When
the Search Is Over, continued
Because dogs’ life-spans are so much shorter than humans’, a cancer such as mesothelioma—caused by asbestos exposure—for example, might show up in a dog in five years, as opposed to the 20 years it would take to develop in a person. In addition, the dogs were not wearing protective equipment, such as respirators, and were closer to the ground than the humans, exposing them to more hazards. Dogs participating in the study get a year of free health insurance.
Otto’s study also will examine surveys handlers have completed about their dogs’ health and behavior—displays of aggression, willingness to learn, and signs of anxiety—since their deployment last September, to see if the dogs suffered from working long hours, being deprived of play, or picking up on their owners’ stress.
The dogs “don’t care what they find [at a disaster site] as long as they find what allows them to get their reward,” she explains. For that reason, volunteers at Ground Zero occasionally were enlisted to hide in the rubble to give the dogs a live person to find.
The dogs also respond to the moods of their handlers. “If the handler is having trouble, they have trouble,” Otto says. “They’re so interconnected. I’m hoping we’ll have evidence to show how tight that bond is.”
Though the ongoing data collection will shape their recommendations, Otto says her gut feeling is that there should be more enforced rest cycles for everyone—dogs and handlers—during a search-and-rescue effort. And more training beforehand.
It takes a certain kind of dog to do this work: Large enough to jump over crevices, but small enough to be carried if necessary. A dog that, as Otto describes, “can make you crazy at home because it just has to have a job.”
Tony and Annette Zintsmaster, FEMA volunteers from Indiana, began training dogs for search-and-rescue work 12 years ago, after their German shepherd puppy, Thor, quickly disassembled the cardboard box they put him in his first night at home. “He took to everything,” says Tony, whose paid occupation is contract work for quality assurance plans. Eventually Thor learned how to do all kinds of searches: collapsed structure, wilderness, water recovery. Working for a local volunteer team in cooperation with law enforcement, Zintsmaster recalls, “We put a guy in prison when Thor found a single drop of [the suspect’s] blood six blocks from a murder scene.”
Lynne Engelbert describes her dog, Lucy, as having “an incredible work ethic. She’s smart, she’s overbearing. She’s a true bitch, I’ll tell you that. And that has absolutely nothing to do with her gender.”
At Ground Zero Lucy “was in her element” and didn’t seem to notice the bone spurs in her elbows and digits. “I watched her carefully,” says Engelbert, “and she didn’t even have a limp. I think the older, experienced dogs have a tendency to pace themselves.”
But there were dogs that got hurt: dogs “that had never worked a rubble site or a concrete pile, much less what the World Trade Center looked like,” Engelbert says. “Some [dogs] would just shut down.” (The Penn study is primarily looking at FEMA search-and-rescue dogs, although owners of 27 non-FEMA dogs—including some unaffiliated with any rescue group—have completed surveys about their dogs’ health and behavior.)
FEMA’s extensive certification requirements take up a 56-page document on the agency’s Web site and for the dogs include such abilities as “proper command control, agility skills, barking alert skills, and willingness to overcome innate fears of tunnels and wobbly surfaces under the guidance of the handler.”
Beyond that, Tony Zintsmaster says he and his wife have prepared their dogs (two of which were deployed at Manhattan’s Ground Zero; Thor had retired by then) for the challenges of search work by “teach[ing] them to cope with stress when they are little puppies, and then throughout life with little challenges. If you build it in them a step at a time, then when they encounter it they don’t go, ‘Oh my God, what do I do?’”
So he tells them, “‘You want your dinner? It’s in the hallway behind one of five doors.’ When they’re younger, you might leave the door open a crack.”
As a result of this preparation, he says, “A dozen generators are running [at Ground Zero], and you’re trying to walk through the street and go through all this dust and confusion. But you get out on the pile and the dog says, ‘Ah, I know what to do.’ In a way [this preparation] affected me the same way, too.”
The
issue of resilience in humans is one that interests Dr. Melissa
Hunt, the co-investigator from Penn’s psychology
department.
Hunt recently completed a coping-skills and depression-prevention project in which she recruited pet owners from the emergency-room waiting area at Penn’s Veterinary Hospital. With sick or dying pets, this population was at high risk for depression, she explains, so she wanted to examine whether certain therapies such as expressive-writing exercises might help them cope more effectively with their grief.
Otto attended a presentation that Hunt gave to faculty about her findings and approached her afterward to ask that she serve as a co-investigator on the rescue-dogs project, studying the wellbeing of the human handlers.
Participants in Hunt’s half of the joint study fill out questionnaires about themselves and take part in a series of informational and diagnostic interviews with clinicians. Among other factors, Hunt is looking at the amount of rescue experience handlers had before September 11; whether there is a history of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder for an individual; and how that person fits into a normal range of personality types. “We’re predicting that more training, more experience and in particular a history of successful search-and-rescue missions will lead people to be more resilient than people who were more novice and had less formal training.” There also may be something unique in the personalities of many people who choose to go into search-and-rescue work that fortifies them against depression or anxiety, she says.
“We’re also looking at things like relationship quality and support,” adds Hunt. “We know the divorce rate for rescue workers who were in Oklahoma City was about 70 percent. [Many of those people also dropped out of the rescue work because of post-traumatic stress disorder.] So one of the things we’re concerned about is what are the long-term consequences. That is not something we are going to see in the first six weeks or first six months, but something that’s going to play itself out over several years. And we’re interested in whether having a solid marital relationship pre-trauma is a real protective factor.” So far no marital problems have been reported within the deployed group from the World Trade Center.
It takes a certain kind of dog to do this work … A dog that “can make you crazy at home because it just has to have a job.
Sept/Oct
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Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 9/02/02