In Search of the Missing Read online

  He had no reply to this, so I went on to explain the requirements for a really good search dog as opposed to a dog trained just to carry out the routine. To qualify, dogs must be very enthusiastic; they must have fire in their bellies. But their handlers must be encouraging all the way, just like team managers on the sideline at a match. They must constantly bring out the drive in the dogs no matter how tired the dogs become. Handlers must train the dogs over and over again without ever showing any signs of depression themselves. Dogs learn mistakes much easier than the correct training methods. There can be no let-up. Dogs can cover eight to ten miles in an hour, and can become very tired. Handlers must be very vocal and show eagerness in their voice, especially when dogs are ranging out.

  A foreign national who was living in Cork had trained with us and had reached the pre-assessment qualification level with her collie. She was a good handler, extremely fit for mountain-rescue work, and could cover ground ten times faster than most. Her dog was excellent. I carried out the pre-assessment in the Hag’s Glen – a tough, wild area. The searches were long and hard. The dog worked well, but I couldn’t give the OK as the handler was too laid back. At times, she didn’t know when the dog had found a body. The dog was becoming tired quickly. His indication was getting weaker. The handler needed to be more passionate, to have the zeal to invigorate the dog and drive him on. She needed to train more, to improve her skills of reading an indication and to develop her enthusiasm. Her problems could be corrected. It was only a matter of putting in the time and staying focused.

  Search and rescue is definitely a young person’s game. You must be able to get up and go. Everyone is anxious to qualify, to be called out on a search, to feel that buzz. But there are no short cuts, and proper training with the right mindset is the only way. We lost many people who could have gone on to become great search-dog handlers because they were not willing to put in the time. To bring a dog to the qualification stage takes a lot of repetition of the same exercises, over and over again, hundreds of times. A minimum of two thousand hours must be put in, and that excludes travelling. Training sessions should be built up to sixty miles a week. Dogs must be super fit to survive and pass an assessment as they will be required to cover eighteen to twenty miles every hour they work, and this will continue for many hours each day over a period of three to four days. A properly trained, fit dog will fly through the assessment and show no signs of tiredness.

  As time went on, K-9 became very involved with the Red Cross – so much so that we eventually decided to disband K-9 altogether. We made a clean sweep and put all our funds and equipment into the Red Cross. But not long after, politicking reared its ugly head among some of the search-dog handlers. Apart from these troublesome few, the Red Cross people themselves were really lovely. I was in a quandary, stuck in the middle. Deep down, I didn’t want to leave. But I had no choice: I just wanted to train dogs. It was time to get out, and fast. Áine and I left, and a few more just gave up. We trained away on our own for a while. Then, along with Kieran Murphy from Rylane, we set up Irish Search Dogs. We agreed that we would work without committees or officers. We clear everything with each other but nobody has any title or any degree of control. We have no restrictions on membership. Like K-9, as time went by we had to bend a little to formality and move with the times, which included the setting up of our own website, a task undertaken by Glen Barton. As well as giving a history of the club, the website introduces the dogs, carries a summary of the more high-profile call-outs, and has news on upcoming events. Some of our members have joined the Civil Defence, and are gaining experience in other areas of rescue and first aid.

  If any of my adult children went missing in the morning, I’d want the searchers out straight away. But the hands of the gardaí are tied as they have to wait twenty-four hours after an adult is reported missing before they can do anything. It must be very frustrating for the families of missing people when hours and sometimes days pass without any apparent action by the government agencies. This is where the civilian agencies come into play: once they receive a shout, they can immediately begin a search. Emergency response should mean immediate response. Too many rules and regulations tie up search teams and prevent them from responding immediately, and I believe many of these rules and regulations should be removed. If someone is reported missing, do something about it now, not in several days’ time. If it turns out to be a false alarm, so what? The fire service answers every call immediately despite the fact that many of these calls are false alarms, so there is no reason why the other services cannot answer calls without delay, and perhaps more people would be found alive. We have too many search organisations pulling in different directions, and that doesn’t help provide the service we deserve.

