Post by oksaradt on May 24, 2009 17:54:13 GMT -5
I've had this conversation about four different ways with four different dog handlers in the past two weeks, so guess it's time for me to tick some people off and put my views out there.
When I started in SAR, the jack-of-all-trades dog versus the specialist was a hot topic then. My first dog got some training in trailing, area search, and then cadaver work. Her preference for human remains caused me to consider the pro's and con's of specialization and I decided we'd work towards becoming an HRD dog team
I am not against cross-training an area search dog to find recent dead. I think it's a good idea for tornadoes, hunting accidents, "sundowners" (Alzheimer patients that wander), i.e. situations where the lost person might not survive their crisis. There are always trade-offs when one does this. I've been lucky enough to train with very high quality area search dogs, both locally and nationally. Such dogs are sent to work and often take off on their own to work their gridding at a very high rate of speed, only occassionally checking back with their handler. The point is these dogs are racing to acquire live scent and through that to find the "subject" (I prefer this term to victim as such implies foul play from the start). Such dogs cover large areas in a short amount of time which is their main advantage over doing man-to-man searches.
An HRD dog (not cadaver as this term has often come to imply a wide range of trained dogs from HRD to poorly trained dogs that would indicate on a dead horse as quickly as human remains) focuses on a window of the decomposition of human remains. Some HRD dogs specialize even more in what's termed as "historic" where they are trained only on non-tissue components, i.e. defleshed teeth and bones, to sharpen their senses for old graves and archeological digs. Some are even trained on artifacts that are created by absorbing in their oxides the results of a human decomposing against them....an example would be a dog that could locate a musketball that lodged in a civil war soldier that was killed and undiscovered to where the slug that killed him absorbed in the lead oxide some of the chemicals that decomposition produced. This is possible. I worked a civil war battlefield with such dogs and the finds were confirmed by the historical society with their metal detectors.
Anyway, an HRD dog learns a variety of gridding patterns depending on the scent source you are searching for. The handler and dog have practiced on scattered skeletal remains, graves in the woods, burial mounds, or, the other extreme, the crime scene. The type of scent source dictates the grid pattern required to cover the area adequately to find all the scent soruces. A proper application of an HRD dog trained to work blood is not to have it replace the area search dog, but rather to have it to be able to deal with the overlaps that lots of scent sources create. It's really not a big deal to train an area search dog to find a bloody source over a large area. It's a much bigger challenge to train that dog to be able to work through the dense blood diffusion cloud to locate (for example) different limbs, bones with tissue on them, spatter sites that a CSI team could be called in to analyze, etc.
So, where's the rub?
Many dog teams like to stack areas of expertise on their dogs, i.e. wilderness, cadaver, disaster, water cadaver, yada yada yada.
The result tends to be a confused dog who is so-so at all the stuff, but not really a scent expert in any of them. The area search dog that works too much HRs tends to shorten its ranging down considerably as the scent work is much more complicated. IF the handler decided his/her dog can do bones as well, the ranging is cut down drastically as the dog learns it can not race over the area and find many dried bones on the prairie AND it's handler begins slowing it down (consciously or sub-consciously) because the handler often KNOWS where the scent sources are and begins to over-control the dog because they don't want their dog to make them look bad by missing the scent source. This often results in a dog that is forced to depend on its handler to make finds.
Many times cross-dog handlers start seeing their dog's performance slowing down OR the dog begins to indicate in scent pool instead of locating the subject. This occurs because the HRD dog rarely gets to see its scent source. The HRD dog is taught that it must locate the strongest concentration of scent diffusion rate and target that. This is normally the closest spot to the source the dog can reach such as for elevated remains, buried remains, remains under water, remains in a debris pile, etc.
The area search dog starts out training on a whole, breathing, fun human being that is obvious to all on sight. The dog is really not expected to target per se. The area search dog is required to get the handler to the subject and the party ensues. When the successful area search dog (live) is then introduced to HRs, the rules are suddenly changed and the human trainers/ handlers just expect the dog to figure it out. Dogs guess till they find the sequence that makes us happy and then they continue to do that as long as it pays. So, if the cross-dog gets rewarded often for bringing the handler to a scent pool of HRs, it often decides it can do the same thing on live humans. We as handlers/trainers often justify this with "the dog needs to re-attain victim loyalty."
