Training with the scent dogs

Clancy is howling in the back of Joan Rogers’ Jeep, declaring that this hound dog is ready to roll. The humans are milling about, crackling on their radios, unloading gear, making introductions, while Clancy howls, alone in his complaint among the search-and-rescue dogs sitting patiently in their cars.

To say that Clancy is a big talker doesn’t give him enough credit. Talking is his job, and the things he tells his person put him in an elite corps of canines in New Mexico who are mission-ready to look for missing persons, lost hikers, and in some cases cadavers. Clancy started training for this job as a puppy, and at age 11 he is a seasoned pro.

About ten people have gathered this Sunday morning near Guaje Pines Cemetery in Los Alamos to practice canine search-and-rescue in Rendija Canyon, one of about a dozen sites visited for twice-weekly sessions that keep dogs and humans ready for that unpredictable call that someone needs help. As of May, there had been four such alerts this year. More often than not, they come in the middle of the night.

When Joan lets her wailing coonhound out of his prison, Clancy escapes like a shot. He bounds off down the trail after a quick sniff of clothing belonging to Trish, who has volunteered to be “lost.” He barely pauses, knowing Trish from previous searches.

Clancy is one of the few “trailing” dogs in the Mountain Canine Corps, an all-volunteer group of about 25 people and half as many dogs. As crime buffs know, we humans continuously shed cells that bear our unique scent. Most dogs can detect the evidence of our passage, though with diminishing success as time, wind, heat, cold, or hard rain erode the traces. Trails are best followed within 24 hours, Joan says, especially in a dry climate.

Today’s trail is easy and fresh, but Clancy methodically follows every spur, nose to the ground, to see if it’s a dead end. Sometimes he wanders off to check out a hunch, but Joan is nonchalant, because he will “talk” to her if he loses the scent. Through thousands of hours of doing this work together, the two have developed a private language of barks, commands, and body language that is opaque to an observer.

Suddenly Clancy perks up and takes off cross-country at a run. “He’s got her,” Joan says, and sure enough, Clancy is on a ridge, barking at a woman lying on a rock. “Show me,” Joan yells to him, and he bounds back, leading Joan to the subject, who is then free to lavish the dog with praise and treats.

The Mountain Canine Corps, or MC Squared, as they call themselves, was founded in 1986 by three people, including Terry DuBois. Nearly 30 years later, Terry is still at it, out of “the love of the people who do it,” she says, “and the love of training dogs. It’s a blast.” MCC is among the 39 volunteer groups that make up the New Mexico Search and Rescue Council, an umbrella group that includes everything from amateur radio clubs to horse-mounted searchers. MCC takes search requests across Northern New Mexico, and even statewide when all hands are needed.

Most of the dogs certified by the group as mission-ready do what is called “air scent”—detecting the presence of humans on a whiff of breeze and following it to its source. Air-scent dogs can be trained to detect a particular human, or any human at all, with different commands for each. A search might begin by looking for the presence of anyone, and then particular people once someone in the party is found.

“We want the dogs to be good at finding up to three people,” explains Carole Kirby, “because sometimes people make bad decisions (when they’re lost) and split up in different directions.” Just as humans shed scent, she explains, we also broadcast a cone of our unique scent that grows wider as it disperses, which is why dogs sometimes recognize a friend from a great distance.

Air scent is highly dependent on wind direction, so the handler tries to orient the dog’s travel crosswind to pick up scent, then upwind toward its source. Air-scent dogs might work on a long lead, or off lead wearing a bell. These kinds of searches move quickly over a lot of ground, so the humans must be fit enough to keep pace behind.

Steve Lucht has two dogs at practice today, muscular yellow Labs both trained in air scent. Christie, just 3½, is still in training and has the task of finding two people within a quarter-mile practice area.

Early on she spies a woman walking across a field and bounds off toward her happily, thinking she has scored. The woman is not one of the subjects, but the dog gets praised anyway because she completed the task of finding a person. Experienced air-scent dogs, like Carole’s Labrador Santi, can tell that people out enjoying a hike or bike ride are not the intended subjects.

