Roka, a black Labrador dog is scrambling over fallen concrete and rubble here at the Search Dog Foundation's National Training Center in a remote part of Ventura County.
He's searching for human scent, someone hidden from view in a concrete tube. When he finds them, he's rewarded by his handler for identifying the location, and given a toy to play with. For Roka, this is a fun game of hide and seek. But in real life, his actions could be the difference between life and death, explains Mandy Tisdale, the director of Canine Behavior and Training the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.
"We want them to really enjoy the game of hide and seek, because that's what this really is. It's a very serious job in the end. But all the dogs know is that it's a really fun game of hide and seek. And so we want them to be able to use their nose to find the odor of a hidden person. And when they find that person, we want them to alert us by barking so we know that they have found somebody," said Tisdale.
These dogs are all rescues and are being highly trained to respond in an emergency by this nonprofit organization. The dogs trained here have gone on to help searches around the world, like the recent wildfires in Maui and the devastating earthquake in Turkey - as well as helping search for missing persons closer to home in Ventura County.
Tisdale explained: "These dogs, they love their job because they've been taught early on that all of that energy and boldness and drive that you have to do something with your life as a dog. We provide that outlet for them."
The impressive facility has residential quarters where teams from around the world can stay while they undergo training and dramatic life-size scenes of destruction.
"This is Search City, and this is a neighborhood prop that's set up to look as though a tornado or a hurricane or an earthquake has gone through and destroyed at least part of the buildings and area," explained Denise Sanders from the Foundation, as she shows me around the property.
Sanders says, "Yes, it looks like a movie lot - but what's interesting is actually what you cannot see, because that's what we deal with day in and day out - scent - and you cannot see it, but we know that it's there. We know how it moves. We understand the science behind it. And we need to teach people, handlers in particular, all about what we cannot see," she said.
"The visual is fantastic and it gets the adrenaline going a little bit, gets that, you know, that feeling of maybe being at a real disaster. But then when the real work starts, that's where we want them to start learning about - you need to trust your dog because your nose can't do the same type of work, let alone the same level of work as your dog's nose," said Sanders.
It's Sid's turn now to search the rubble. The handlers have a chance to not only use voice commands, but hand signals to help guide the dogs towards the areas to search.
"Sid is a German Shepherd, Belgian Malinois mix," said Sanders. At least, that's what they think.
"A lot of our dogs again are mixes or we don't actually know what breeds. They are taking a dog - we don't know their background, we don't know their personality yet - and being able to work with them to get the whole point where they're thriving in whatever career or life they choose is pretty amazing," said Sanders.
These nimble, four legged first responders are nearly at the end of their training journey, and then will be putting their highly trained senses to work in invaluable ways - ways that two legged first responders simply can't.