So, one of my conversations was with someone that wants to do only HRD work with the dog and is getting advice from a handler that works a cross-dog. The cross-dog handlers states (with the wisdom of experience), "Don't train too much on HRs as the dog begins to perform poorly with too much training."...... From the cross-dog handler's point of view, this is correct. For the HRD-only dog, this is bad advice. As long as the training is fun for the dog, you can not train often enough. Now, if you set up the same problem over and over, if you work the same problem lots of times, etc. then the dog often becomes bored. That's up to the trainer/handler to continually challenge the dog (IN BABY STEPS) such that it's skills and nasal receptors continue to improve. I've observed in many HRD-only dogs where the dog's skills continue to improve through out it's career as long as the handler has a well-established training program that reinforces what the dog can do while adding in the occassinal challege for the dog to deal with that it's never had solve.
With area search dogs, this can be done as well, but usually the challenge is adding different scenarios with the subjects and where they are located. The scent source size doesn't change, but it varies in age, diet, race, gender, alcohol content. The location of the scent soruce changes from kneeling behind a tree to up a tree, down in a culvert, in buildings, etc. Area search dogs tend to be limited by their athletic ability and as such their careers tend to be shorter.
oh yea, that reminds me, it's very common for the live-only area search dog handler to realize that "old trusty" is slowing down with arthritis, so the handler has a brain-storm and decides, "now is the time I'll train the dog in cadaver work." I have to tell you, I often come out of search areas with clothes torn, cut arms and face, very tired muscles and the dog only looks slightly better. One of the reasons I like to have two dogs is that the younger dog will be doing the athletic work and the older, more experienced dog will be doing the detail work. Not only will it take quite a while to re-train the retiring area search dog, but chances are that by the time it is retrained that it won't be up to the task intended.
Anyway, before that tangent, my point was an HRD-dog can easily train every day. I prefer to train such a dog 75-80 percent skeletal/dental (or historic level), 10-15 percent decomp, and then one FUN day where the point of this is that the dog gets lots of easy finds and rewards. A FUN day can be a bone rubbed with adipose tissue that the handler has the dog find, throws a ball as reward, and then races to the bone and tosses it somewhere else before the dog gets back for another find, and another, and another. Another FUN Day can simply be picking up scent sources you've asked to dog to search for over 3 to 4 days. I simply ask the dog to "show me" which implies, "you've already located it, target it for me" Many times the dog is forced to re-search for the item, but we both know it's there so fun can be had. When my dogs start as puppies, they might train every day 2-3 times a day as the training periods are all of five minutes long. As long as the dog is having fun at training and is demanding to go train to get that reward it just can't live without, you can train all you want.
A minimum training program for an HRD dog (in my opinion) should be no less than every other day. If I can slip in more, I do. If I don't slip in more, I often have a dog that's driving me crazy because he wants to go play ball and that only happens for a find. If the dog doesn't get excited about working scent then the handler either picked the wrong dog, is confusing the dog in training, or (the most common) has taken the fun out of dog training. Any body that works with me knows that I demand handlers to do whatever it takes to excite the dog with the find. The best subjects for live are those people the dog just can't wait to go find because they know they are so much fun. If the handler's reward system is boring then the dog will quickly tire of the game.
* *
Oh yea *chuckle* (one of my students got teased (by me)for this) the reward is not the search itself. Our canine partners have the mentality of little kids. I have no kids, but I have friends with kids that hate it when I visit because there kids want them to fly them over their heads in the air like I do when I visit or play adventures. A dog handler MUST be able to get into the head of the 6-8 year old child that's in their dog to know what will spur them on when you're working long hours in crappy weather with no scent. I do try to limit myself to just dogs now after a 16-year old that came up to me and said, "Bet cha can't lift me over your head now." A little judo, a little Aikido and he was air born, but my back did complain a bit the next day. My point is that even at 16, this person had great memories of the party we threw. Our canine partners have to be in that mindset at every training. If you can't be Mr. Happy, then don't train that day....
