwise, that one acre can easily become three acres as you try to find all your bones. I set an artificial time goal of finding all ten bones in one hour. If my dog finds all ten bones within that time then I have a good estimate as to how we can search that sort of terrain for scattered skeletal. If not, then I have a percentage of ten bones in one hours and can use the reciprocal to give myself an accurate time estimate.

For buried, you again have to calibrate you and your dog to give yourself a good estimate of how the two of you work each situation. Each dog is different and each dog handler is different. We'd like to imagine that HRD dogs can perform lightning fast like they train the narcotics dogs to act, but this can miss so much of the remains. An HRD dog must learn to be methodical if the handler hopes it to find bones as small as teeth or buried six feet down out in nasty areas. HRD dogs must be trained for worst-case conditions. What is more often the case is dog teams train to the minimal required to get a piece of paper that lets them go play. That piece of paper doesn't prepare them or provide the skills for most of the HRD searches they'll be asked to perform, yet they'll go do those searches anyway.

*sigh* I knew this subject would cause me to soapbox.

Anyway, to try to answer your question....I'll pose questions:

When does HRD become historic? What is the length of time the body decomposes into the earth and the sun bleaches the adipose tissue out of the bones? Even this is not a black-&-white question.
If the body is in the earth, say deeper than 18 inches, multiply this number by 8. (Dr. Vass/Bass)

If the body is buried in soil with a high water table, how long might it take for the body to decompose....will it stop decomposing possibly? Can your dog find adipocere? Do you train on adipocere? Have you worked cemeteries with known unmarked graves so that you know how your dog works in those soils, slopes, under cedars, under trees, out in an open prairie with cows milling between the graves...aye?....don't laugh...this happens more often than I'd like to think....

If the body decomposed out on the open prairie in full summer heat, how long will it take to become skeletonized? What is the predator/vermin activity in the area going to do to your problem?

If the body falls into water, cold cold water, just above freezing, and doesn't decompose then what are your best chances of locating it? What would you hope for in nature for your chances for a find to improve?

If someone goes climbing in the rocks and dies down in rocks due to a debilitating injury...hmmm, can you and your dog search rocks? How is the temperature of the rocks and the soil going to affect decomposition and location of remains? If it's high altitude, how is this going to affect the decomposition and the find? Would you need to train your dog on mummified remains perhaps to be able to locate?


My point is there are many many dog teams out there that want to search, they want to help, they NEED to help. Many times this NEED blinds their thinking (or sometimes I think some are just con-artist...I knew one that was) where they'll say they can do it regardless....they train on bone after all? Do they leave the bones buried for months sometimes to see how this affects the scent conditions for the dogs? Dogs, in some respects, can become like us in that they look for what's different if we allow them to train that way. They stop hunting for scent and begin playing the game of "what's different in my field?" When taken to a new "field" this often puts the dog in a situation it doesn't know how to cope with. The search dog must train to where it's "NORM" is there is NO NORMAL SITUATION.



I need to tie this up.

SOOOOOO, what we do is we slap artificial time limits upon ourselves and our dogs so that we pay attention to how fast or slow they work problems. When I was first learning this on a national basis, I'd be brought up to a problem, told a story, told what type of remains I'd probably be looking and then ask, "SOOOOO, Buckaroo! Just how long will it take you and your dog to clear this area.....there are say.....zero to four (could be more, could be none) sources.....how long?"
I'd be forced to estimate. As a budding handler, of course I would give myself more time. I quickly learned this wasn't going to fly as they would often cut my time allowed in half. The problem setter had an idea of how long it should take...(these were/are experienced HRD dog handlers, not the innocent helper without a clue..."but hey this could be fun") ......but, I was being
forced to manage my dog in the area given as efficiently as possible.



