About Search Dogs South

SDS trains all our dogs to be scent specific. A scent specific dog is taught to search for one particular person. The training process is a simple one that begins when we start a new dog. By working the dog from his very first puppy trail to look for jus the person we want him to find it becomes second nature for the dog to expect to hunt just one person. An example of what that allows us to do is to follow a subject through a crowded fairground to a successful find, or to follow the trail left by a criminal 2 weeks previously.

An important concept to understand is that we are not really teaching the dog very much. We are teaching the handler a tremendous amount of new information. Think about it for a second. If you weren’t there to feed your dog what would he do? He would find something to eat. He would hunt for his food. Dogs are natural hunters, all we do is channel that natural hunting drive to find one specific person when we ask them to do it. The major learning is the handlers responsibility. We have to learn what or dog is telling us, we learn to read dog body language.

Probably the toughest challenge for a handler to master is to learn to trust your dog”. Another important element to remember is that dogs never lie. It is not in a dogs nature to be able to lie. When we learn that regardless of how unlikely the indication may be, that our dog is telling us that the scent they are seeking goes “this way” the more effective we become and the dog and handler become a true team. In a rural setting, or in an urban environment, either a residential subdivision or even the tall buildings and all paved areas of downtown, the search dog will encounter many people on his way to the missing person. By teaching the dog to look for only one person, he will ignore the crowds on the streets of downtown and work his way through them to his target. Another advantage to teaching scent specific is that if we are in the unusual situation where we just cannot obtain a usable scent article our dogs will work without one. If a dog has never worked with a scent article they will not know what one is.

A natural extension of searching for missing people is cadaver search. When we begin a search we never know if we will find the person alive or dead. For this reason, and also to assist in cases where we already know a person has died, we train all our dogs to do cadaver work. If we begin a search for a live person and at the successful end of the search find that the person is deceased we want our dogs to know that we expect them to take us to the body. In a related situation, because we train our dogs to search for cadaver we are able to assist authorities in body searches for missing persons, accident victims and victims of crimes. As in all searches we never know what type area we will be asked to search so we train for water search also. We have assisted in a number of searches for drowning victims.