Fidel, Talos, Hector: The dogs of EMAK that save lives

“Look!”

In a word, Fidel, Talos, and Hector run away, sniffing for traces of human life in danger. Specially trained to rescue people, the three dogs of the 2nd EMAK will search for someone who is barking, injured or unconscious and will bark to alert their trainer, performing an invaluable task.

Their important role is also recognized by their handlers, who treat them as members of their family since, most of the time, they raise them from puppies and after they “retire”, they stay in their homes.

At the headquarters of the 2nd EMAK, in Thermi Thessaloniki, the dogs are trained every week in order to be ready, at any time, to perform their difficult task – like Talos, who participated in the rescue operations after the devastating earthquake in Turkey.

Each dog has its own fenced area, with its name on a tag outside, and each handler undertakes the training. A member of the canine search and rescue team is Chief Firefighter Ioannis Papagiannakis, who took in 8-year-old Hector, a towering husky labrador, when he was just a.. handful.

“I have him as my child, I got him as a puppy a few days old, he was trained and passed all the evaluations. Of course, he’s in my family and it’s funny, when I sometimes argue with my children, he gets in between and … pushes me”, describes Mr. Papagiannakis. With the dogs, he and his colleagues have ventured everywhere, in ruins, snow, difficult areas, “we have even embraced the dog to go through places no man goes, but that is our job”.

Reward with a ball!

About 20 minutes the dogs can search for survivors, then they have to rest for a while, because the work is tiring and they lose interest.

“Their reward is a ball that they play like mad, they pull it back and forth, they are happy when you throw it to them and then they pull it with force with their teeth”, emphasizes pyronomist Anastasios Panorios, companion of Talos, a Malinois 7 ,5 years old that came into his hands, when he was four months old.

“We try to train the animals to be obedient and socialized, because in many cases, they have people during the searches. Then their fitness and ability to join the team is assessed.”

The three dogs constantly go through exercises and training, in Greece and abroad, in order to be ready to participate in a rescue mission at any time. They even go to snowy Olympus and do simulation exercises, looking for people even in snow holes!

Fidel, the eldest of the group

For deputy firefighter Panagiotis Grousko, Fidel, the 9.5-year-old German shepherd he has taken over, may be able to continue until he is 12 years old. Most dogs, however, “retire” at the age of 10 and, as he says, “it goes without saying that you continue to have it with you in your home.”

“The dog is not a tool, it is tied to you and everything it does, it does it purely for you,” notes Mr. Grouskos.

Now approaching an age when the three dogs will have to be retired, the trainers are already looking for new ones.

“Because our dogs are now at an age of 8 and above, we have to start working with new puppies, based on protocol, in order to have continuity,” says Mr. Papagiannakis, who points out that the most important problem they face is that they don’t have cars to transport the dogs.

“In Greece there are 25 rescue dogs and our most important problem is that we don’t have cars to transport them, that is, we are forced to take them home in our own cars with all the risk this entails, that is, a traffic accident may occur and endanger the dog in the car. We want each dog to have its own service vehicle so that it can move easily to incidents”, Mr. Papagiannakis concluded.