cadaver dogs - Page 1

Authorities in my area are currently using the assistance of several cadaver dogs to search for the body of a young college student who disappeared nealy 9 years ago. (They apparently have gotten some new leads.) After 2 days of searching and digging the news report says they will be back tomorrow except for the cadaver dogs. They say the cadaver dogs are too stressed to return after picking up a scent and not being able to find anything. I can understand (I think) the frustration for the dogs after picking up a scent and having no closure after searching for 2 days. I'm wondering what can be done by the handler to relieve the stress? Do the dogs just take a few days off? Or do they have to bring in new dogs?

Usually, to ease the dogs we do a mock search and "plant" material for the dogs to search for. That allows the dog to be successful and then we can reward them.

Guess I didn't think of a mock search. After 9 years you'd think it would be tough to pick up a scent but then who knows if it is even the person they are looking for. Guess my curiousity is a bit morbid tonight :) 

The answers are all good - more detail if you want it:

Cadaver dogs are regularly used to find old scent / shallow graves. Some are finding human bones hundreds of years old for archeological digs. 

 I would not count on the news stories as they tend to not quite report things the way it was explained to them.  The dog's don't need closure - they just need alerts to be reinforced and it they are constantly finding scent and alerting with no reward the behavior will start to extinguish - so they need a break and reinforcement to keep the motivation up. 

I think it is pretty SOP (at least for us) on a cadaver search that you do not reward your dog for a find, as unless you are looking at a clearly human corpse, you are not 100% that the dog is alerting on the right thing., and every dog out there will throw an occassional false alert, so you don't want to reward unless you are 100% sure they are right.   If the dog finds scent and alerts, you note the location to the authorities and move on.

We don't carry any material with us or in our vehicles  when we go to a search (in large part due to the Sandra Anderson debacle)  but set up something when we get home to give the dog a postive find.   You do a lot of positive reinforcement in training (and also must train with no-rewards -"jackpot theory" kind of stuff)   Sounds like several days of searching without reinforcement was hard on the dogs.....The handlers possibly did not carry any human remains material with them for reinforcement training and may have been away from home.

We don't know though the real story though, because it was given to us though whatever "filters" the reporter had when they were interpreting the info to make the news story.  I am sure the dog handlers who were there could explain it best.

If you think 9 years is something, the one that still always amazes me is how they can distinguish human cremains from animal cremains.  We also just did a seminar and the instructor brought in a 400+ year old human bone. Yep, they all alerted on it just fine.

How long will they work the dogs before they "give them a break"?  Can they go all day searching, is it a few hours at a time and they rotate another team of dogs/handlers??  I always wondered how it all worked when doing this sort of real life finds.  I see it on the news all the time but they only show clips, never really even give credit so much to the dogs when a body has been found but instead just say "we found the body" making it seem like it was all done by invesitgating and not by the k9's. 

Nancy, thanks for all the info. I was wondering about the dogs being able to tell the difference between animal and human remains. Here's a link to the news story. There's a brief glimpse of one of the dogs jumping into one of the holes they are digging. Looks like a pretty deep hole. The end of the story mentions the dogs being stressed and not coming back.

www.myfoxnewisconsin.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail

Agar, have to agree the dogs seldom get the credit they deserve. Since coming here I have a whole new appreciation of the working dog and just what kind of contribution they make.

To be honest, I don't have enough experience to come up with a general statement on how long to work a dog before you break them. I think it is very conditional on a lot of variables.   I believe the cadaver dog handbook says to break after about 20 minutes or so but I have seen dogs steadily working for several hours (my copy is lent out)

Figure though that a dog tha only trains for 20 minutes until it finds scent may be confused if asked to work for 4 hours so, anything you do in the real world should have been approximated in training first. 

Figre shallow grave work is much more detail oriented and slow going than looking for a missing, presumed dead, camper or hunter.  ambient conditions, terrain, drive of the dog, training of the dog, offending diesel fumes, condition of the dog (and handler), can impact performance.  One thing I can say from what training I have done is that you do learn to tell when the dog is, and is not, working by reading its body language and you would stop, break, maybe even pull the dog if it is not actively working.