Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ing but fresh, unscented water. “Nikki went completely limp for just an instant.” Game over.
Scent, scent, more scent . . . no scent.
Her handler dropped a buoy on that line. Marcia wrote: “She remembers thinking, 'What
have I done?'” Nikki's handler had never seen her react that way. Yet as one of the dog hand-
lers said, for the dogs, “it was like stepping from one room to another.”
That threshold was where the victim was located, trapped under logs.
Water work, even more than land work, depends on being able to know and read your
dog, and having someone along who can watch closely. The dog's cues may be much different
and run the gamut between subtle and dramatically obvious.
On land, Solo uses his whole body, including his large tail, and I get to watch him from a
distance. He has a much smaller stage to work on when he's on a boat; he's working in close-
up. We'll need to work with a whole series of clues, escalating signals that can help the hand-
ler and the boat operator work in tandem. Licking lips, lapping water, throwing his head: It's
a new vocabulary. Because water work is so different, Solo might also need to find a new way
of alerting, so there's no question in anyone's mind that there's something there. Biting at the
water, yowling, who knows? I don't fully know what Solo's alert will be on water. We're still
working on it. I hope we get there.
Detective Art Wolff's gorgeous Belgian Malinois, Radimir, whose name means happiness
and peace in Russian, digs at the bottom of the boat. If he could just dig through, he knows
he could get to the body lying in the water beneath. He has gone all over Tennessee on water
recoveries.
On one of the most emotionally difficult cases that Canadian trainer and handler Kevin
George ever worked, on a flooded river in Calgary that claims victims each year, his Belgian
Malinois started barking, leaning over the side of the Zodiac, snapping at the water. In his ex-
citement, he snapped at the side of the inflatable boat. Thankfully, he didn't deflate it. Sadly,
the river was too high and filled with unstable logs to recover the victim safely.
Nancy liked what her big German shepherd, Indy, used to do: When he couldn't stand it
anymore, his big question mark of a body would become more and more unbalanced over
the water until he would tumble in where the scent was strongest.
Then there's an even more direct method. As Lisa Higgins told a group of handlers, “A
dog jumping out of the boat and swimming in a circle over the source? That is an indication
you just can't miss.”
Lisa does worry about alligators where she works, so she doesn't encourage Louisiana
handlers to let their dogs jump out of the boat to alert. On one search, she counted thirty
alligators. Interestingly, they hadn't touched the victim Lisa was looking for. Nonetheless, for
training, she chooses her spots carefully.
