I am attached to a FRS K-9 SAR & HRD team. Our three dogs are very strong on land in both SAR and HRD. Their success ratio has been incredibly high. I am located on an island and various other agencies have requested HRD in water. We are in the tropics and the ocean and bay are very warm. I tried the dogs by walking them into shallow water with cadaver scent tubes in the water. Upon command to search for cadaver, they attempted to work, but overall the exercise went very poorly, my fault not the dogs. Can anyone point me in the right direction to someone that has done this type of work and would be willing to share information, or a book or video, thank you.

Hi, Clifford:
Do you have access to a dock? Have you tried divers?

I have access to a dock and I have not tried divers yet.
I was thinking of putting the dogs one at a time in a boat, having a diver with a cadaver scent tube in an area
Try to get the dog to alert on the diver, if needed have the diver blow air to attract attention
Then when the dog alerts at all have the diver surface and give the dog his Kong toy.

I personally would start with divers under a long/large dock - the type of dock with slats so the diver can reward through the slat. No boat needed for this, and you can start with the diver only partially submerged (with no visual to the dog because the diver is under the dock) and then graduate to full submersion. Since the dogs are already trained, they should be very interested in the human scent under the dock to start. You can have the diver reward them for their interest in the diver's scent/location without requiring an alert the first few (meaning one or two) times.

Also, I would avoid using bubbles or anything other than the scent itself to clue the dog in to the diver's location. That has the potential to bite you in the rear in the long run.

Do the divers have re-breathers? I personally would insist they use them so the dog doesn't ever learn that bubbles or other water disturbance=reward.

Oh, and you don't necessarily need to use HR scent to start. You can use the divers alone. I've seen dogs (and owned a dog) that were trained solely on live divers who were accomplished water recovery dogs.

Edited by Konnie Hein (07/17/2009 04:49 PM)
Edit reason: last paragraph

my very brief exposure to this was with a very young lab that someone was training for wildlife enforcement.

They had put scent tubes in a extra large kiddie pool full of water and playing a find the right tube game.

So long as the dog indicated the right tube in some way the event was marked.

I wish I knew more about water recovery for you but I wanted to pass along the lil bit I had seen. The main issue I see with starting in salt water for detection is there is alot of dead smell I would imagine in salt water with all the decaying plant life, dead fish, dead birds, etc.

 Quote: Melissa Thom

I wish I knew more about water recovery for you but I wanted to pass along the lil bit I had seen. The main issue I see with starting in salt water for detection is there is alot of dead smell I would imagine in salt water with all the decaying plant life, dead fish, dead birds, etc.

Dogs can definitely discriminate between the scent of a drowned person (regardless of the stage of decomp) and other decomposing matter. It's all just training