 Finn and I spent close to a week in the jungles of Guyana, South America looking for a plane that had been missing since November 2008 along with 3 flight crew. They were doing a geological survey for minerals. We went with two other dog teams, and 3 support personnel.
To put it bluntly, we fought the jungle and the jungle won. The heat, exhaustion, and dehydration overwhelmed a lot of the humans on this trip and we weren’t even able to make it to the site we wanted to search. The most frustrating thing was, we had gotten within 1.5 miles of the search sit, after struggling through 10-12 miles of rugged jungle. I think that we were truly the first humans to walk in that environment, astonishing really. But those last 1.5 miles would have take at least 2-3 days to cover due to the extreme terrain we were going to cover. At the point we decided to abort the mission, as we had already dropped one dog for health reasons. And during the last day of our trek to the search site, although we didn’t know it at the time, two of the field team leaders were developing severe health problems that would have been very difficult, if not deadly, to deal with the farther we got away from our base camp. Eventually, we ended up having to give one of my teammates IV fluids because he had become so sick and dehydrated. I think we impressed our Amerindian guides with our aggressive treatment. I was impressed that we were actually able to get an IV catheter in a dehydrated human, while on the banks of the Mazaruni River in the middle of the Guyanese Jungle.
When we got back to our base camp, we set up a demonstration of what the dogs could do as human remains detection dogs and all of the natives involved agreed that if we could have gotten the dogs to the site we would have had a good chance to find them. |
March 21st
Finn easily completed his recertification task, found his subject in 10 minutes. There wasn’t enough time to take any pictures of him working, just one with his subject.
