Lost and Found: On the Front Lines with a Search and Rescue Trailing Dog

Gremly, the shorter half of the SAR team, is skilled and devoted to her work. photo: CARDA

You’re woken up at 2 a.m. by an emergency alert blaring from your phone. You roll over and check the message: immediate callout for two trailing K9 teams to respond to a search for a missing 6-year-old in Los Gatos. You respond “available” and five minutes later your phone is ringing. “How soon can you be there?” asks the dispatcher. “If I start packing now, an hour,” you say. “Start packing,” she says.

Ten minutes later, you’re pounding an energy drink as you and your dog race down I-680. It’s going to be a long night.

What is a Search and Rescue ‘Trailing’ Dog?

Whenever I tell people I’m a trailing K9 handler, they look at me with confusion. While many people are familiar with cadaver dogs or FEMA disaster dogs like those who worked the 9/11 scene, the term ‘trailing’ throws them. “Basically it’s like a tracking dog,” I often simplify.

In fact, search and rescue trailing K9s are trained to follow the path a missing person has taken by following their scent. The handler presents the K9 with a scent article that smells like the missing person so the dog knows whose scent to follow. Trailing dogs work in front of their handler on a long line that is clipped into a back-attaching harness.

This is technically different from a ‘tracking’ dog, which should have its nose more-or-less right on the footprints made by the human, as it would be in most dog tracking sports. However, demanding that the dog stay close to footsteps doesn’t reflect how canines naturally hunt.

Enter ‘trailing,’ which allows the dog much more freedom of movement to follow the subject’s scent wherever the scent might be. That’s important because, over time, a scent trail evolves and may not stay consistent with where the subject actually walked. Wind and car traffic can push a scent hundreds of feet away from its original source. Hot, sunny areas with paved surfaces may burn off a  subject’s scent quickly, while cool, humid conditions may cause it to linger.

All this means that hours or days after someone has gone missing, the trailing K9 may be given an inconsistent, patchy, messy scent trail and asked to follow it. As you can imagine, it is super challenging work.

Late night searches are common for trailing teams. photo: CARDA

Who Are We and What Do We Do?

My search dog, Grem, and I are “professional volunteers” with the California Rescue Dog Association (CARDA), a nonprofit organization that trains, certifies,  and deploys K9 teams for search and rescue operations. To earn this status, Grem and I trained three times every week for nearly three years before going through a rigorous certification process.

Today, we go on searches all across California, in addition to participating in  intensive, ongoing training. Surprisingly, most of our callouts aren’t for missing hikers but for seniors with dementia, people with mental health differences or disabilities, and children.

What makes trailing dogs such a unique asset in search and rescue operations is they are trained to be “scent specific.” Each human’s scent is like a fingerprint – totally unique to that individual. Trailing dogs are trained to follow only their subject’s scent and ignore all other human scents, which gives them the ability to work in urban locations and other places where many people may have crossed a scent trail.

How Do Trailing Searches Actually Work?

The key to a successful search requires a high-quality scent article that smells only like the missing person. This is easier said than done, since the scent on some articles may be intermixed with those of people the missing person lives with or with law enforcement or other searchers who were on scene before the trailing dog team arrived. In a perfect world, I prefer to enter the missing person’s home or car myself and, using sterile gauze, collect my own article that has rubbed or rested against something used only by the missing person, such as the inside of their shoe.

Next, we need to identify the best place to start. Often, this is the “place last seen,” such as the missing person’s home or a location recorded on a neighbor’s video doorbell. Other times it may be at the location of a possible reported sighting.  Among their skills, trailing dogs can also communicate when their subject has not been in a given location, which is extremely valuable in narrowing down where to focus the search effort.

When it’s time to get to work, I clip Grem’s long line into her harness and hold out the double-bagged scent article for her to sniff. Immediately she is ready to go, and our search begins.

Yes, It’s as Amazing as It Sounds

I’ll never forget the first time I watched a trailing team work: it looked like literal magic. Watching a dog follow a human’s path days after they walked it is a  humbling experience. It lets us understand that dogs live in a totally unique, rich world thanks to their ability to obtain and analyze scent. Our human abilities seem puny by comparison. 

It’s as though they have access to some secret knowledge - which of course they do.  After all, they’re dogs.