A Dog's Life is Hardly the Pits
September 2003

Last September 11th, Kristine Crawford's web site registered one million hits on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The site has a tribute to search-and-rescue dogs in music, words, and pictures. It was created by the Castro Valley woman, herself a dog handler with search-and-rescue pit bull terriers. The tribute is on her web site and shows dogs searching through debris, standing atop rubble and comforting firefighters and disaster workers.

www.forpitssake.org/SAR1.html

While all eyes were focused on the Pentagon and New York and the horror of the twin towers' collapse, here at home, handler and dog search-and-rescue teams were looking for Alzheimer's patients, missing or abducted children, and lost hikers, Crawford said. "Life goes on," Crawford said Monday, while using hand signals to instruct and direct Dakota, her 6-year-old, 55 pound pit bull.

Crawford is the only handler in California to have a pit bull as her search-and- rescue dog. Dakota is her current partner and she has two other pit bulls; Cheyenne, 7, who is a therapy dog, and 3-year-old Tahoe, who is in training to be a search-and-rescue dog.

Search-and-Rescue Must Be On Call

Crawford volunteers her time with four search-and-rescue organizations. Through her life saving work, she is also educating people about pit bulls and dispelling what she describes as "misconceptions" of what she believes is a misunderstood breed.

Enthusiastic, not menacing, is perhaps the best description for Dakota, who enjoys nothing more than bounding up to people and giving them big, wet kisses.

Most people hear about search-and-rescue only when there is a national disaster, Crawford explained. But human and canine volunteers must be ready at a moments notice when law enforcement or other government agencies ask for their help to find people who are kidnapped, lost or missing.

Crawford describes pit bulls as the ideal search-and-rescue dogs. "They are athletic, agile, intelligent and driven," she explained. "They won't quit and will keep going and going when they should be exhausted.

Earlier this year, Crawford and Dakota--who are among a dozen handler-and-dog teams in the Alameda County Sheriff's Search and rescue program--went to Modesto and other parts of California to help search for Laci Peterson or her body. Last spring, the duo went to Texas for 10 days to search for the bodies of the seven astronauts that perished in the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. NASA and FEMA officials forbid Crawford and other searchers from disclosing what they found. However, Crawford, who spends at least 20 hours a week training her dogs for such excursions, recalls searching with Dakota for 12 to 15 hours a day in bone-chilling rain and cold. Yet every morning, Dakota was raring to go out and search some more.

The pair would come back to a tent each night and huddle with other cold, wet searchers and their search dogs around a propane heater, she reminisced. One night, emotions were running high. A NASA official, who had been helping search for his fallen comrades all day, came into the tent, sat in a chair and buried his head in his hands. Dakota saw this and moved away from her warm, cozy spot in front of the heater and nudged her way into the semicircle of the man's arms and gave him a big kiss, Crawford said.

Thanks to recent national media exposure of Crawford and her search-and-rescue dog Dakota, this side of pit bulls is becoming better known. The Animal Planet Channel came to Castro Valley last spring and captured Crawford putting her dogs through the paces for a half hour program about Crawford and her pit bulls which aired in July. This week, National Geographic is here for three days to film a show about Crawford and Dakota and their life saving activities and programs.