Watch How-to Teach any Dog to Find Family Members after Floods, Earthquakes

Watch us start training a search dog in basic skills and learn how to teach your own dogs to find lost or missing family and friends.

This is one of the skills you can learn more about in my Family Disaster Dogs book. (free on Kindle unlimited)

This fun game of hide and seek is perfect for families to play with their own dogs. Knowing how-to ask your dog to find your child or partner sure would come in handy in the aftermath of a disaster or if a child or elderly person wandered away on a camping trip.

Teaching your dogs how to look for friends and family is one skill I hope you never have to use.

While knowing how to do this with your dogs may never be used, it sure does not hurt to know how!

Plus this gives you a fun activity to do with your dogs and family.

Here's a video of a family dog I'm teaching to find lost and missing persons with her owner. Bella is three years old and did not have an formal training before starting to learn how to find a missing person. She knows basic manners and obedience, enjoys the dog park and swims in the river fetching her toy. This video is one of the first times we asked her to find the boy she lived with. Watch her go!

Your dog can do the same, ask a family member to go hide while you hold the dog until the person is out of sight then let the dog go and see what happens !

You can use a leash or not. We are teaching this dog to be an official trailing-tracking dog and the leash in this case is part of the job. Family dogs can get the job done anyway they are comfortable looking for a family member.

Please leave a comment and let us know what you think. Thanks and stay safe everyone!

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Please share this post so others learn how to save their loved ones.

With climate change rising seas and heatwaves, floods, wildfires and storms everywhere it's time to prepare for the worst and pray for the best.

my Wrinkledpups Daisy Mayham 2000-2014

Assessing the Scene for Scent Dog Training

Assessing the Scene

Before you set up a training course, first check the location and make a note of each person or thing (cars running, spilled chemical, garbage) that might contaminated the area.

In an actual response this is called doing an assessment of the scene and should be done visually as you approach the location. Findings should be noted on paper for later planning.

Doing a visual assessment helps you to know your dangers before placing your dog and self in a bad situation. Make a mental note of any dangers you might encounter such as a busy roadway or a train track your dog might lead you across.

After checking the area to determine it is safe and noting the contaminants then check the wind direction and weather conditions (more on these factors in another lesson). In training novice dogs always start the dog into the wind so the scent is blowing towards the dog to give the dog the best chance in picking up the scent.

Pay attention to the location and use what may be available for hiding spots and turns, such as buildings, picnic tables in a park or a large tree across the cleared field.

Be safe and prepare!

Dogs as Team Players

How to Encourage a Dog to be your Team Mate and Partner 

Washee Thunderfoot 

Learn to love and watch a dog accomplish what they set out to do. Capture that moment that resides in all of us. The moment of accomplishment of though, focus, action and movement in perfect harmony.

This harmony in nature is what brings into creation the art of being able to put in motion a single thought transformed in real life from the joy of the moment.

Dog love to please us, they have proven time and time again throughout history that they will do for us anything we ask or need with tail wagging joy and total commitment.

They learn early on to come to us and ask us to take them for a walk, to feed them and to love them.
They know how to get our attention and we've all heard about how well our dogs train us.

A well trained dog is actually a partnership built on trust and love with its handler. Dogs that are trained to fear being wrong are not working with their handler as a teammate, as a partner. They are reacting from fear of punishment and have learned that the handler will scare them if they do that behavior again.

They have not learned to think of the performance but of the punishment. Even the slightest punishment puts the dog's attention on what you are doing "to" him and not what you are asking them to do at the moment "for" you.

We want your dogs to be thinking of what they can do for you instead of what you might do to them.

Training dogs with food rewards can bring on a similar response as punishment where the dog is only working for the food or for what you will do to them or give them and not with you as a team member.

Food therefore, is only recommended as a way to motivate the dog to begin to pay attention to the handler's clues and once this is established, the food should be withheld and replaced with praise and encouragement that leads to teamwork.

As a team player your dog will be a reliable and trustworthy partner working with you toward a common goal instead of working in response to fear, punishment or food.

2 generations of Search and Rescue Dogs
Akelia and Chaos- mother and son 1997-2009
 Raised by us with the parent dogs, Nikki and Shotgun (1990-2003)

All rights reserved including photo

Amber S Higgins 2015