The ? of Depression ask any SAR handler... - Page 1

I could not beleive some of the responses on the other thread....

Of course dogs get depressed ask any SAR handler and they will tell you that in a disaster area the hardest thing to do is to keep the dog upbeat enough to continue working after they start finding corpses.  Live find dogs do NOT like to find a person who has passed.  They become very depressed and sometimes are completely removed from SAR all together if they do not recover,  I know of one dog that died,  after a 3 day run on a child lost in the woods,  the child xpired approximately 2 hours before they located him,  this dog was a bloodhound and fell into such a deep depression that she DIED !!      The dog was ran through every test under the sun at the vets, they tried chaging her feed, routines, everything,  nothing worked the dog refused to eat and about 30 days after the boy was found she xpired.   The handler stated that when they found the boy,  the dog dropped layed her head on his tummy side area and refused to obey any commands he gave her, it was reported that he said the dog actually had tears, and was packed out as she refused to walk,  he reported her as wobbly, and faint acting and took her strait to the vet fearing she had been in contact with a toxin in the mountains.  Nothing.

So to those who made the comments that dogs who have emotions "are culls"  I disagree,  yes sometimes they are harder to manage, and you have to work at it to keep them up but until the above incident this dog had been one of the most successfull live find dogs in the East side of the state...  She was only 5 yrs. old.  She was THAT good.  her handler after she passed stopped training SAR and stopped handling,  I am very sad of that loss in itself but I understand how it would be hard for him to face that kind of loss again....  But his dogs WERE some of the BEST in the SAR community in the state !!!

and so no one jumps to conclusions...  The boy was lost for 2 days before it was reported and SAR called in,  the people were  camping had hiked in, and had spent one day looking for him on they're own,  one day hiking out to get help it was the 3rd day until this guy got the call,  1 day hiking in and 2 days on the trail of the youngster,  I think the boy was 8 or 9 and he had traveled a very long way from where they had camped....But the dog picked up the trail and stuck to it,  they were just too far behind him.  Exposure of the cold mountain nights was the determined cause of his death.

Thats really sad. I do believe some dogs are so tuned into us humans. For instance, good therapy dogs. My once in a life time dog was like that to. Almost like a fuzzy little person with 4 legs. You can see many emotions cross their faces and even cognitive thinking, that some people refuse to believe dogs are capable of. These dogs are rare and maybe so are the people who can see it or believe it.

My friends dog died of grieving himself , which is depression , when her husband died of cancer, and the dog was there during the months of Chemo and suffering the man went through....So isn't that enough proof, that german shepherds do suffer impressionly when death is involved...This was a high priced , highly trained, guard dog....not just a german shepherd.....so the remark that the dog had no backbone or nerve bag, wont hold water....the dog was the cream of the crop......but it had a heart and sense of kinship to its master,,,

Dog's or least gsd do get depressed, im having the problem now,  my youngest just left for the military,he has been gone for 2 weeks, it took her about a week to realize he hadn't been home, as he was 19 and was in and out at all hours, but his friends started coming bye to check on us, and it was like a light bulb went off, she is now mopping and going to his room with toys and crying, the only thing that seems to help is the daily walk, she is due to have pups in 10 days , so i hope that will help until he returnsso maybe a puppy would help your dog and you,at least think about it . Sorry for your lose Dee

Quote: So to those who made the comments that dogs who have emotions "are culls"  I disagree,  yes sometimes they are harder to manage, and you have to work at it to keep them up but until the above incident this dog had been one of the most successfull live find dogs in the East side of the state...  She was only 5 yrs. old. 

OK, what was the name of the dog and the handler? What cert process did they go through? How many live finds??? To me this is a dog that is useless, because if one corpse sent this dog spinning off the edge, then it was a cull to begin with. Think of all the good the dog could have done if it wasn't so useless.

Jeff Oehlsen,  and you were missed in the culling ???   How did that happen !

good grief,  be intelligent,  just because a dog shows some emotion does not make them a cull,  maybe it makes them very passionate about they're job,  Yes this one spiralled out of control and let her emotion/connection to the victim effect her to the point of causing her death,  but when she was working there was NOT another dog that could surpass the HEART she put into a search.

Echo, I'm nut sure you were given entirely accurate information.  Cadaver does not smell like a human. It smells like rot. Cadaver dogs are trained to sniff for "rot" with a certain scent to it as opposed to "rot" that may be, say, deer crap, which is also cadaver. It's just once living now dead cells. A dog that is a live find dog is trained to differentiate between the smell of this human person or that human person. A cadaver dog is trained to hit on the smell of this kind of rot versus that kind of rot. But they do not put together that the rot had at one time been a human. Maybe if it was with the child as it died and thereafter? Even then I'm not sure they would. Dogs love dead stuff. It's hard to imagine one coming upon something dead and being saddened or repulsed by it.If the dog is tracking and the child died the chances are the dog followed the scent to a place where suddenly that scent was mixed with rot. And while I'm nowhere near proficient in the theory his is my understanding.

This is what I've learned in my training. I'm sure there are qualified people who may know better, if I'm mistaken. Btw-"rot" is what I call it. Not what my instructors call it.

I do believe Echo is saying this was a live find, tracking dog. Not a cadaver dog. Her reward was always a live find. Not getting there in time and finding the child dead, could have broken her spirit. She felt she failed and failed miserably. Who knows, could be true, many a dog has died after it's owner,  just like old couples who spend their lives together, often die within months of each other. Dogs have been known to sleep on graves the rest of their lives, when owners pass too. Just depends how connected they are. Some dogs I think get more attached  and understand people more than others.

Oops that was me in the above post. GARD would never put human feelings into a dog. I have seen it happen with my own eyes, so I am a believer. Sorry to all of you who don't think dogs can think and feel that way. I guess not everyone is blessed with a special dog like that.

I have heard this before, with the dogs working the site at 9/11. At first they were using live find dogs, and the dogs did get depressed at only finding cadavers. I have heard this too many times from too many sources for it to be a crock of bull.

I have studied animal behaviour at univerisity, and even geese get depressed when they lose their mates, and sometimes pine away and die. Why should an animal that is even more intelligent than a goose not have such emotions?

Many time I have heard of a dog dying shortly after the person it cared about the most going away to college, to serve overseas in the military, etc. It is very common. My first GSD weighed only 35 lbs. at 5 years of age. Her owner had gone into an old age home, and the people that took her in (my aunt and uncle) did not want her, and she knew it. I am sure she would have died if I had not adopted her. Once she knew someone cared for her, she started to eat again, and eventually got up to a normal weight for a dog of her size (she was 26" tall).