What Training a Bad Search Dog Taught Me

It is getting to that time in Ryder’s life where the days behind her far outweigh the days ahead of her. She is an 11-year old German Shepherd Dog who has lived longer than the average lifespan of a GSD. Her hips give her pain when she jumps at Koda, and she is having a hard time controlling her bowels. All that to say, I don’t think she has 6 months with us. At this point, I find myself reflecting on this shy white shepherd I bought in Buda, Texas back when NASA was still flying space shuttles.

I’ve owned three dogs I trained for human remains work. Ryder is the third. She is also the only one I completely dropped from training because she didn’t have it in her. She had drive, and she is very smart. But she taught me that drive and intelligence can only take a dog and handler team so far.

With my first dog, Mojo, he had a lower drive. He was hyper-loyal in that blue heeler way, and he loved to be outdoors and playing with me, so as long as it was a game to him, and he had a food motivator (he was half retriever), he was ready for action. But if he wasn’t hungry or just wasn’t feeling it that day, he’d give me the paw quicker than anything and say “I’ll wait for you in the truck.”

Princess changed that mentality in him. Because I’m fiendish, I made her his motivator. Working her made him really jealous that I was daring to spend time with another dog, and he knew he had to work hard to spend more time with me. After Princess, Mojo rarely gave me the paw, and when he did, it was a half-hearted paw that I could work him out of.

Princess was a Labrador retriever who LOVED the smell of dead people almost as much as she LOVED food. Any kind of food. She wanted it all. She was an excellent working dog because of these two qualities, and I am sure I could have qualified her if she hadn’t died prematurely at the age of 3.

This led me to Ryder, who was to be my new HRD. Mojo was getting old, and I wanted to retire him properly, so I needed a new dog to work. I hoped I had this in Ryder. I didn’t, but I benefited from it.

Ryder really hammered in that this work, meaning the act of finding lost people, is team work. A good dog and a bad handler might overcome some difficulties, and a paltry dog and a veteran trainer can get through others, but in order for search and rescue to really click, it requires a good dog and a good handler. There is no substitute for that combination.

Mojo was a paltry dog with a rookie handler capable of lots of human error. We learned a lot together, and we even got good enough to become a working dog-and-handler team. By the time I was training Princess, I had evolved into a respectable handler and she was a good dog. I’ve never been a great handler, but I was pretty decent in 2009-2010. Ryder was the bad dog with a good handler because there are some things you can’t fix.

Before a canine is accepted into a SAR team’s training program, the dog is evaluated to ensure there are no rooted personality issues. A dog with no drive will hate life as a working dog. An aggressive dog is a liability. Ryder aced her evaluation. Good drive, obedient, not really affected by being set out alone or picked up or anything. Basically, her test showed that she was a German Shepherd.

Ryder imprinted quickly and started working cones, which is where I set up a line of cones and hide human remains (a.k.a., “Fred”) under one cone. When she finds the cone with Fred in it, she is rewarded. Again, no problem here.

But what I was coming to understand, and what a fellow handler pointed out to me, was the obvious problem with this dog. Despite everything she had going for her, she lacked confidence. She was unsure of herself in new surroundings. She was evaluating threats when she should have been searching.

Around people, especially new people, she didn’t want to be petted. If people sat down in a circle and I was in the circle, she’d allow people to pet her (this is one of the parts of the dog evaluations the team does), but Ryder didn’t really go to them. This isn’t necessarily bad, but in her case, it pointed to that fear. As she has grown up, we’ve marveled at the moment when she finally accepts people and allows them to pet her. It usually takes about a week of living in our house, or a couple of months/years of visiting our house off and on.

The poor dog gets nervous outside of our house. As an older dog, there have been times this past year where we’ve talked about taking her to the beach or somewhere, and we decide it’s not worth it to put her through that kind of trauma. She’d be miserable and just wanting to go home. I spent months working with her on this when she was a puppy, taking her everywhere and slowly introducing her to new people and dogs. Do you remember the part in the Jim Carrey version of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” when he is going through the phone book and says, “Hate-hate-hate, hate-hate-hate, double-hate, LOATHE ENTIRELY!”  Yeah, that’s her Yelp review of the whole experience.

One star – would not recommend.

But the main thing was confidence. When it comes to HR, the dog often works off lead and takes the initiative. You can’t find dead people for them. The dog must be willing to step forward in front of the handler and, once commanded, take charge of the scenario. When you think about it, the handler is in charge of their dog, but for the search, they are only guiding the dog. The dog has to detect the scent by going out in the world and hunting for odor. Ryder wasn’t willing to do this. She wanted to wait behind me while I made sure that nothing in the world was going to upset her. As long as I was ahead of her, she was willing to search, but a snapped twig or addition of another spectator, human or canine, would completely take her off task because she was skeptical to their threat level.

So within the first month of training, I came to the conclusion that the search life was not the life for her. She’d be hesitant, and I’d be frustrated, which would make everything worse. When my daughter took her out to train on HR with the team, I warned her about the ups and downs of Ryder and not to let Ryder’s inabilities get to Brina. The benefit of this training is the socialization side of it and getting her out of the backyard. Brina worked with her, and with a lot more patience. I’m not sure that Ryder ever graduated beyond cones, though.

There is a lot that can be learned from every dog ownership experience. Even the ones who don’t pan out have lessons to teach. As Ryder moves into the twilight of her life, I am happy for her. She is a good backyard dog, and she’s had a good life. To me, I don’t’ think it has been as rewarding as Mojo or Princess, but who am I to judge? Ryder would’ve been very unhappy in their lives. Running around in the outdoors, jumping in boats and onto the back of ATVs, she would’ve expected anything and everything to injure her or attack her. She likes her life in the backyard playing with Koda, eating sky raisins, and barking at neighbors. Who doesn’t want a life like that? (Except for the eating sky raisins part.)

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