Did you all hear about this?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world...lost_in_fr.html

Talk about heart warming. Apart from the gross negligence of the babysitter; I think its a fantastic story about survival.

It leads to another questions though: how do you teach a 3 year-old about survival?

You don't "teach" a 3 year old. I figure at that age, their good ole brain stem is doing most of the work - keeping warm is a pretty basic instinct.

After all, most 3rd world countries, a toddler is ready to wield a knife and slaughter a chicken. It's only in the "Developed" world where a 3 year old is sheltered.

A two dog night for sure. The babysitter needs to spend a night out in the cold...

The babysitter is still breathing. That speaks to the child's guardian and their self control.

Weekly steak for life for the pups.

Glad the little tyke made it. Glad the hounds made it too. Not sure who saved whom, but what does it matter. A win is a win.

With all respect, though, I do have to ask the skeptical question: 21 hours to search a one-mile radius? A SAR dog should take you from A to B in about half an hour, AFAIK. Even a focused ground search should cover that in a lot less time.

But I'm not a SAR expert, so I defer to wiser heads in this group.

I once read an article on survival that said little kids do faily well in these situations. They tend to hunker down, stay put and try to stay warm, exactly what you should do. Having the dogs around helped with warmth.

Depends on the dog, the weather, the terrain, etc. A circle with a one mile radius contains Pi square miles (3.14). That is a significant amount of ground, and dogs aren't a panacea. Usually there are a limited number of canine teams, their training and skill level varies wildly, and you have to focus them on the areas of highest probability.

Little kids can also be problematic, because they've absorbed their "stranger danger" lessons, and some of them also are afraid that they're going to get in trouble for wandering off. So, they sometimes hide and don't make a sound even if ground searchers walk right by. If you're playing hide-and-seek with a tiny tyke in 3+ square miles of rough territory, it's going to take a while.

I vaguely recall a search near here a few years ago where hundreds of searchers did a grid search (i.e. make a tight line and comb the woods) for a kid that had wandered off. The next day the kid popped out from under a dead tree 200 yards from the house. I believe that area had been searched at least twice, and she said she could hear everyone calling her the whole time.

This one appears to be true, but I always am a bit skeptical when I hear these stories. Several years ago, not far from here, we had a similar story, little boy 3-4, goes missing in the woods, for 3 days they searched and searched, then a relative "found" him and supposedly the dogs kept him warm for 3 nights in the cold. When he was "found", he was given to police in the woods, and taken straight to a hospital.

On examining him, the doctors became suspicious because not only was he not dehydrated or hungry, after 3 nights in the cold woods, his clothes were shabby, but his underwear was clean, 3 night and part of a 4th day alone in the woods, and he had not soiled them at all.

Turned out, the family faked it for donations and sympathy.

I've always found that a couple of nice puppies makes for a rather decent face warmer especially during these long cold winter evenings.

Yep, gotta love a warm pair of "puppies".........

I'm not a SAR expert either, but a 1-mile radius translates to over 3 square miles, or almost 8 square kilometres.

Simply throwing a bunch of untrained volunteers together and saying "go search this area" is a recipe for disaster. First of all, they may not even be able to search the right section; I volunteered for the local candidate in our recent federal election, and we had volunteers who dropped flyers off in the wrong section of town, even with a map and a street address, so I wouldn't trust most volunteers with a topo map and a GPS unit.

Checking the volunteers to make sure they were properly dressed, and not likely to get lost themselves (in the dark, in the woods, and in sub-freezing temperatures), takes time. Walking past the kid in the dark, if he's sleeping or hiding, is a definite possibility; so is searching the wrong area (see above) and trampling potentially valuable clues. (I've heard of volunteers picking up discarded candy wrappers they found and sticking it in their pockets without telling anyone, unaware that it might be a vital clue.)

Given a line of trained searchers, 10 meters apart, 100 searchers could take a couple of hours to properly search a square kilometre.

And all that assumes that they *knew* the missing person was within one mile.

I think 21 hours to get organized, get the volunteers on site, make sure they were trained and equipped, move them into position, and conduct the search is properly pretty good going.

But I'm not an expert. Just MHO.

I've heard that there is approximately a 4-hour window of opportunity for a tracking dog to find the scent and follow it from the point of disappearance. And even that depends on weather. The kid disappeared during the night, and I didn't see anything that indicated how much time elapsed between him leaving and anyone discovering it, and then how long the family searched before they called for help, and then how long it took for the search to get organized.

