Searchers of lost souls. About dogs and people who find the dead
Larysa Borysenko is most afraid of hospitals, although she, her mother, and grandmother worked there. But working is one thing, and lying helpless in a hospital bed is another. The woman suffered from pneumonia in her legs and stayed home with a fracture just to avoid medicines, injections, and intravenous therapy.
"I'm a strong, trained person, so I promised myself that hopelessness, despair, and weakness would not overwhelm me. I thought I was unbreakable. But a disaster happened," the woman says.
In March of this year, she, a dog trainer and head of the Antares search and rescue team, worked in the de-occupied territory of the Kharkiv region. She and her team were searching for the bodies of fallen service members. The dogs from the unit are trained to find both alive and dead people. Suddenly, 51-year-old Larysa, her 19-year-old partner Viacheslav Maiboroda, 48-year-old search group commander, Major of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Andrii Cherniavskyi, and five-year-old dog Biesha run into tripping wire. All of them suffered concussions.
The animal survived, the young man and the major received moderate injuries, but the woman was taken to a hospital in a coma. Doctors did not give her a chance: she lost three liters of blood, suffered terrible burns, and had her entire body cut up by shrapnel.
Nevertheless, Larysa survived. After four months in various hospitals, where she underwent a dozen operations, she has been at home in Pavlohrad for several weeks now. The dog trainer is undergoing rehabilitation: she is learning to sit, walk, and put on shoes. Her whole body hurts 24/7. But the enormous desire to return to the search mission helps her to get through it.
She invented a methodology to train dogs to search for both the alive and the dead
At the age of 10, she got her first dog. At 14, she was already working as a dog handler at a service dog club.
The woman has a medical and psychological degree but has focused her entire life on dogs. She grew up to become an international trainer and judge, and participated in world championships with her dogs. First and foremost, it was her sporting achievements, and in 2008, when she created the Antares volunteer unit, search and rescue units emerged.
"First of all, we were looking for alive people in environmental and man-made disasters. The first is missing persons. Mostly grandparents who left home and got lost. Because of memory and mental problems. Sometimes such searches were successful: an old lady who went to the ATB supermarket was found on the third day in a well where she had fallen; another old lady was found in the woods, disoriented, thinking she was in her own yard; an unconscious boy was found in a sunflower field. Interestingly, dogs do not look for survivors by their tracks but by the concentration of lung breathing.
As for man-made hazards (earthquakes, gas explosions, building collapses), this rarely happened before the war. A dog might have worked with a man-made disaster once or twice in its life. But because of the war and, in particular, the full-scale invasion, the number of disasters is growing exponentially," Larysa says.
Unfortunately, Antares specialists were often called to search for the lost on the 6th or 10th day, when the chances of finding a person alive were zero. That's when she realized that dogs cannot work with bodies, that Ukraine does not train dogs that would search for both the alive, the dead, and their remains. She and her partner, Oleksandr Lisnychenko, had to invent their own methodology.
In 2013, Larysa trained Sparky, her Belgian Malinois sheepdog. The breed and genetics are very important for this type of work because not every dog can be trained. For most dogs, death is unnatural. Sometimes, an animal shows itself well in training. But in reality, when they smell death, especially when there are many bodies, they get stressed, panic, and simply run away.
The police also began to invite dogs from Antares to help in criminal cases. Once, it took the dog only 4 hours to sniff out the corpse of a girl that forensic experts could not find for four months, even though they had their own dogs.
The dog found the body at a depth of 2 meters
Since 2017, the Antares unit has been cooperating with the "Evacuation 200" humanitarian project of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which has recently been renamed "On the Shield." This is the only dog training organization they involve.
Now, people and dogs are searching for fallen soldiers on battlefields and in the de-occupied territories. A separate job is on the rubble after attacks. There are civilians there.
There are 14 dogs involved in the missions, 9 of them are versatile dogs. There are two of Larysa's "girls." After a missile hit a nine-story building in Dnipro, veteran Sparky, who "couldn't retire because of Putin," had been working for 22 hours. Although it is allowed to work no more than 5.