  Bothered and Bewildered

  A gang of us were doing some light training in a wooded area near Watergrasshill. It was one of those days when I seemed to be just going through the motions rather than taking it seriously. A young foreign national living in County Cork happened to join us for the session. She introduced herself but her name went in one ear and out the other. She offered to act as a body for George, a very young bloodhound with very little training behind him. Poor George couldn’t find his way out of a brown paper bag, but he needed a run.

  I showed the young woman a boggy area of about a quarter of a mile square and covered in dense bushes. I told her to stay put until George found her. Normally, a handler would always know the exact spot where the body is lying, and would work the dog towards it if the dog failed to find the body naturally. But on this occasion, being as laid back as I was, I let the young woman pick out her own hiding spot within the given area. I made the mistake of not checking where she was, and I didn’t even know the general direction she had taken.

  An hour went by and then another half-hour on top of that. There wasn’t so much as a tickle coming from George. After that length of time, many of the people acting as bodies – especially if they’re Irish – would have packed it in. But there wasn’t a sign of the woman appearing, and I couldn’t go shouting her name because I’d forgotten it. I scoured inside the boundary area again with George, and combed all around outside it. But our luck was out. By now, most of the gang had gone home as they were only puppy training and so their training sessions were short. Then, by pure chance, Gary Daly happened to come along with his trainee dog. Was I glad to see them! I nearly kissed the ground when I saw them coming. As they set off in search of the body, my hopes were high. But like George and me, they failed in their task.

  The young woman had been in hiding since 11 a.m. It was now three hours later. There was nothing else for it but to call in the emergency services: Áine and Zak. Of course, Áine let me have it when she found out I didn’t even know the woman’s name or where exactly she was hiding. Zak always works with great nose and determination. He came in along the path, walked through a gap in the woods, indicated, barked and went straight in. He was spot on with his location. Up popped the young woman from a six-foot mound of heather and bushes with her hands in the air, as if it was a hold-up. God only knows what she thought of us! Being from abroad, I suppose, and new to the training, she had done exactly as she was told and would probably have stayed there all night if it had taken that long for us to find her.

  Another time, I was in the middle of a training session with Bob at The Vee in Lismore. Noel Murphy arrived late, around midday. He had been at a party the night before and looked the worse for wear, but he had stuck to the promise that he would turn up and be a body for us. I sent him up the side of the Sugar Loaf to an area about a mile square. ‘Don’t go too high,’ I said to him. ‘Just make it a one-hour search.’ Usually, we give the body about thirty minutes to get into position.

  Bob and I started searching for him. The going was tough. The climb was steep. We had to trudge our way through knee-deep heather all the way up. It was like climbing never-ending stairs with resistance. Four hours later, we were still searching. I kept shouting Noe
l’s name as loud as I could. There was no reply. I tried contacting him on the two-way radio but there was no answer. I was getting very worried. It was now almost twilight. I was seriously thinking about calling in the South East Rescue.

  Then I decided to search further outside the boundary area where Noel was supposed to be hiding. We climbed higher still. Bob ranged ahead. As I neared the top of the mountain, Bob disappeared over the summit. Then he indicated. We were now a good half-mile outside the boundary area. I ran up. Bob was barking eagerly down into the heather. Was Noel dead or alive? I feared the worst. But there he was, all snuggled up in his bivvy bag, having a good old snooze for himself. He made absolutely nothing of the fact that he had climbed way above the boundary or that I’d been looking for him for half the day: ‘Oh, I just got into a rhythm,’ he said, ‘so I decided to keep going.’ But at least he was safe, and all was forgiven – but not forgotten!

