Here's a link to an interesting discussion about rescue dogs. Thanks to Arial for the link.

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"I've worked with some of these dogs before when I was in the military in Alaska. It's heartbreaking at times. These dogs work amazingly hard. You can see it get to them when they find somebody who didn't make it. After spending about 8 hours going through an avalanche area, we were all exhausted, but a couple of the dogs were still trying to find anybody they could. Once we had accounted for everybody, a couple trainers asked some of us to partly bury ourselves so that the dogs could end their day finding a live body. The dog that found me was ecstatic that it had finally found somebody to save."