* *
An HRD dog handler doesn't have to locate a subject to go hide and is only limited by their imagination as to where they can place scent sources. Remember though to still to only complicate the scent problems in baby steps and have clear objectives to what the scent problem is supposed to prepare your dog (and you) for.
So, with all this in mind, my real frustration with jack-of-all-trade dogs versus specialist is that the handlers of jack-dogs often fall into a trap. They will go get a certification such as NASAR cadaver dog that has them do one elevated, one surface, and one buried. So, they train to this certification and proudly say, "ayup, my dog can do cadaver work." Law enforcement calls them on an five-year old case that they really haven't trained to work, but they don't want to look as if they can't do it. After all, they did say they had a cadaver dog. They'll treat it like an area search because that's what they know best. In many cases, the remains go missed, law enforcement gets a bad taste in their mouth on "so-called cadaver dogs" and decides not to use them again.
A case in point. I was asked today about a 20-year old case with most likely clandestine graves. I stated without seeing the terrain that it would probably take the dog an hour per acre to properly search for such a grave. It could take less, but in some situations, it could take longer. The point is this is all my dogs and I do, I know their limitations and how to work specific scent situations. I called a cross-dog handler and asked them what their take was on such a search. With best intentions I was quoted 10-acres per hour regardless of terrain/soil types/time-of-day.
And, last, but in my mind the worst, are the disaster dog handlers that are cross-traiing their dogs on the sly so that they can stay on the pile longer. I don't care how hard they convince themselves that they have two commands for live and for dead, if the dog is surrounded by lots of human remains and there is one unconcsious subject down in the rubble, the dog is going to choose what's easiest to get paid for. The live-only dog doesn't have that option of pointing out the remains on the pile, so it works its butt off to locate that one source of live human breath barely buffing out of the pile despite slipping on the red stuff on the rocks. If I'm the one in the pile, I want the live-only dog searching for me. After the golden time is up and I was missed, then the HRD dogs can take their time finding me. Personally, I'd rather be found. I'd really be happy to see FEMA put in their certs that charred human remains will be on the pile and dogs will fail if they locate them.
Sorry for all the tangents. Entire posts could be written about several subjects in here, but this all goes together with cross-training.
Regards,
Jim
When I started in SAR, the jack-of-all-trades dog versus the specialist was a hot topic then. My first dog got some training in trailing, area search, and then cadaver work. Her preference for human remains caused me to consider the pro's and con's of specialization and I decided we'd work towards becoming an HRD dog team
I am not against cross-training an area search dog to find recent dead. I think it's a good idea for tornadoes, hunting accidents, "sundowners" (Alzheimer patients that wander), i.e. situations where the lost person might not survive their crisis. There are always trade-offs when one does this. I've been lucky enough to train with very high quality area search dogs, both locally and nationally. Such dogs are sent to work and often take off on their own to work their gridding at a very high rate of speed, only occassionally checking back with their handler. The point is these dogs are racing to acquire live scent and through that to find the "subject" (I prefer this term to victim as such implies foul play from the start). Such dogs cover large areas in a short amount of time which is their main advantage over doing man-to-man searches.
An HRD dog (not cadaver as this term has often come to imply a wide range of trained dogs from HRD to poorly trained dogs that would indicate on a dead horse as quickly as human remains) focuses on a window of the decomposition of human remains. Some HRD dogs specialize even more in what's termed as "historic" where they are trained only on non-tissue components, i.e. defleshed teeth and bones, to sharpen their senses for old graves and archeological digs. Some are even trained on artifacts that are created by absorbing in their oxides the results of a human decomposing against them....an example would be a dog that could locate a musketball that lodged in a civil war soldier that was killed and undiscovered to where the slug that killed him absorbed in the lead oxide some of the chemicals that decomposition produced. This is possible. I worked a civil war battlefield with such dogs and the finds were confirmed by the historical society with their metal detectors.
