Alert types

[Perivleptos]

What kind of alert do you use?

We train our dog in bark alert as we want to work in rubbles an open areas.
The refind and jump-refind is too dangerous especially in rubbles.
There is also the "silent alert" with a down stay behaviour but it is not good for us.
Digging is for avalances mostly.
I know the bringsel think but only see it in video...

Any other ideas?

[petra]

In Sweden we use two different alerts: barking och bringsel. I will here give some of the thoughts in Swedish SAR-training.

The dog often has a "natural" behavior when he finds a victim, he either wants to stay with the victim or he wants to go back and get his owner. The behavior chosen by the dog is an important issue when choosing which alert type to use. Also the physical ability to bark and the mental ability to bark at people play a part when choosing which alert the dog should have. A dog that has (physically) great difficulties and has to make huge efforts to bark will get tired quick and will need a huge interest in finding the victims to be able to overcome the difficulty to bark, especially after a long time working. For a dog that (mentally) isn´t confident with barking at people, it could be devastating to have a barking alert since the training could decrease the dog´s interest to find victims.

Apart from the above - the use of both alert types have positive and negative aspects, here are a few of them:

- The barking dog could have difficulties barking when he is tired, standing on unstable ground etc.
- The bringsel dog has to find his way back to the handler and find his way back to the victim again, a difficulty that could fail sometimes.
- The barking alert could be difficult to hear (for example in area search) if the weather is bad, the distance between the dog and the handler is long and so on. If the dog has a bringsel alert instead it´s obvious when they alert.
- The safety aspect in rubble search - the barking alert dog can stay put when he has located the victim and don´t need to run back and forth in the rubble like the bringsel dog has to do.

In Swedish (national and international) SAR the barking alert is more used than the bringsel alert, f.e. in our international USAR team we have approximately 2/3 barking alert and 1/3 bringsel alert dogs. (But when it comes to the dogs competing in search, I think that it´s more common with bringsel alert since it seems easier to get better points from the judges with bringsel than with barking.)

Norway has a somewhat different view on this - they sometimes choose to have two different alerts for one SAR-dog: bringsel alert in the area search and barking alert in the rubble search.