Sparky is indispensable in the most difficult locations. Her specialty is finding the dead who are buried deep underground. She checks the area, exploring it with her nose a centimeter at a time.
Once, in the Kharkiv region, one of the locals buried the body of a Ukrainian service member shot by the Russians in his garden. Tanks and armored personnel carriers had been passing through that spot for several months. The ground was almost turned into asphalt. The exact location of the burial is unknown. The person who knew it left, and no one could pinpoint the place. So they let Sparky out. She found the point where the smell was coming from. Usually, a dog either lies down or starts digging. (And when an animal finds someone alive, it barks happily, lively, ed.) We checked that point with other animals. They brought in an excavator and found a body at a depth of 170 cm in that very spot, in front of the surprised residents.
Another time, the dog trainers were told about a burial site on a cliff in someone's yard. But it was a rumor. Everything was flat, not dug up, as if the ground hadn't been touched for years. But Sparky gave a sign that the body was there. Larysa pulled her away, saying, "You've gotten old; you've made a mistake." The dog grimaced as if saying that the body was there. The team left the location but later decided to return. They brought in Larysa's second dog, a five-year-old Belgian shepherd terrier named Bieshu. Her specialty is the ability to smell a body from hundreds of meters away. She confirmed Sparky's discovery. They dug a huge hole with an excavator bucket. There was nothing there. People were desperate: did the animals make a mistake? But at a depth of two meters under the old linoleum, there was a service member's body. He had his documents with him.
Having found a human, the animals tremble with excitement. For them, it is a game. They get a toy, usually a ball. They immediately tear it up, satisfying their instinct: the prey must be torn apart.
The dogs of Antares unit became stars, and the photos of them working on the rubble in Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia went viral in media and social networks.
She "turns off" her emotions while working
Last year, on February 24, Larysa made one of the most important decisions in her life. She received calls from friends from about 15 countries who also work in the rescue and search field. They all invited her to visit them and their dogs (besides Sparky and Beshia, Larysa has two other retired dogs, Filia and Ozzy, ed.) They warned me, "The Russians will arrive in the evening."
"I realized that abroad, I could have been a great specialist with status, I would have had a job, and social protection. And everything would have worked out. But my country is in trouble. And we, our resources, are needed here. We realized that there would be shelling, attacks. And that they will be numerous," the dog trainer explains her decision to stay.
The old work of searching for old people and helping police investigators has not gone anywhere, and so much new work has been added so that the unit had to send young, versatile dogs to work on the sites. They are trained since their early childhood, that is, from 2-3 months of age and up to one and a half to two years. And in this case, a dog started working "in the field" at 14 months old.
"It's like children at the age of 17 going to the frontline because they have to," Larysa summarizes.
It takes at least a year to train an assistant for the dog so that they can go out on their own to search mission.
The searcher recalls one of her first attacks in Zaporizhzhia. A missile hit a four-story building.
"We split up, and each started working on a designated location. Almost immediately, the dog gave me a sign: he had a beeper device attached to his equipment. I realized that I had to go up. And there are some rags hanging there. Before that, the State Emergency Service employees had been working for several hours there. They said, "There is no one here". And I put my hand out to this rag, and it was covered with dust, plus it was semi-dark. And I realize that I have touched something heavy. I pull it up to my eyes and see that it is a piece of flesh. A freshly torn human being," she says.
When Larysa works, she "turns off" all emotions because they get in the way, even if she is looking for her friends. The job requires extreme responsibility. You can't make a mistake because, after the dog trainers, heavy equipment will arrive to clear the rubble.
Emotions can overwhelm a woman after work. Especially when she sees photos of the people she had collected piece by piece before. Her soul still hurts from the death of the elderly people.
"Tights, stockings of old ladies whose bodies stick out of a black plastic bag... It hurts," she says.
Sparky found more than a hundred people in her lifetime, Biesha – more than 60
After the full-scale invasion, people and animals of Antares did not find any alive people. Not because they don't exist. If the building is attacked, rescuers are the first to arrive, literally in 5 minutes. And they are the first to get those who survived out. But if they suddenly didn't find anyone, the searchers from Antares would.
