Article from Susannah Charleson, Author of Scent of the Missing: Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog
Five Communication Lessons from a Search-and-Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson Author of: Scent of the Missing: Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog She does not speak English, and I do not speak dog. And yet somehow six years into my partnership with Puzzle, a golden retriever and certified search-and-rescue K9, we have forged a common language. We need it in the search field. Our working life together is framed by loss and urgency—a person missing, time passing, a family and community desperate for answers. And so Puzzle and I enter the hard spaces where a lost person might be, and I give my dog a command, and off she goes into the thick of it, independent and ahead of me, ready to communicate back what she knows. It’s my job to translate her and move all of us closer to a rescue. Having run beside many other dogs and handlers before I met the puppy who would become my partner, I knew this kind of collaboration existed, this necessary dialogue. What I didn’t realize is how my work with Puzzle in the search field would improve my communication with other humans, too. Here are some of the lessons offered by a working search dog in the dark. 1. Avoid Hasty Conclusions. Experience is the best teacher, we’re told, but sometimes past experience can be misleading. While it’s easy to judge from the obvious and frame people, places and events by things we’ve seen before, such grab-and-go thinking can cause us to overlook important differences, to miss what we don’t expect, and to stereotype others. Search dogs don’t work with these kinds of preconceptions. Every new situation is taken on its own terms, the obvious and the subtle alike. The dogs operate on what’s real and present to them right…
