On a crisp autumn morning, a Labrador with a shiny black coat zigzags over broken concrete and steel rebar. There are overturned boats, piles of wood, a broken-down bus. As he climbs the small mountain of rubble, his nose is down, tail straight. This dog is working — focused and searching for a person.
The thing is, we’re at a training ground in the back of a construction site outside Baltimore. The person he’s looking for is fine, hiding with a walkie-talkie. And all that rubble was brought in for the purpose of teaching dogs to find people after a disaster, as part of a program by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Around the country, FEMA has 280 certified detection dogs trained to find people in disasters, and it has another 80 that look for human remains. They deploy everywhere from collapsed buildings to natural disasters. Earlier this year, 35 dogs were sent to Hawaii to recover bodies of people who died in the wildfires.
Read the rest of the story from NPR here.
