2023-05-01 19:28:00
Puebla, Mexico | July barks when she locates people in the back of a building. Maia slowly descends down a ravine. Both participate in a simulation of rescues after catastrophes, and are part of the team of canines from Mexico that have saved lives, such as in the recent earthquake in Turkey.
At another point in the exercises, July, a seven-year-old black Labrador retriever, allows herself to be transported in an ambulance with a bandaged paw. In the simulation, she went into the bushes at night with two necklaces, one with light. After a few minutes, she was heard barking as she found a paramedic and an injured man who needed help.
At another time, Maia walks between rocks and grasslands and when she reaches a ravine she stops so that her trainers put on her rappelling equipment to descend. She barely moves on the way down.
The drill was organized this past weekend by the Red Cross of Mexico in the state of Puebla, in the center of the country, to maintain the training of 18 dogs, 10 accredited by the American organization Urban Search and Rescue (USR) to give help anywhere in the world.
With a lot of experience in natural disasters in Mexico, July found six bodies in the rubble after the February 6 earthquake in southeastern Turkey, which left more than 50,000 dead.
It was the first time that July responded to an international call for help.
Their work “alleviated the human suffering of people who were waiting to receive their relatives” who died, says Anneth López, 35, the rescuer who has worked and lived with July since she was a puppy.
Proud, López does not hide her attachment to July. “One can’t be without the other,” she says.
“Speak the same language”
In addition to July, other Mexican dogs traveled to Turkey, including Proteo, a German Army shepherd, who died in a landslide.
Upon arriving in Adiyaman, a Turkish city devastated by the earthquake, “we began to extract deceased people and also live people,” says Alberto Peña, a 36-year-old veterinarian after the drill.
“The important thing about this type of exercise is that all the personnel with whom we are preparing every day speak the same language on the subject of rescue,” he says.
López points out that the entire rescue team must even know how to grab the canines, because this maneuver varies if they are injured or have to be transported by strangers.
As a heroic ancestor, the Mexican rescue dogs have Frida, a honey-colored Labrador retriever, who, dressed in her protective gear, became a symbol of hope during the earthquakes that shook Mexico in 2017.
His first mission was during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where he helped extricate 12 people alive and 12 dead. In a landslide in Ecuador in 2017, she located the bodies of 20 people.
The Mexican armed forces paid tribute to Proteo and Frida, who died when she was already retired.
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