  One of Noel’s best buddies was Richard Cotter, who was one of a few young fellows who came up from Midleton with Noel to act as bodies for us. Not everyone stuck the pace, but it was no bother to Richard. He came any time we wanted him, and did exactly as he was told, to perfection. He was the ideal body: he was enthusiastic, could entice any dog to run after him, and was a natural with a map and compass. Richard was quiet, a special guy, and he had a wicked sense of humour. Once, when he went on a call-out with Noel for a woman missing in County Limerick, the two of them kept shouting the woman’s name as they searched: ‘Mary! Mary!’ They couldn’t find a trace of her, high or low. Later, when they went into a hotel for some food, they saw a poster on the wall about her disappearance and realised her name was Ann. Quick off the mark as always, Richard said, ‘No wonder we couldn’t find her. We were calling the wrong name all along.’ Luckily the missing woman turned up safe and well afterwards.

  On another day, Áine and Noel were training with the dogs in a quarry dotted with deep ponds when they were joined by a newcomer and her dog. Áine offered to throw a ball for the woman’s dog, but it accidentally landed in the middle of one of the ponds. Áine apologised: ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’ll buy you another one.’ The words were barely out of her mouth when the woman began to strip down to her birthday suit before plunging into the water and retrieving the ball. Áine and Noel still haven’t fully recovered from the experience – and probably never will.

  Water-dog

  Neil Powell – a co-founder of SARDA and a man with whom I’d worked on a number of searches – was always testing new ground with the dogs. Luckily for us, his experiments led to the instigation of water-search dogs in Ireland. In 1992 Neil began training a German shepherd named Cuisle as a water-search dog. At the time, Ireland and the UK had no dogs qualified for search work on water. Neil was well at home working on water as he had previous experience with the Royal Navy and had also served as a crew member with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charity set up to save lives at sea.

  Cuisle learned how to search for the scent of decay from a person who had died recently or months earlier, and became the first ever water-search dog in Ireland and the UK. His newly acquired skills were first put to the test in the Glenties in County Donegal, where he went out on a boat searching with Neil and a member of An Garda Síochána. He gave a strong indication on one particular spot. When a diver went directly down from there, he found a body at the bottom of the sea, sixty feet below.

  Neil has had much success with other water-search dogs, among them Fern. During the Easter holidays of 2007, Fern was involved in the search for the bodies of two teenagers in Castlewellan Lake in County Down. When he made an indication, a member of the Northern Ireland Fire Rescue Service marked it with a buoy. The bodies were later recovered only ten feet from the marker. Fern is also credited with the recovery of a man drowned in the River Boyne at Navan, County Meath, in March 2008. Divers found the man’s body lying only fifty-five yards up river from where the dog had indicated.

  Neil succeeded in training his dogs to search an area of water stretching to roughly a half-mile square in about an hour, showing an accuracy of ninety to ninety-five per cent in the first sweep, depending on the wind and current, then increasing this detection rate even more in a second sweep. Neil had done all the groundwork and put the rest of us on the right road with regard to water search. Based on what I’d learned from him, I trained away here with Áine, Noel Murphy and our dogs, Holly, Zak and Bob.

  Water search is much easier than searching for bodies on land. In water search, a dog’s level of concentration is much higher than on land, and its indication in water is also much stronger. But setting up a water-search training session is hard; it takes at least two hours, and the deeper the water, the longer it takes. Also, a lot of manpower is needed. Divers must be on hand, together with a boat, a person to steer the boat and another person on shore. The river or seashore should be at least three feet in depth. The person on shore holds a long line that goes through an anchor. The line is attached to a float that has the dog’s toy and a cadaver scent. Sometimes during water-search training, I used a pseudo-scent created in America; however, this artificial cadaver scent, which came in liquid form, was very expensive and nowhere near as good as the real thing. The gas emission from the carcass of a decomposed young pig is very similar to the scent of a dead human. But to use it in training, the carcass must be complete. The whole carcass should be placed in a plastic container punched with holes. The dog should then be allowed to play with the container. Later, the dog should be trained to indicate on it.

