It was a blistering Saturday in July, and we were lost in the woods on purpose.
Three of us sat in a reinforced golf cart, parked under a young tree whose shade didn’t quite keep the heat off. Ahead of us was a clearing roughly 20 feet across, covered with tall grass that blazed green in the midday sun. Quicker than we expected, a shape appeared in the clearing.
A black lab trotted methodically through the tall grass, nose to the ground, accompanied by two people. Soon they were out of sight again, before briefly reappearing on our 3 o’clock, and then, directly behind us. This time, the dog found us. She wiggled up to us some distance ahead of her handler, and together we lavished praise upon our little savior.
In the office, at home, in the car, you can kid yourself into thinking that modernity has somehow tamed and hemmed in the elemental world. But the woods are still there to get lost in. Industrial society is a mushroom growing on a tree older than reckoning. You can drown in an inch of water, you can get struck by lightning inside, and you can still get lost in a world with GPS navigation and modern telecommunications.
Without that black lab, in a more dire situation, we’d be dead.
Dogs have been trained to find missing people for centuries. Some of the earliest examples are the famous St. Bernards used by monks in the Swiss Alps to rescue lost travelers. More sophisticated training methods were developed in the early 20th century, for locating missing soldiers during the World Wars. Later, in the 1970s, police developed training for “cadaver dogs,” specifically trained to locate dead tissue.
Nowadays search and rescue dogs are used by all kinds of organizations to locate missing people under lots of different circumstances. Common situations include very young children wandering off, or elders becoming confused and disappearing. Certain diagnoses, such as autism or Alzheimer’s, can increase a person’s risk.