Anyway, an HRD dog learns a variety of gridding patterns depending on the scent source you are searching for. The handler and dog have practiced on scattered skeletal remains, graves in the woods, burial mounds, or, the other extreme, the crime scene. The type of scent source dictates the grid pattern required to cover the area adequately to find all the scent soruces. A proper application of an HRD dog trained to work blood is not to have it replace the area search dog, but rather to have it to be able to deal with the overlaps that lots of scent sources create. It's really not a big deal to train an area search dog to find a bloody source over a large area. It's a much bigger challenge to train that dog to be able to work through the dense blood diffusion cloud to locate (for example) different limbs, bones with tissue on them, spatter sites that a CSI team could be called in to analyze, etc.
So, where's the rub?
Many dog teams like to stack areas of expertise on their dogs, i.e. wilderness, cadaver, disaster, water cadaver, yada yada yada.
The result tends to be a confused dog who is so-so at all the stuff, but not really a scent expert in any of them. The area search dog that works too much HRs tends to shorten its ranging down considerably as the scent work is much more complicated. IF the handler decided his/her dog can do bones as well, the ranging is cut down drastically as the dog learns it can not race over the area and find many dried bones on the prairie AND it's handler begins slowing it down (consciously or sub-consciously) because the handler often KNOWS where the scent sources are and begins to over-control the dog because they don't want their dog to make them look bad by missing the scent source. This often results in a dog that is forced to depend on its handler to make finds.
Many times cross-dog handlers start seeing their dog's performance slowing down OR the dog begins to indicate in scent pool instead of locating the subject. This occurs because the HRD dog rarely gets to see its scent source. The HRD dog is taught that it must locate the strongest concentration of scent diffusion rate and target that. This is normally the closest spot to the source the dog can reach such as for elevated remains, buried remains, remains under water, remains in a debris pile, etc.
The area search dog starts out training on a whole, breathing, fun human being that is obvious to all on sight. The dog is really not expected to target per se. The area search dog is required to get the handler to the subject and the party ensues. When the successful area search dog (live) is then introduced to HRs, the rules are suddenly changed and the human trainers/ handlers just expect the dog to figure it out. Dogs guess till they find the sequence that makes us happy and then they continue to do that as long as it pays. So, if the cross-dog gets rewarded often for bringing the handler to a scent pool of HRs, it often decides it can do the same thing on live humans. We as handlers/trainers often justify this with "the dog needs to re-attain victim loyalty."
So, one of my conversations was with someone that wants to do only HRD work with the dog and is getting advice from a handler that works a cross-dog. The cross-dog handlers states (with the wisdom of experience), "Don't train too much on HRs as the dog begins to perform poorly with too much training."...... From the cross-dog handler's point of view, this is correct. For the HRD-only dog, this is bad advice. As long as the training is fun for the dog, you can not train often enough. Now, if you set up the same problem over and over, if you work the same problem lots of times, etc. then the dog often becomes bored. That's up to the trainer/handler to continually challenge the dog (IN BABY STEPS) such that it's skills and nasal receptors continue to improve. I've observed in many HRD-only dogs where the dog's skills continue to improve through out it's career as long as the handler has a well-established training program that reinforces what the dog can do while adding in the occassinal challege for the dog to deal with that it's never had solve.
With area search dogs, this can be done as well, but usually the challenge is adding different scenarios with the subjects and where they are located. The scent source size doesn't change, but it varies in age, diet, race, gender, alcohol content. The location of the scent soruce changes from kneeling behind a tree to up a tree, down in a culvert, in buildings, etc. Area search dogs tend to be limited by their athletic ability and as such their careers tend to be shorter.
oh yea, that reminds me, it's very common for the live-only area search dog handler to realize that "old trusty" is slowing down with arthritis, so the handler has a brain-storm and decides, "now is the time I'll train the dog in cadaver work." I have to tell you, I often come out of search areas with clothes torn, cut arms and face, very tired muscles and the dog only looks slightly better. One of the reasons I like to have two dogs is that the younger dog will be doing the athletic work and the older, more experienced dog will be doing the detail work. Not only will it take quite a while to re-train the retiring area search dog, but chances are that by the time it is retrained that it won't be up to the task intended.
