Search and Rescue Author Susannah Charleson

Let me introduce you to author Susannah Charleston. She has written two non-fiction books, Scent Of The Missing and The Possibility Dogs, which I have reviewed on previous post. 

Thank you, Susannah for taking the time to answer my questions.

Are you still involved with search and rescue (SAR) and the Metro Area Rescue K9 (MARK9) team?

I am still working SAR with Puzzle, and now SAR trainee Gambit. We are now with Waypoint SAR, a grant-funded organization that serves nationwide and specializes in search strategies for the special-needs missing.

Puzzle would be about eleven now. Is she retired now? If so, how does she spend her time?

Puzzle is 11 ½ and still working, primarily trailing and human remains detection (HRD). She’s not interested in slowing down yet, and every cold front that comes through makes her act like a puppy even now. When we don't do enough training on any given day, she has a way of staring at me balefully until I go set up a scent problem for her to work.

When SAR dogs retire, do they transition easily to retirement? 

Some do and some don’t. I know handlers whose dogs just decided to crash out on the couch in their senior years and others that had to learn something new to do (one would go get the mail every day). Puzzle is very driven, so even when physically the search might be too much for her, I’m going to have to give her daily scent problems to work out, because she gets crazy bored if she’s not training and working on something related to search.

When the tragic events of 9/11 occurred, a lot of media attention was given to the SAR dogs need to protection their paws and the lack of appropriate gear. Has the technology advanced to protect the SAR dogs and their paws with any type of search environment? 

There are booties, yes, as there were then, but I think the durability and grip capabilities have improved in the past 15 years, and they needed to. The biggest change I see now is appropriate vests for cooling, reflecting plenty of situations where dogs on long summer searches need to be visible from great distances, but need to wear something that won’t make them even hotter.

 I know every dog is unique and each learns at a different pace. What would be the average time it takes to get a dog fully trained for SAR? And the average for a service dog? 

18 months is a pretty good average for a high-aptitude, high-drive dog and consistent access to training facilities. This is true for both service and SAR, allowing for repeated training and testing experiences in all different kinds of venues and seasons and situations. Some dogs take longer, some a bit less, but practically, if you’re following a rigorous curriculum, it takes both dog and handler time to work through all the exercises and scenario drills that must be mastered to demonstrate reliability prior to testing.

With your book – The Possibility Dogs, you wrote about homeless dogs in the animal shelter system being evaluated as potential SAR, therapy, service or emotional support dogs. Are you more involved with going into the animal shelters to do the evaluations and pulling these dogs? If so, what is your biggest challenge?

The most difficult thing with shelter dogs is having adequate time and space to evaluate them. So many shelters are stressful, anxious places for both dog and human, and giving a dog a fair chance to show who (s)he is and what (s)he can do can be challenging. On the flip side, these are not decisions that can be made in haste. If, truly, 1/50 dogs or so have the aptitude for service or SAR, the temptation to take a sweet dog on a whim and a hope is unethical. That sweet dog could be adopted to a family that isn’t needing involved service tasks, and to put a dog unsuited for that kind of work into a role (s)he is ill-equipped can lead to disaster all around. There are two lives at stake in this – the life of the disabled potential partner and the life of the dog training to serve. It’s tough passing up any dog, but we very, very often have to.  When I find super sweet dogs that evaluate well in temperament but just don’t have service aptitude though, I do try to connect them with rescues that can get the word out for their potential as family pets.

 For your fans, do you have any plans for any other future books?

 I’ve already written a third and am working now on a fourth. The third book is a novel, set just after a tornado has hit a small Texas town. The fourth is nonfiction, and while I can’t say much about it at the moment, I can say there are plenty of doggy characters in both books, and the fourth one also features a colorful—and opinionated—cat.

You can follow Susannah at:

facebook.com/susannahcharlesonauthor

Twitter:  s_charleson