From what I've read, most searches NEVER call the dogs in first. They have a bunch of people trampling the area first, and let a lot of time go by, and then finally someone says, "Why don't we get a dog team in here?"

Scent-trained dogs probably find a lot of the victims by picking up their scent when they cross it during a more random search.

Those were pretty small pups, maybe large Beagles or Foxhounds. Considering the story, I was expecting a couple of large hound pups or something.

Lucky.

Sue

Good comments. I can see how something that seems simple (viewed from my comfy armchair) becomes quite complicated in the field.

It's sad but true that some SAR teams have a hard time getting the police to call them. The two teams with whom I've worked have had to get an official call from the jurisdiction in charge. You can't just show up.

By the time we got there, you can bet that a half dozen volunteer firemen had been driving around the area on ATVs for hours.

Yep, think of a scent trail as a phosphor trace. As the target moves across the terrain, the trail they leave behind fades out over time. However, if a dog can catch the tail of the trace, which as you say decays in roughly 4 hours, then they can speed up the recovery considerably. All they have to do is cross that line once or twice to get the orientation, and then they can home in on it. Dogs are limited, but they do certainly help when used properly and within their known limitations.

Wow this sure is a judgemental crowd. I haven't read this story so maybe some of you know something that I don't. However there are a lot of details we don't know, I personally have no idea of the circumstances in which the boy wandered off, so I don't think we should be so quick to make assumptions and judgements. Besides, I'm willing to bet that the babysitter felt pretty horrible when this happened.

I've noticed on many occasions people on this forum are quick to condemn others as irresponsbile or stupid. Certainly this is true sometimes, but often people make honest mistakes or simply do not have the benefit of the knowledge that we have. I often read posts that strike me as condescending, and I don't think that is helpful to anyone, especially to new readers who are not active on this forum.

Not condescending, just responsible where human life is concerned. When I watch over someone and I am responsible for their safety, I make damn sure I know where they are at all times. If it is a small child and at my home, that includes locking our dog door so the tyke cannot get out and putting up an extra safety fence around the pool. If I sound condescending I sure am sorry, but not as sorry as if I lost someone's child.
Maybe I was raised different from other folks, but if I tell you I have control over someone's child you can bet that child is safe or I am dead.

Judgement and conclusion are based on the facts as presented. If what is known doesn't add up, then you call a spade a spade. Of course any situation we read about here or elsewhere may have aspects or conditions we are unaware of, and so the observations we make are based on limited knowledge of the actual event(s).

Knowing that, it is in the context and magnitude of the available information from which we would pass such judgement, and so on the face of it, we offer our opinions, however condemning they may seem, because the available facts allow for no other conclusion. If, in fact, the babysitter in this case was not doing what she was supposed to be doing, which is to watch over and supervise the child, then she is negligent, and on the face of it, deserves a high level of criticism. If more information is made available upon which to condition such judgement, then it would seem both prudent and fair for us to change our minds about the matter.

Based on what is known to us, if it had been my child, I can gaurantee that the babysitter would be feeling pretty horrible, and most likely from a hospital bed if I got my hands on them. I have little tolerance for mistakes that place my family at risk of harm.

Assumptions, no, conclusions based on a limited amount of information, yes. Judgement, well, if we didn't offer up our opinions to one another, I suppose we'd have no discussions.

So based on the information provided, I would think that a conclusion of irresponsibility and/or stupidity would indeed be germaine and relevent. If we knew more of the circumstances or they whys and wherefores, it would likely be a wholly different story we'd be reading about, even though the outcome was the same.

Honest mistakes that put my family in peril will get a person in dutch with me almost as much as deliberate acts would. I tend to give most people a lot of leeway, but somethings I just can't afford to tolerate. If there's one thing I would strive to demonstrate to any new member on this forum with regards to the topic of survival, it is that, first and foremost, you need to be accountable for your actions. Without this, you will forever remain at the mercy of your enemies and beyond the assistance of the most magnanimous among us.

My "judgemental" comes from raising a couple of kids, and watching over a gaggle of grandkids. I never failed to know where my charges were. If we were in a store, I had a kids hand in mind unless they were using both of theirs to look at a toy, while I was standing nearby. If we were at home, I might not have them in sight, but I knew that all of the exits to the house were secured in a manner that a child could not defeat. Every day I see kids running thru stores with not a parent in sight. That is just wrong. If you are in charge of a child, you have to watch them every minute. If you don't, bad things can happen...

