Rescue me

            Everyone loves dogs; they’re nice, loving, and loyal. They deserve the name “man’s best friend”.  They are always there to make you happy with their amazing faces that seem to smile. They’re so cute that I just want to cry whenever their sad little faces show up on TV with the Sarah Mclachlan music in the background. Most dogs are extremely talented as well.  They can follow a scent, point, fetch, roll over, get the paper and about anything in your wildest dreams. During this last week, the minds of Americans reflected on the anniversary of a devastating event, 9/11.  Recognizing and remembering the brave souls, firefighters, and victims of this terrible tragedy is something everyone should do. One particular group of people I would like to recognize is the K9 search team that went to work after the 9/11 attacks and the work this search teams do everyday. 

            In order to distinguish how amazing and hard working these dogs are, we have to know about their training, practice, and abilities.  Dogs have an astonishing sense of smell!  In order to find people lost in rumble, snow, etc, they smell the air around them to find the scent of someone they are looking for. These search team dogs are mostly bloodhounds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound), they are known as SAR (search and rescue) dogs. An unusual place to get more information on these dogs is from Mythbusters. They took the challenge of trying to confuse a SAR dog.  They failed terribly. It’s quite informative and the Mythbusters crew always makes their show entertaining.  Taking a shower, back tracking, taking odd routes, and using black pepper where all strategies that failed trying to trick a bloodhound. What makes these SAR dogs so good at what they do is the fact that humans shed a bunch of dead skin. This dead skin carries a trail, which dogs can smell, giving them directions to the person being followed. Along with trailing people, the smell of humans in general can be used to locate people buried from disasters like 9/11.

            When the towers collapsed, the SAR dogs where sent out to search for survivors. Of course, as we know now, after the towers fell no survivors would be found. I wrote this blog post because of this fact, “Due to no survivors being found, search dogs became extremely stressed from not finding anyone, because to this, workers hid in the rumble and let the dogs find them to get their spirits up” L.