A QUIET ANNIVERSARY

In the book Brother Dog, it is written:"On the last Sunday of March 1965, at 12:35 p.m. local time, the ground shook across a vast area of Chile, and within just 87 seconds, the town of El Cobre ceased to exist. The miners' clay houses crumbled into dust, which the flood wave from a nearby ruptured dam turned into mud. Under several meters of this layer, hundreds of people were buried."

But already four years earlier, Czech émigré Rudolf Toman from Hradec Králové had founded a specialized canine search unit for missing persons in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Under the motto "In the name of humanity," he immediately set off with his German Shepherd Doro into the ruins of Chile to search for earthquake victims. Thanks to his incredible reliability and precision in marking finds – even up to depths of eight meters – Doro soon earned the admiring nickname "Doro-Detector" from journalists. At the end of his mission, he even received Chile’s highest state honor, the Cross of Merit. Even decades later, his performance under such conditions commands well-deserved respect from all rescue dog handlers.

Now, as we quietly mark 60 years since that earthquake, no one is surprised anymore by the presence of search and rescue dogs at disaster sites. But is their work always equally reliable? And is the cooperation with their handlers consistently professional enough to still earn the kind of admiration Doro once received? Are we not sometimes deploying dogs that are “specially trained” in name only, and not yet truly fully trained?

A dog can only be considered fully trained after successfully passing the highest-level test in the given category – rubble or area search, level B. This standard is accepted worldwide, and dogs with this qualification are called upon for real-life operations in various disasters. No one questions this qualification, which is awarded on an international platform by independent experts. National agencies, therefore, limit their screening to tough physical – and above all, psychological – assessments. Even our own volunteer handlers sent abroad in the past had to pass such evaluations, and many excellent dogs could not be deployed simply because their handlers failed to meet the standards. But that was certainly the right decision – neither an untrained dog nor an insufficiently prepared handler should take part in demanding rescue operations. Any failure in this human-canine team can have fatal consequences.

The now almost historical motto that “a rescuer's success depends on the perfect harmony of human intellect and canine scent” has lost none of its truth. But we must rigorously uphold the requirements needed to reach such harmony. After all, lives are truly at stake here...