The move I made in “a new direction” started with training Rachel. I countered my hateful shifts at the dispatch office by spending almost all my off-hours with my new puppy. As fast as Rachel grew, so did my love for her.
Rachel was a natural retriever, and I wanted to play up her ability as much as I could. While the rest of the puppy-owning population was shouting “Fetch!” when they threw a ball, I yelled “Search!” and made it Rachel’s first cue word.
As I worked with my new dog, I began to think more seriously about using my knack for training to make a career change. With Rachel’s potential always on my mind, I began playing scent games with her. I started by tossing sticks for her, first in open areas where she’d have no trouble bringing the right stick back, and then in increasingly hard places for her to find it. In a pile of other sticks, she had to be able to ferret out the one with my scent on it. I never even had to mark the sticks to be able to tell which was the one I had tossed, because Rachel would do that for me. Before I tossed the stick, she would tug and chomp down on it while I held on, leaving her saliva and dozens of tiny teeth marks in the soft bark. Because she could smell the contact scent from my hands and her own saliva on the stick, on nearly every occasion and without hesitation, Rachel would fetch the stick.
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I started by tossing a stick up to the edge of the pond. Rachel ran up, grabbed the stick, and brought it back to me. Next, I tossed the stick into the shallow edge of the water. Rachel ran up, hesitated, but then trotted in up to her belly, picked up the stick, and brought it back to me. Next, I tossed the stick out a little farther and my dog jumped with enthusiasm into the water, grabbed the stick, and brought it to my feet.
I was so pleased with our progress that I threw the stick way out into the center of the pond. Rachel went loping into the water, hopping like a rabbit and splashing everywhere. She took three leaps, and then she vanished underwater. When she popped up several seconds later, she was panicked, coughing up water, and paddling for her life. I waded in and pulled her out, realizing I had made a mistake in rushing her into deeper water.
It was an error that Rachel never let me forget. From that moment on, she refused to swim. There wasn’t much that she wouldn’t do for me, but after that day, the edge of any body of water was where Rachel drew the line. It meant that she would never pass a statewide search dog training certification program because they required, as part of their “signoffs,” that every search dog should be able to swim. Mine didn’t, so I never pursued taking that test.
I had given a lot of thought to what direction Rachel’s training should take once we’d covered the basics. There are countless different areas of specialization a search dog can have, including everything from tracking criminals to locating disaster victims. There are even “water search dogs” that, working from a boat and in conjunction with a dive team, use their noses to pinpoint the location of drowning victims. But my puppy’s pond experience made it abundantly clear that she wanted nothing to do with water. Rachel wanted to be a water search dog about as much as I wanted to be a 911 dispatcher! So, I found myself considering the initial discipline that I read about in the world of search: cadaver dog training.
Cadaver dogs (currently called Human Remains Detection or “HRD” dogs) are trained to recognize the smell of human decomposition, something dogs instinctively do anyway. These dogs had been of critical importance in working homicides, disasters, and missing person investigations. At the time, it was a new field of specialization. I can’t tell you why the idea of training my dog to find dead people appealed to me. When I told my family that I wanted to get a Weimaraner and train it “to find dead people” they thought I was nuts. In part, it was the novelty of the field—an area of specialization that was new and still being explored. That meant it would be more open to new handlers and dogs as well.
The close tie to law enforcement was another factor—training Rachel to be a cadaver dog would bring me closer to the police work that I had always wanted to do. But it was Rachel’s behavior as she romped around the cows in the pasture behind my cabin that tipped the scales and convinced me that she would excel in cadaver work. Sadly, my beautiful dog had a stronger inclination to investigate and roll in fresh cow poo than any dog should be allowed. I figured I might as well put that “skill” to good use.
You are reading / listening to (and enjoying, I hope) the memoir Pet Tracker by Kat Albrecht. It was originally published and in bookstores in 2004 under the title The Lost Pet Chronicles (Kat’s co-author was Jana Murphy). It went out of print in 2015 and has as since been updated with new stories and renamed Pet Tracker: The Amazing Story of Rachel The K-9 Pet Detective. It is posted here as a free gift to all of Kat’s subscribers. Here are reviews of the original manuscript (from 2004):
Publishers Weekly
In this thoroughly engaging book, Albrecht narrates, with deadpan humor and Grisham-like suspense, the story of how she came to create an entirely new career: lost pet search and rescue. As a police dispatcher and later a police officer in California, Albrecht was duty bound to give human emergencies priority over animal crises, but it wasn't until her Eeyore-like bloodhound, A.J., went missing that Albrecht saw the need for sophisticated detective and scent trail work to find pets. With humor and fascinating insight into search-and-rescue work, Albrecht continues to find innovative ways to help animals and the humans who love them, and inspires readers with her dramatic career changes. This is a must-read for animal lovers and sleuths alike. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Booklist
The book, which recounts several of her cases, is downright engrossing. David Pitt, © American Library Association. All rights reserved.