Larysa does not count the total number of people found by Antares, does not divide them into the alive and the dead or into those who were killed before and after the invasion. She knows that Sparky has found more than 100 people in her lifetime, and Biesha – more than 60.
"The result of our good work is always someone's grief," the dog trainer sighs.
Larysa has a unique sense of smell. When she was young, she could tell when she passed by a high-rise building that there was a dead person there. Over the years, she has learned to distinguish whether someone died 20 minutes or two hours ago just by smell. She says she can find the location by the "scent" and work instead of the dog. She has been developing this ability in herself. After she ran into the tripwire in March, she was afraid that she had lost it. When the hospital staff wheeled the woman outside, she sniffed the grass and flowers: what they smelled like after rain, when the dust settled, before the bud opened, and after. Everything seemed to be fine. The "perfumer's" nose was preserved.
Some dogs from Antares are also specialists in psychological recovery. They have international certificates and are invited to visit wounded service members in hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
"I saw a dog come up to people who did not leave the ward and were lying with their face to the wall. The dog approached them and licked their hands. The person would turn around and start smiling for the first time in weeks. When one of the veterans with amputations was given a puppy, he cuddled it and fell asleep for the first time in a month. And everyone whispered: "Hush, hush, let him sleep," Larysa recalls.
The woman herself was terribly depressed, hiding in her blanket and not wanting to see anyone. When her family offered to take her outside in a wheelchair, she would scream. "What didn't I see there? You better take a teddy bear for a ride!" Larysa recalls the terrible months of despair.
But they would take her to the yard, and Sparky or Biesha would run to meet her. Sparky would gently put her paws on the owner and sniff. The scent was overwhelming. It belonged to a stranger because Larysa had been given blood from five people, with liters of medicine poured into it. But Sparky understood everything and started licking her hands. She walked carefully in front of the wheelchair and looked back every two or three steps. She was saying with her eyes: I'm with you.
Another time, Larysa's daughter brought Biesha. The woman did not believe the words of her relatives that Biesha had survived the explosion. She thought they were reassuring her. But she ran into her arms and kissed her, alive and well. These meetings allowed her to go through a few more days until she started recovering.
"I've always had dogs and will always have them," Larysa says, and you can hear them barking into the phone. They agree.
Searchers believe that they are guided by the souls of the dead
Finally, I asked her why she chose this job.
"There are very few people who work with death like this. Very few. In Ukraine, we all know each other. We are all stubborn, crazy, fanatical. We all believe that the dead have the right to be protected. We exist thanks to the people who died. Service members who give their lives must be sure that someone will come to get them and take their bodies. Those who died innocently at the hands of enemies somewhere in basements or under the rubble from attacks should not stay there.
We all bury our loved ones and go to the cemetery to visit them. Likewise, all these people have the right to be buried in a human way. We need to cry over them, to grieve. Relatives should come somewhere to lay flowers.
I live for this and am happy if I can find someone. No matter how strange it may sound. We have to take the person away so that they can return home and rest in peace. In cases like this, we say, "Returned from oblivion". Their lost soul, chained to an unburied body, will finally be free. We believe in it," she explains.
Larysa is sure that the soul that wants to be found will help and call:
"Sometimes a specialist sits around and suddenly gets up and runs somewhere in the bushes. He is driven by some inexplicable feeling. The bushes move, and he hears a scream, "There's a body!" Or the dog pulls him where he would never have thought to look. We, the searchers, believe that the souls guide us."
Shortly before March 26, when an accident happened to Larysa, she had a bad feeling. But she pushed these thoughts away. On the day of the explosion, the team managed to find the body of the soldier they had been searching for for exactly a year. And on the same day was the wedding anniversary of her parents, who had died a year earlier.
"The explosion was so strong that the whole group should have died. But I felt that the souls of those whose bodies we were returning were fighting for us. I believe in it," Larysa is sure.
While we were preparing this article, Larysa had already started going to the playground and training dogs.
"It will not be the same as it was. But it will be different. A new life," says Larysa. And I feel her confidence through the phone.
This text is part of hromadske special project dedicated to the Independence Day of Ukraine.