Features

Tomato farmer trains Taiwan’s search and rescue dogs

Chou Tsung-chi, a tomato farmer and dog lover, has devoted himself to training rescue dogs over the past 15 years. (Staff photo/Chen Mei-ling)

• Publication Date：06/23/2012
• Source： Taiwan Today
• By  Grace Kuo

The magnitude-7.3 earthquake that struck central Taiwan Sept. 21, 1999, left 2,415 dead and more than 11,300 injured. Chou Tsung-chi, a tomato farmer and volunteer firefighter at the time, realized from his disaster response work that Taiwan desperately needed search and rescue dogs.

Chou participated in rescue missions with the Changhua County Fire Department, assigned with 50 other team members to a collapsed building in Yuanlin Township, just west of Nantou County, where the quake was centered.

“We dug a tunnel into the debris, searching here and there, but it was eight days before we found a body, with its eyes wide open, buried under a collapsed wall,” Chou said.

“When the corpse was carried out, the wails of the family and the ambulance sirens filled my ears, while the smell of death and disinfectant overpowered my brain. Today the memory is as clear as if it happened yesterday.

“It’s hard to believe it took 50 trained rescuers so long to find a body,” he said, lamenting the team’s insufficient abilities. “At the time, Taiwan had no rescue dogs, although they were listed as essential to disaster response in other countries. I knew then that I had to train dogs for this work.”

While Chou is a dog lover and keeps several to guard his farm, he had zero knowledge about training the animal for rescue purposes. He began to pour over books, search for information online and visit canine training facilities nationwide, offering to trade tomatoes for the knowledge trainers had.

With some he succeeded, but others tricked him into buying expensive and unsuitable breeds. Some of his dogs were stolen, and he also met opposition from his father.

Chou Tsung-chi and rescue dog Adam search for a missing mountain climber in eastern Taiwan’s Hualien County Jan. 17, 2011. (Photos courtesy of Chou Tsung-chi)

“My father thought I was crazy to invest huge amounts of money in dogs, but I insisted on spending our earnings on something meaningful,” Chou said.

His perseverance has paid off, fortunately, as he has gradually built up knowledge on how to breed and train dogs for rescue work, as well as how to identify suitable individual animals. To date, he has trained more than 10 dogs, most of which he has donated to government agencies.

In 2010 and 2011 his dogs Adam, Kelly, Lisa and Tang Tang passed the Mission Readiness Test RH-B level of the Austria-based International Rescue Dog Organization (IRO), in either area or rubble searches. Tang Tang, which has passed the IRO’s Rescue Dog Area Search Test level A, in which contestants have to find two victims in a 100-meter-by-200-meter area with both open and covered terrain in 15 minutes, is Taiwan’s only certified wide-area rescue dog.

On the strength of Chou’s outstanding performance, in late 2010 the Nantou-based National Fire Agency’s Training Center offered him a position as a rescue dog trainer and began to subsidize his work.

It costs at least NT$1 million (US$33,333) to train a dog, according to Chou, including breeding, feeding and maintaining the dog’s health. “Generally speaking, the whole process takes three years, but we try to shorten the time to one and a half years,” he said.

A dog can be used for seven years, but by the time it reaches the age of 7, it is getting old for the job. “Taking the training period into account, that doesn’t leave much time for it to serve.”

Preparing a dog takes many steps, from selection and desire adjustment to the several stages of training.

Tang Tang undergoes helicopter training.

To tell whether an animal will make a good rescue dog, it is tested for activeness, courage, suitable personality, resilience after being frightened, natural level of obedience and acuteness of hearing and smell.

“For instance, we burst a balloon or fire a gun near a pack of two-month-old puppies while they are eating,” Chou said. “Those that run away are eliminated from consideration. Another test involves letting the dogs smell a certain type of food, and then seeing how fast they can find it when it is hidden.

“We also have to adjust their desire to play, beginning when they are 15 days old. Dogs don’t think about the value of life. They search for people out of a sense of fun, in the expectation that people will play with them or give them something good to eat. We use this characteristic to shape their motivation to find people.”

Trainers have to think of ways to stimulate animals that are not willing to work, he pointed out, such as rewarding them with tasty treats like pig’s liver, chicken, hot dogs—and for our dogs, my tomatoes—after a task is accomplished.

“Dogs have emotions just like humans, and controlling them is a training technique, just as stimulation and incentives are used to arouse their desire for play. The process is cruel in that their desires can never be completely fulfilled, so they are never satisfied and thus will want all the more to play at the next opportunity.

“They also have to learn that there will always be something to play with, so they have the notion that when they are let out of their cage, it is time for them to be active and concentrate, so they can enjoy themselves.

“To the dogs, searching for people during rescue missions is like a game, with rewards afterward. There is always someone waiting to be saved, but they don’t know when, whether the person will want to play, or when a reward will be forthcoming, so they must keep looking.”

Interaction plays an important role in this process, he explained. “Trainers must be willing to spend time with a dog and let it know there will always be something fun to look forward to when they are together. Gradually, a bond of trust will be established, and the dog will be willing to do whatever is ordered.”

Training may take place anywhere. Chan Tien-wen, with the NFA Training Center, recalled an obedience training session conducted at Taichung City’s Fengjia night market. “The point is to help the dogs understand that, regardless of the place or type of incident that has occurred, they must always be ready for a mission.”

Chan noted how in the past his center has collaborated with National Pingtung University of Science and Technology to teach the dogs to recognize the variety of human smells. “The school has exchange students from Haiti and other countries, and people of different ethnicities don’t all smell the same. The objective is to let the dogs know that they will not be searching for people of a specific culture.”

Chou stressed that rescue dogs are different from other working dogs in that they must be autonomous, very playful and able to work in harsh environments—and they must love to eat. They cannot be frightened by thunder, and they have to be capable of carrying on with their work despite distractions.

Chan said visitors to the training center often ask whether the dogs will bite. “But they’re called rescue dogs because their job is to save people, so the primary requirement is that they will not attack humans, especially disaster victims who are already very vulnerable. Often, the dogs get close to people because they want to play.”

Hope is being groomed by Chou as the next star in the rescue dog sector.

A search and rescue K-9 needs to be very healthy. Chou’s dogs eat better than most people do, he said, at a cost of more than NT$8,000 each per month. To aid digestion and maintain bone strength, they get common nutriments such as bromelain, fish oils, Move Free, vitamin B and Wakamoto—a Japanese stomach pill made of yeast powder. They are also fed special prepackaged meals of beef, chicken or lamb, with vegetables like carrots, pumpkin and sweet potatoes.

The trainers pick out the ingredients themselves, and contract a food processing plant to make the food packs, to ensure they are suitable for dogs, Chou said.

In addition, the dogs get four health checkups annually, plus dental cleansing and rabies injections, along with heartworm medicine every month.

“Training a dog is like raising a child, but it is more exhausting as the animal does not understand a word you say,” Chou said, emphasizing the love and patience required for each step along the way. Following this principle, he continues to school dogs that will one day save lives. (THN)

Write to Grace Kuo at mlkuo@mofa.gov.tw