(Oh, and for those new handlers that said, "I can do this in two minutes!".... they would say "fine", when your two minutes was up, you were yanked and sent on your way, thanks for playing, that's all the time you asked for, see ya!..... This forced one to become honest with oneself and one's dog)


In conclusion, when I am asked to do a search I ask lots of questions. I don't ask who the person was. I might ask how it's thought they died. as that might help in where the body ended up.... I ask what the terrain is like. I ask what the vegetation is like. I ask what the moisure level is like (lake, swamp, desert, rocky hills, what?) I try to figure out the weather of the area and what it will be like when they want my dog to search...(can we reschedule for three days out....no? ok, can we do this in the middle of the night?...cool....) I ask the area we think we might need to search....recently a search was to be no bigger than an acre (ok, what if we don't find anything?....oh, 50 acres right next to it, you say?...mmmmm, all full of six foot tall weeds, thick as thieves......but, you just know this one acre is the one....uh huh....)
oh yea, are there wild pigs in the area? Wild dogs? Emu? (you laugh, I had to search such a place twice)

How long will the search take? Only you know your area. Only you know how your dogs train.

I wish I could give you a black-and-white answer, but it's a very grey area. The answer is always time your dog in training. Always time your and your dog in blinds. This is the only way you get a feel for how long it will take. The more blinds you do, the better you get at it. The more challenging blinds you endure, the better you get at it.
If possible, keep collective stats on the other dogs you get to work with to see how their times compare. DO NOT MAKE THIS A COMPETITION. This is calibrating your resources. A fast dog can often miss the subtle sources and the slow dog can put every one to sleep..even itself. Strive to create a dog that is working steadily and methodically for the type of sources you expect to have to find. Tissue should be faster than skeletal (most times) just because there is more diffusion at a faster rate.


Hope this helps. I know it is all over the place, but this is a complicated subject that most try to over simplify to the detriment of the victim and their families.

Regards,

Jim

[terrierlvr]

Jim, what can I say? Once again, ALOT for me to read, absorb and digest. This could be a career. <g> Good thing I don't work much.
The blinds have been INVALUABLE. I never really know what to make of them, but they seem to turn out ok. I made the mistake of having Rick set out a series of blinds for me......heck, you would think he'd have a good idea by NOW! I said to put a good four or five or whatever sources out in a 50 yard by 50 yard area, more or less. There was snow on the ground so he was totally fehtummeled...........he made the area one THIRD the size, had all kinds of sources overlapping, couldn't remember where he put the sources..........it was not very pretty. We DID find everything, thanks to THE DOG! I think he has the hang of it now.
Since we have the opportunity to travel so much, it is invaluable to use these opportunities to train in different locations.......different elevations, topography, humidity, desert, brush, plains,weather, all those great things. It is just another opportunity to add to the scent bank.
I am gradually gaining more confidence in reading him and I am at the point where I am really starting to trust him in what he finds. He has not given a false alert in so long that I can't remember. I guess I have it "fixed in my head" that he needs to work slowly, methodically, like a bank teller counting pennies........I don't know why I picture it being like that. I see us in the graveyard, slowly and methodically going from point to point, alerting as appropriate. Porter's style is VERY different from that. He "sizes up" the area by charging to a region of scent, and then works the area in a pattern.......a large circular pattern that gets smaller as he gets closer. Sometimes, he races around and he totally changes direction. At this point, I KNOW he has the scent, and I simply stand and watch. If it is difficult for him to locate, I will help him by doing a grid of the area, but oftentimes, I don't need to do that. I am PRACTICING the darned grid because *I* need it. He needs it too. He is so busy running about searching for one specific source that my main concern is that he will MISS other sources.
I am very pleased with my progress in that I don't feel the need to "direct" him to an area, or lead him to a specific spot. I think this has made blinds a bit easier for me. Before I started blinds, I KNEW he could find the source, so I had to get the mechanics down and develop a flow or work style. We are definitely still working on that.........something I think you would describe as "the dance." We are finally learning to dance.
Blinds have changed our world, and for the better. Heaven knows, they sure are more fun for ME!
Anyway, I digress. ALL this information is extraordinarily helpful, and alot for me to read and reread. In a nutshell, there IS no definitive answer on "how long" the search could be. I get it.
Once again, my thanks. Bonnie