Session 3: Disaster Training

It was a grey and drizzly Sunday morning: the kind when you really want to stay in bed and read a good book followed by a leisurely breakfast with the Sunday papers. Those kinds of Sundays are not for Search and Rescue people, oh no. Off I went, hoping I had everything I needed – waterproof jacket, shoes, some food and a good attitude.

Linthicum Disaster Training Area is a bizarre place. At the outset it looks like a trash transfer location, but a small sign simply with the letters K9 give away that at least part of it is something else. The tarmac quickly gives way to a very pot-holed road, with steep, short hills, such that you cannot really see where you are going until you get to the top. Over one hill was a trailer, which serves as headquarters.  Great, somewhere with a little cover, and a porta potty, vastly superior to peeing in the woods, really. Inside the trailer were a couple of smelly overstuffed sofas and a selection of dog crates. Good, I was in the right place.

But what a place: it really did look like an earthquake zone. To one side, huge cement tubes, half buried in a short hill; In front, wooden pallets, higgledy piggledy, piled 30 feet high; a huge wood pile undulating and precarious-looking; a burnt-out bus, and two boats, strangely out of place, even in this setting.  Behind the trailer was a fenced in area which looked a bit like an agility course, but with ladders horizontally high above the ground and other fearsome looking obstacles.  Apparently there are only a very few such training locations on the East Coast, and groups come from considerable distances to train here.

There were only two people (and three dogs) there apart from me, so lots of individual training. It was too slippery for the dogs to safely navigate the wooden obstacles (although one pretended she had to go up there, just for fun), so most of the work for the dogs was for them to find us in the barrels (nice and warm and dry).  But even hiding in the barrel was more complex than I realized. For a start, each dog works in a different way, and each needs different rewards. It is not easy to count 30 barks before opening the lid to the barrel a crack. It is really not easy to hold a tug toy when you are lying flat on your stomach and to engage the dog in the appropriate amount of tug play (especially when your arms are being bashed from side to side on the barrel rim, and the dogs teeth are precariously close to your fingers).  The most important thing is to make the dog really want to find you.  I was told that a good SAR dog does not make a good pet dog: they need to be a bit crazy and wild.  Each time I go I realize it is not going to be easy to do this with Cino.

I was somewhat cheered that one dog was not very enthusiastic, and basically was not “indicating” in the right way. He seemed confused about what he was supposed to do.  Most of the people with this group have been doing it for years, but this one woman and her dog had been doing it for only a year, therefore were still novices. They have not yet passed the NASAR SARTECH II Certification.  OK, I’m not entirely sure what that is, either. But it is difficult!

Did I mention it was rather a wet day? And by the end of the morning I had rather wet feet, even though the shoes I was wearing are supposed to be waterproof. Time to visit Hudson Trail Outfitters.  At least if I can stay dry, I will have achieved something.