Kelsy's search for Kosmo

Kosmo was an older yellow lab, 14 years old, with back legs that didn't work too well sometimes.  Looking back at the case now, I see that I missed several things and provided bad advice to Kosmo's owner.  Kosmo went missing 12/18, and Kelsy started searching on 12/20.  We used his bed as a scent article.  Kelsy immediately took me to some bushes not far from the house, but Kosmo was not there, and there was no trail he might have taken.  I started her again, and she took me down the driveway to the road, and up another driveway to a wooded lot.  I'm 90% sure this was not Kosmo's trail because Kosmo was found in the bushes 4 days later, fifty feet from his front porch, alive but gravely ill.  Even though I knew Kosmo's back legs didn't always work well, I reasoned that he might have gone that far if his joints warmed up once he started walking.  It happened that way on a previous case.  I remember, now, that Kosmo's owner said his weakness was neurological, not joint related, and more walking made it worse.  The scenario I imagined was not logical, now that I think about it.

Kelsy follows scent trails, and pools of scent are difficult for her.  This is why we use her for dog cases and not cat cases.  Cats tend to leave scent pools without any directionality.  For those situations, we use a cat detection dog, trained to thoroughly check an area for any cats.  Well, this was a case like a missing cat case, where Kosmo hadn't gone far, and he had left a non-directional pool of scent rather than a trail Kelsy could follow.

Before we started, I told Kosmo's owner that Kelsy usually does not track right up to the missing dog.  She has found five dogs directly, and she has been confirmed to be on the right trail most of the time.  In most cases, the missing dog had already been picked up by someone before we started searching, so there was no dog there for Kelsy to find.  As I told Kosmo's owner, Kelsy has been on the wrong trail a few times, and I did not realize it until we had followed that trail a long way.  Kelsy is supposed to give me a negative signal when we don't have the scent of the dog we are looking for.  This is something we have trained on, and I don't know why we fail in this way some times.  Maybe there is a problem with the scent article.  Most definitely there is a communication problem, where Kelsy is misunderstanding what I want and I am not reading her right.  Mistakes do happen, and the owner knew this before we started.

The worst mistake was the advice I gave her.  Before I left that day, I told her that, "At least we can be certain Kosmo isn't somewhere near the house in the bushes."  Obviously that wasn't the case because Kosmo was found not far from the house.  I should not have advised her as I did.  Kelsy can be fooled by a directionless scent pool, and I should not have been so certain Kosmo wasn't nearby.

Kosmo's owner heard him bark, faintly, and they found him in the bushes four days after he had gone missing.  He survived for a while, but he did not regain full health.  Kosmo's owner and the vet decided it was best to euthanize him on January 7th.  The bad advice I gave Kosmo's owner certainly didn't help him and it may have hastened his end.

One lesson I could learn from this is that Kelsy and I should not be doing searches if we can be mistaken in this way.  I have to weigh that against the good we have done when we found those five dogs.  For now, I will continue to work on training with Kelsy in order to try to determine where we are failing to communicate.  In our most recent training session, she performed flawlessly.  I hope the lesson learned from the search for Kosmo will help us on a future case.

Temp: 42°F
Feels like: 38°F
Fog
Humidity: 92%
Wind: SW 6 mph

Name:		Track 099
Date:		Dec 20, 2011 11:04 am
Map: (valid until Jul 15, 2012)		View on Map
Distance:		3.39 miles
Elapsed Time:		2:46:18
Avg Speed:		1.2 mph
Max Speed:		7.7 mph
Avg Pace:		49' 07" per mile
Min Altitude:		0 ft
Max Altitude:		381 ft
Start Time:		2011-12-20T19:04:53Z
Start Location:
	Latitude:	47.496607º N
	Longitude:	122.469742º W
End Location:
	Latitude:	47.496812º N
	Longitude:	122.469717º W