Trust Your Dog

Many a times, I always hear the SAR Officers say "Trust Your Dog" to our human handlers.

However, in the initial stage, HC was not confident of my ability, and started to direct me in the search even though my nose tells me otherwise (wasting my time and energy, really). Sometimes, she even cheated by helping me look for ‘humans’ and gave me cues. (She swears she no longer cheats.)

Now, she has learnt to trust me and stay away while I am doing my nose job.

Sometime back, someone decided to teach us a new method of searching for victims. That meant that we have to start from scratch. Unfortunately, the method backfired on me as I find the search job unchallenging and unfulfilled. Slowly, I started to hit a plateau and am unable to progress. Luckily, HC understood and protested against the new method.

I am now enjoying myself so much that I can’t wait for the bi-monthly training.

Lesson learnt – Trust your dog. Understand their needs.

I am further motivated by the article on Straits Times last Saturday on how SCDF plan to get 4 dogs to boost its fire investigation unit, in addition to their 10 resident SAR dogs and another 10 ‘civilian’ dogs (ahem… I am one of them)

In the report, Captain Lim was quoted "Dogs will always be an asset to the SCDF, even with rapid technological developments…. While there are detectors or equipment that may serve the same function, these detectors do have limitations…. Dogs are fast and accurate. They can even be highly passionate and intelligent, making them suitable partners during rescue missions."

What Captain Lim said is absolutely true. I have seen on television how some rescue workers go round the disaster area slowly with equipment to look for signs of life. However, as they progress so slowly, the victims chances of living are diminishing. Dogs are so much faster, we just sniff the air for a couple of seconds and can almost find the correct direction to go to.

Yeah… we dogs are wonderful beings, right?

(HC :errrrr.. not quite wonderful yet. Joey is very stupid. The other day at training, I can clearly see the victim hiding among the rubble but our 'smart' Joey followed the victim's scent and had to go a big round to reach the victim. If only, he had use his other senses - SIGHT, he would have seen the human lying on his (Joey's) left)