Steve’s other dog, Zeke, is certified as a cadaver dog, trained to detect human remains (bones, teeth, flesh), which all smell alike decomposing. It’s a grim job, but important especially in cases of suspected suicide, when a family wants to bring a body home.

All search-and-rescue dogs are supposed to give an alert if they sense human remains, but cadaver dogs are trained to look for a needle in a haystack. “He can find a single tooth in high winds,” Steve says proudly. “He’s probably got the scent already,” he adds as Zeke waits in the parking lot.

Steve has hidden three jars with “human remains” (the precise contents of which are a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mystery) in a wide wooded area below where the cars are parked. Zeke gets the command and tears off happily, stopping to pee and poop and sniff at leisure before getting down to his task, which takes him all of about a minute each, even though the first location is in a tree, 4 feet off the ground.

The alert for cadaver is lying down, head toward the object, which is where Zeke is next, in front of a downed log. Steve pulls out the jar and we both sniff the holes in the lid, fearing nasty and discerning nothing at all. For Zeke, who earns a can of cat food for his success today, this one-gulp reward was motivation enough to detect a hint of nothing, a football field away.

Super-high motivation, or “drive,” is clearly a prerequisite for search dogs and their people, which is why fewer than half the dogs who begin training with the group succeed in passing the certification exam a couple of years later.

There’s no single type or breed or life history of dog that predicts success, which is why some long-time members no longer have a dog in the program, and help out in other ways. Dogs have to be large enough, strong enough, and have the mental focus to search for hours without success. Steve says Zeke “doesn’t know discouragement,” though he does get tired. “Even on mile 11, after 7 hours, he does it. He loves his job.”

The people involved tend to be the same way—“Type A,” Terry categorizes them. “People who don’t give up. You can’t be relaxed about this. They’re very bright, energetic, driven, intelligent people.”

In fact, over six years of search-and-rescue work with his dogs, involving 15 to 20 actual searches, Steve says he has never actually found anyone or any body. This is not unusual, apparently, especially in arid New Mexico. Searches are started at the subject’s last known location, but the person could be many miles away, or—in the mountains in winter—frozen solid under several feet of snow and emitting no scent. Moreover, the state police, who initiate searches, don’t report later whether a subject was eventually found, alive or dead.

“We’ve worked ten hours at a stretch,” Steve says, over rough terrain and sometimes into the night. “It’s not like the rat who pushes a bar and gets a reward,” says Terry. “We keep training and training, but we must be a bunch of dummies because we keep doing it.”

Terry herself has been on countless searches where missing persons have been found, either dead or alive. She recalls a skeleton found by a pair of her Labs, siblings who made the discovery together. “They were amazing to watch!” she recalls, enthralled. It made all the training worthwhile.

Besides a devotion to dog training and wilderness adventure, this “hobby” requires of its humans skills in navigation, backcountry survival, radio use, and wilderness first-aid, which must be certified by the state organization before going out on a mission.

Such barriers have not deterred people from continuing to cycle in to MCC over the years, which is why the group has gradually tightened its requirements to weed out all but the most determined participants. Potential members must attend ten practice sessions before their dog is even invited along, and then, if found suitable for the work, the dog will require a year or two of training, twice a week with the group and almost every day at home.

“We don’t like people to get their hopes up,” Carole says.

For people who stay year after year, however, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of working so closely with your animal in life-and-death circumstances, as a bonded team. Steve, who drives up from Santa Fe for practice, says he’s the type to be hiking with his dogs for hours anyway, but there’s a whole other dimension to search and rescue that is addictively fulfilling for both.

“We can help people, or save someone’s life. Or we can help the family, so at least there’s no mystery about what happened to someone.”

Everyone knows that a dog with a job is a happy dog, of course, as Clancy will tell you. For him, it’s just a howlin’ good time.