The day I did the full Begleithund I test with Luna, my wife was once again along for moral support. These tests are generally sponsored by one local group but are open to anyone whose is a member of a recognized local group. So as a guest in our group for this test, but in the Begleithund III division, we met a lady, Anne Schmucki from the eastern part of Switzerland. She was there with her Border Collie and we got talking to her. She explained that she actually does Search & Rescue with her dog but will occasionally also take part in such tests.

We were fascinated. She explained that Swiss Search & Rescue was mainly concerned in training dogs to search after earthquakes, floods etc, so a large part of the training has to do with the dog learning to search semi-independantly from the owner, without leash because the dog can go places a human can’t and then the human learning to interpret the dogs' types of pointing out the location of found victims.

After meeting Anne and visiting their web page of the Swiss Search & Rescue Canine group (REDOG), we got in touch with the local leader, Rosi Longnoni. She invited us to an open house. It was terrific and we joined up right away.

One and a half years later (beginning of August 2002) , I’m sitting in a Czech Hotel about 5 miles away from the Austrian border writing this. Some people organize their vacations around their kids. Well, out kids are home alone (some of the time, between parties) and we are on the home leg of fitting a two week vacation around training sessions in the Black Forest in Germany and in Teplice in the Czech Republic.

How did we get here? Simple. I can’t participate in the Search & Rescue training because of numb feet that hinder me from keeping my balance in rubble, so my wife is in training with Luna.

They started off with Luna learning to bark upon command for goodies – long, long times at a stretch. A Search & Rescue Dog must be able to continue barking and to show through barking if a victim is buried in the ground or stuck up in a tree for minutes at a time or until the human can locate the victim as a result of this barking.

Then my wife would animate Luna with a Tupperware box of food and run off into the rubble and Luna would have to find her and bark, bark, bark. Same thing in a building. Or a hole in the ground. Next another person would animate Luna and run off and Luna would have to find him/her.

There is also training in an obstacle course and going up a ladder. Luna does all this very well, but she has to learn to slow down and take it easy, so that she doesn’t hurt herself by going too fast and slipping.

After about 10 months, Luna was featured in the local newspaper as being a very talented trainee. Now, after 18 months, the two of them are almost finished with training and will begin the tests leading up to the final qualifying tests to be officially included in the Swiss REDOG rescue organization.

As part of these preparations, Luna and my wife have to learn as many new and demanding situations as possible so that a real catastrophe will not be a shock to them. In the Simaringen in the Black Forest they trained in an area that they’d never seen before, but contained no real new challenge except that they both had to travel over 4 hours to get there, get out of the car and get right to work.

The situation in Teplice was different in that it was a vacant sanatorium that was being used by drug addicts and such as housing. So there were human scents everywhere and they had to learn to keep the scents of the addicts separate from those of the “victims”. Not an easy task.

Between these 2 sessions and after the second one, Luna became Ye Olde family dog again and we were on vacation, soaking up the culture of old Europe. Living out of suitcases, going from hotel to hotel (absolutely no problems having a dog in the room or a restaurant in either Germany or the Czech Republic). Once, we went to dinner near the old town of a Czech city. Our room was in a private house in the new section of town about 2 miles away. We walked to the restaurant. Often, after having been somewhere, when we ask Luna “Do you want to come with us?”, she will grab the leash in her mouth and pull us along as if to say, “Let’s go home.” This time we wondered if she really knew where “home” was, inasmuch as we’d been in a new hotel in a new city every day for the past 9 days. I just kept telling her “Take me home. Where’s home?”. She pulled me along with a semi-arched back. Anyone seeing us would have to ask, who was walking whom. Anyway, she lead us back through housing tracks we’d only been through once before, going the other direction. She lead us up to the exact right house that looked exactly like every other house in that street. She knew just in which house her food bowl and her dinner was!

While this amazed me, my wife is much more informed in such things as she trains with Luna in Search & Rescue and also in tracking. She told me, Luna was not tracking in the classical sense, inasmuch as her nose was not on the ground. But she’d noticed the general scent of the our house, the houses around ours, the street and the streets we’d walked through. She’s always had a good nose and every type of training she’s done as sharpened her ability to use her nose in such ways.

The last thing all the dogs in our REDOG section did in Teplice was to go from the ground floor through every room of the house up through and including the attic. This was so that the dogs could learn what such a house is like in their "nose" fashion. If she ever has to work again in such a house, she will be less likely to have problems keeping the scents of previous occupants and present victims apart, nor will she be distracted by rotting food or human waste, even if it was a total gross-out to us.

Seeing how a simple Swiss farm dog and my wife can be trained into a team that will be able to save human life after a natural catastrophy is simply amazing and I’m so proud of both of them. I bet you couldn’t tell that, could you?

For more recent Search & Rescue photos, check this out.

26. November 2007 - As a footnote, I must mention here. The pictures of Luna participating in Search & Rescue stop around November 2003. This was the first time she gave an indication that she had some health problems. For the first time, during an internal test search, she was unable to find a "victim", due to pain she was eperiencing when climbing up through rubble.

Despite visits with different vets who performed lab tests, took X-Rays, Ultrasound examinations and so forth, no one ever found the cause or the exact location of her pain. Because no one could find a cause, there was also no cure for the problem. A Search & Rescue dog must be able to "work" at a moments notice and must be 100% healthy. It became apparent, that Luna wasn't, although it didn't sem to bother her much for normal, everyday activities. In all fairness to the catastrophy who might need to be found by a Search & Rescue dog, we withdrew from the program, but still kept up the less strenuous excercises with Luna because she so enjoyed them.