I don't doubt this is true, or even necessary (in an evolutionary sense), but it's things like this that make me avoid children in public. There is something in that protective instinct that makes parents slightly insane.

If I see a kid in a store, lost and screaming in terror, and there are any other adults anywhere close, I'll fight my desire to help, and then turn and walk the other way. Because of the parents. I don't want to be anywhere in the vicinity when the parent arrives, fuming at everyone else, when they should really be looking in the mirror.

It's as if, where kids are concerned, there is no concept of honest, daily risk acknowledged any more. The only language spoken is blame, as if the world would be perfectly secure without humans to make mistakes in it. To be honest, that's bull. Accidents happen, especially to kids, who can be little Houdinis and Indiana Joneses as they explore their surroundings without fear. Most of the time it turns out fine, and probably every one of us has the minor scars to prove it. Sometimes it doesn't, and that is a tragedy, but not always a crime.

I don't know if it is as much about perfection as it is about control. I accept that life has it's risks, even where my children are concerned, and not only would it be impractical for me to have tried to eliminate life's risks in my children's lives, but I feel it would also have deprived them of much functional knowledge they would need later in life to get by.

However, as a parent, I am responsible for the welfare of my children, and so it is up to me to discern what constitutes an acceptable risk, and what is going to be unacceptable. Based on desired outcomes, there are risks I am willing to subject them to, such as taking them into the mountains hunting with me, where I feel the opportunity for growth is significant enough to allow for the amount of risk I am going to expose them to. Then there are times when my expectation of risk is necessarily quite low, usually by restricting their activity in order to accomplish some other objective, such as the necessary social time I need to spend with my spouse once in a while, away from the kids. Under those conditions, I make arrangements to mitigate risks, and so my expectation will be that nothing averse would likely happen, and if it does, and it is because of a negligent act by someone in whom I placed trust and entered an agreement to compensate them for their supervision, then we will have words, even if the outcome is benign.

Have their been lapses in my own judgement/duty to control the risk exposure to my family? Yes, unfortunately I've discovered that I too am not perfect. It was a sad day for me. I was lucky that bad things didn't happen, but the fact remains that the unintended exposure occurred, and so I learned from it, and will not repeat the same mistakes. In the particular case where such a lapse might've ended with an outside party getting involed, I would like to think that, depending on the behavior I observe at the point of recovery, I would tend not to go off on a stranger right away, unless I was positive there was an imminent or progressive threat. That could be splitting hairs in some rare cases. A tough call.

I agree. I remember being out walking the dogs and finding a neighborhood child of about three years age standing in the middle of the road at about 10 pm on a cold night in my dark, semi-rural neighborhood, about a block from my house. I knew which house was hers, but I'd never met the parents.

I am usually quite decisive, but I recall a feeling of confusion and slight panic, not wanting to come within 10 feet of the little girl, lest the parents choose that moment to come bursting forth, and mistake me for a child-stealing pervert.

I needed to get her inside, and couldn't leave her in the road to go knock on the parents' door, but I dared not approach her. I began to sort of herd her back home from a "safe" distance, and, sure enough, just then the parents came out, scooped her up, with nary a word to me.

I see kids hurt all the time, sometimes from that moment of inattention, other times from sheer stupidity.

Truly constant vigilance is, in fact, simply impossible to maintain. The kids of obviously good, responsible parents do, indeed, still find ways to get hurt from time to time, and I've seen these parents tearing their guts out over it. I always make a point to offer a word of understanding at these moments. Knowing that we aren't judging them seems to help.

But propping a toddler up on a horse, letting a 10 year old run up and down the road in a four-wheeler, or not using an infant safety seat is pure stupidity. likewise keeping fighting dogs and toddlers, passing out and leaving your booze and pills on a low coffee table, and a seemingly endless list of equally Stoopid Parenting Tricks.

My all-time favorite, though: "Donut Day." A multi-gallon pot full of hot grease, a rickety folding card table, and a classroom full of excited kindergartners running about. Do the math.

Jeff

This seems like it's caused by our litigious and suspicious society. You don't want to be near the child for fear of what? Being accused of doing something, I guess. I understand that having received a suspcious look when noticing what seems to be a child left alone and asking. DW rouses less suspicion.

I also felt it once when I found an elderly woman who had fallen on an NYC sidewalk. I helped her, but was real glad when I got away from her without her knowing my name.

It might also be making our society more vulnerable, by isolating us from each other. Humans survive in communities.