Anyway, before that tangent, my point was an HRD-dog can easily train every day. I prefer to train such a dog 75-80 percent skeletal/dental (or historic level), 10-15 percent decomp, and then one FUN day where the point of this is that the dog gets lots of easy finds and rewards. A FUN day can be a bone rubbed with adipose tissue that the handler has the dog find, throws a ball as reward, and then races to the bone and tosses it somewhere else before the dog gets back for another find, and another, and another. Another FUN Day can simply be picking up scent sources you've asked to dog to search for over 3 to 4 days. I simply ask the dog to "show me" which implies, "you've already located it, target it for me" Many times the dog is forced to re-search for the item, but we both know it's there so fun can be had. When my dogs start as puppies, they might train every day 2-3 times a day as the training periods are all of five minutes long. As long as the dog is having fun at training and is demanding to go train to get that reward it just can't live without, you can train all you want.
A minimum training program for an HRD dog (in my opinion) should be no less than every other day. If I can slip in more, I do. If I don't slip in more, I often have a dog that's driving me crazy because he wants to go play ball and that only happens for a find. If the dog doesn't get excited about working scent then the handler either picked the wrong dog, is confusing the dog in training, or (the most common) has taken the fun out of dog training. Any body that works with me knows that I demand handlers to do whatever it takes to excite the dog with the find. The best subjects for live are those people the dog just can't wait to go find because they know they are so much fun. If the handler's reward system is boring then the dog will quickly tire of the game.
* *
Oh yea *chuckle* (one of my students got teased (by me)for this) the reward is not the search itself. Our canine partners have the mentality of little kids. I have no kids, but I have friends with kids that hate it when I visit because there kids want them to fly them over their heads in the air like I do when I visit or play adventures. A dog handler MUST be able to get into the head of the 6-8 year old child that's in their dog to know what will spur them on when you're working long hours in crappy weather with no scent. I do try to limit myself to just dogs now after a 16-year old that came up to me and said, "Bet cha can't lift me over your head now." A little judo, a little Aikido and he was air born, but my back did complain a bit the next day. My point is that even at 16, this person had great memories of the party we threw. Our canine partners have to be in that mindset at every training. If you can't be Mr. Happy, then don't train that day....
* *
An HRD dog handler doesn't have to locate a subject to go hide and is only limited by their imagination as to where they can place scent sources. Remember though to still to only complicate the scent problems in baby steps and have clear objectives to what the scent problem is supposed to prepare your dog (and you) for.
So, with all this in mind, my real frustration with jack-of-all-trade dogs versus specialist is that the handlers of jack-dogs often fall into a trap. They will go get a certification such as NASAR cadaver dog that has them do one elevated, one surface, and one buried. So, they train to this certification and proudly say, "ayup, my dog can do cadaver work." Law enforcement calls them on an five-year old case that they really haven't trained to work, but they don't want to look as if they can't do it. After all, they did say they had a cadaver dog. They'll treat it like an area search because that's what they know best. In many cases, the remains go missed, law enforcement gets a bad taste in their mouth on "so-called cadaver dogs" and decides not to use them again.
A case in point. I was asked today about a 20-year old case with most likely clandestine graves. I stated without seeing the terrain that it would probably take the dog an hour per acre to properly search for such a grave. It could take less, but in some situations, it could take longer. The point is this is all my dogs and I do, I know their limitations and how to work specific scent situations. I called a cross-dog handler and asked them what their take was on such a search. With best intentions I was quoted 10-acres per hour regardless of terrain/soil types/time-of-day.
And, last, but in my mind the worst, are the disaster dog handlers that are cross-traiing their dogs on the sly so that they can stay on the pile longer. I don't care how hard they convince themselves that they have two commands for live and for dead, if the dog is surrounded by lots of human remains and there is one unconcsious subject down in the rubble, the dog is going to choose what's easiest to get paid for. The live-only dog doesn't have that option of pointing out the remains on the pile, so it works its butt off to locate that one source of live human breath barely buffing out of the pile despite slipping on the red stuff on the rocks. If I'm the one in the pile, I want the live-only dog searching for me. After the golden time is up and I was missed, then the HRD dogs can take their time finding me. Personally, I'd rather be found. I'd really be happy to see FEMA put in their certs that charred human remains will be on the pile and dogs will fail if they locate them.
Sorry for all the tangents. Entire posts could be written about several subjects in here, but this all goes together with cross-training.
Regards,
Jim