{"id":47452,"date":"2021-04-07T18:35:29","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T00:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/search-dog-on-hunt-for-national-certification\/"},"modified":"2021-04-08T00:35:29","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T00:35:29","slug":"search-dog-on-hunt-for-national-certification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/search-dog-on-hunt-for-national-certification\/","title":{"rendered":"Search dog on hunt for national certification"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Jon
Jon Bonnette works with his dog, Isidore, left, trained in air-scent search and rescue, and Raaz, trained in human remains detection, Tuesday during a search and rescue training exercise near Flora Vista.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

FARMINGTON \u2013 Somewhere out on 40 acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, a mother and her two boys hid, nestled in the branches of trees, waiting to hear the scamper of paws from a rescue dog named Isidore. Luckily, this was just a drill.<\/p>\n

Jon Bonnette, Isidore\u2019s K-9 handler, volunteers with Badlands Search and Rescue in Farmington and is working to get Isidore certified. Isidore is a 2-year-old Belgian Malinois.<\/p>\n

\"Not
Not only has Jon Bonnette trained Isidore for search and rescue, but she demonstrates some fun tricks he has taught her before a search and rescue training exercise Tuesday near Flora Vista. Isidore wears goggles to protect her eyes from the brightness of the sun and help prevent blindness.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cShe doesn\u2019t like to snuggle,\u201d Bonnette said. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t like to sit on the couch. She is all go, all the time. If you\u2019re playing ball with her, she\u2019s happy. If you take her inside, she\u2019ll tear your house apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bonnette takes Isidore on training exercises, he requests help from volunteers who have not worked with Isidore before, so their scent will be new to her. This is called blind training. So the volunteers hide without her seeing them or smelling them first, and then she goes with Bonnette to search for the missing.<\/p>\n

But Isidore doesn\u2019t just find the missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s non-scent specific,\u201d Bonnette said. \u201cSo she finds anyone in her search area. If a searcher happens to wander into our search area, she\u2019s going to find them, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isidore walks within several yards of Bonnette sniffing and running around. She wears a set of goggles to help deflect the brightness of the sun, which can bounce off the sand. Belgian Malinois, especially search and rescue dogs, are prone to go blind, so the goggles help with prevention. When she has found someone, she runs back to Bonnette and pulls on a glove attached to a string on his waist as an alert signal. Bonnette asks Isidore to show him and then she leads him to her find.<\/p>\n

\"Jon
Jon Bonnette plays fetch and tug-of-war with Isidore, his air-scent trained search and rescue dog, after a training exercise Tuesday near Flora Vista.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

She\u2019s been training for as long as she has been alive and can take the place of 30 to 40 people on the ground with her keen senses, Bonnette said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith me and her working together, we can clear a lot of land very quickly when looking for a lost hiker,\u201d Bonnette said.<\/p>\n

Once she makes her find, Isidore gets to play with her favorite toy \u2013 her ball. Bonnette said she loved playing fetch as a younger pup, so when they started training, he limited her fetch time to post-rescues only so she would have to \u201cwork for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

During their most recent training session, Isidore and Bonnette found volunteer Micha Elmore and her two sons who learned about the opportunity to \u201cplay a little hide-and-seek\u201d and help with a training exercise.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very impressive what they can do,\u201d Elmore said with her sons nodding in agreement.<\/p>\n

\"Isidore,
Isidore, an air-scent trained search and rescue dog, comes back to her owner, Jon Bonnette, after finding a person. She bites on a glove that hangs from Bonnette&#x2019;s belt to alert him of a find.<\/span>Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Isidore needs to pass a 40-acre search preliminary, and if she does, she will be able to move onto the next level, which is a 160-acre search. If she passes that, she will get her national certification.<\/p>\n

Bonnette is always looking for more volunteers to help with blind searches. Anyone interested may email Bonnette at bonnette44@yahoo.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

mmitchell@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isidore, 2-year-old Belgian Malinois, will win games of hide-and-seek<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[799,28,138,29,443],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-47452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-farmington","tag-headlines","tag-new-mexico","tag-newsletter","tag-san-juan-county-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47452"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=47452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}