Search and Rescue Dog Training for Successful Tracking Missions

Dogs are wonderful animals. They not only make excellent pets but are also great partners during search and rescue missions. Their astounding sense of smell makes them perfect for sniffing illegal drugs, finding dead bodies of people, tracking down lost persons and many more.

There are special trainings conducted to make a dog capable of search and rescue missions. The training aims to develop five major areas of dog behaviors that are vital in developing dogs that are capable of search and rescue missions. The main objective of search and rescue dog training is to develop dogs that are obedient, agile and good in tracking, retrieving and searching.

Search and Rescue Dog Training

Obedience is the first lesson tackled in a search and rescue dog training. This will serve as the basis or the foundation of the entire training. There are several exercises that dogs, with the help of their trainers, ought to accomplish. These exercises are combinations of sit, jog at heel, staying down, keeping still even when the trainer is out of sight and other exercises that are geared to developing obedience. Dogs that are able to pass the obedient lesson will be the ones to proceed to the next level of exercises.

After obedience come the agility exercises. The main objective of this exercise is to prepare the dog physically for the strenuous tasks that goes with actual rescue operations. The agility exercise comprised of diverse types of jumping exercises with the guidance of the dog trainer.

Tracking is another important exercise in the search and rescue dog training. The purpose of this exercise is to develop tracking dogs that will assist police in their search for missing persons, evidences and even searching for illegal drugs. This training is consist of teaching a dog to track down human scent as well as crushed vegetation using their excellent sense of smell.

Here are some Dog Facts….

Dogs possess 125 to 200 million olfactory cells which is the very reason for its amazing sensitivity to various smells. As a matter of fact, a dog can detect odor for as little as one part in a trillion. You see a dog’s brain is greatly devoted to its sense of smell compared to humans wherein a greater part is used for thinking.

For the tracking exercise, you will need a non-restrictive harness and a 20 to 25 foot long line preferably made of leather. The dogs are trained to follow human scent. The tracking exercise takes 45 minutes to complete. A successful dog that finishes this training advances to the next level of training exercise which is retrieving.

The retrieving exercise is geared to teach the dog how to recover things. Various types of materials are presented to the dog. The purpose of this is to make the dog get used to the smell of these materials. Some of the most common materials used are leather, cloth, wood, glass and even metal objects.

The dog trainer will use a fetch command which the dog will follow. The dog is expected to pick up the object, return to the trainer while holding the object for at least 30 seconds. Another command will be use to motion the dog to finally give the object to the handler. Search and rescue dogs are expected to master this exercise.

The last exercise involves searching particularly for a missing person. The dog is trained to locate a missing person by means of sniffing on the scent left by a person’s footprints. In case there are no footprints, a scent from a lost person or from one of his owned article will be used as the dog’s basis for its search.

And lastly the dog that successfully finished all five searches and rescue dog training exercises will be the one employed by the police force for their search missions.

Copyright 2006 Jim Sterling - All Rights Reserved

Ian Dunbar: Dog-friendly dog training

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