  When a dog has completed most of its training, it will start to indicate in only a matter of minutes. Once that stage is mastered, the container should be hidden in the soil at various depths, and a long line should be attached to the dog’s toy, which is buried above the cadaver. When the dog is over the spot, the toy should be pulled out of the ground by the person holding the line. This action confirms to the dog that this is a fun exercise, and will therefore increase the dog’s drive to make the find. In training sessions, the dog should be encouraged to bark at the area where the container is buried, and also to dig and scratch the ground.

  Over a period of weeks, training should be transferred to water. The dog should be taken out on a boat with a diver, who will pop up from the water every so often with the dog’s toy. Later, the diver should introduce a cadaver scent and tease the dog with it. The diver should go under the water for a few seconds, pop up, then go back down again, repeating these actions several times to make sure to give the dog plenty of fun, which the dog quickly learns to associate with the cadaver scent.

  Next, the training moves on to using a mobile anchor and float. An anchor is placed in a river at least three feet deep. A line runs out from the anchor and back to the person on the shore. That person is critical to the training. Once the dog on the boat shows an interest or gives an indication, the person on shore releases the line and the float pops up out of the water with the dog’s toy. The cadaver scent is also attached to the anchor and suspended about a foot under the water. But that never surfaces. The dog is then rewarded for responding. From then on, the line is extended further and further out until the dog can make a find located fifty feet under the water. If the dog can consistently find at the fifty-foot level over a series of twenty sessions, it’s ready to go on a call-out accompanied by an experienced water-search dog. Once the experienced dog indicates, the inexperienced dog is brought in and observed to check if an indication is made on the same spot.

  The biggest problem with search dogs is that humans simply don’t know enough about them. Dogs are far more capable than we believe, and teaching a dog to detect cadaver scent is probably the easiest exercise in training a dog. Anyone can train any dog in this area. Cadaver training on land is the easiest of all; I could train a cadaver dog over a three or four-week period with just two or three sessions a day, each lasting just five minutes. It all comes back to the hunting instinct of dogs. Basically, it’s a game of hide and see
k. Even training a dog in drug detection is simple. Once a dog has a good hunting instinct, is a bit destructive and has drive, then it’s only a matter of properly channelling that drive.

  Anyone who has the time to walk a dog has the time to train that dog. Transferring the time from one exercise to the other is all it takes. One can imagine the difference that would make to our search resources in a time of crisis. If only people would change their way of thinking. Today, the need for dog handlers to train their dogs in water search is more pressing than ever as water-search call-outs are now much more frequent than mountain call-outs, mainly because the arrival of mobile phones has allowed people in trouble to call for help and explain where they are.

  Bob became the first qualified water-search dog in the Republic of Ireland, and shortly after Holly and Zak finished their water-search training, the shout came to take part in one of the most distressing searches ever, when a spate of tragic events struck the banks of the River Slaney.

  Sadness Along the Slaney

  Of all the searches in which Áine was involved, the river search in Enniscorthy proved one of the most emotionally challenging. Over a six-day period beginning on 11 November 2002, four men went into the River Slaney from the Séamus Rafter Bridge in Enniscorthy, in separate incidents. Further downstream, a man entered the water at the village of Bunclody and another at Wexford. The six men ranged in age from nineteen to forty-one.

  One of the men had entered the water on a weekday morning while children were on their way to school. Those children who saw the tragedy screamed with horror. When a lifebuoy was thrown in to save the man, he did not take it. Another man, a Latvian in his late twenties, was rescued. He had gone into the Slaney after he had failed to injure himself earlier by attempting to be run over by a car. The driver of the car and a local club doorman pulled him from the river. He was taken to Wexford General Hospital for treatment. The body of a nineteen-year-old apprentice carpenter from Bunclody was recovered ten hours after he entered the water. His best friend, from the same village, had taken his own life only three weeks earlier. The body of a twenty-eight-year-old man was also found. His family had already lost another young member when his sister was the victim of a car crash.