HELENA — They had no badge and wore no uniform, but they were among the first to search through the rubble of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
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“To be honest, I did not know if I was going to come out alive because we didn’t know then,” Dr. Marie Suthers, a Veterinary Medical Assistance Team leader at the site of 9/11, said.
In the days after September 11th, the search at Ground Zero was unlike anything crews had ever faced.
“There was that smell that was like a weird electrical smell, the cremains smells, really a combination that I have never smelled before and never want to smell again,” Suthers added.
Amid the twisted steel and mountains of debris, over one thousand specially trained dogs went to work looking for people alive or dead, and any possible evidence.
“Those dogs were doing that work of finding remains to really help the families, you know, to know who was in this pile, how many people did we really lose,” Suthers said.
Suthers was there at the pile for two weeks. “Feeling compelled to go,” she said, despite having a 10-month-old baby at home.
Her job, overseeing the safety, mental health, and care of volunteers and dogs alike.
Today, as an anthrozoology professor at Carroll College, she looks back on that experience as more than a moment in history.
“When we were down in the red zone, which is the area right around the pile itself, it was especially at night with all the big lights; you felt like you were in a movie set,” Suthers said. “It was so surreal, like I had never been in anything like that before; it was a war zone.”
It's a lesson in the remarkable relationship between humans and animals and the ways animals can serve alongside us during some of our darkest moments.
For many of the dogs, their reward was simply a chance to do the job they had been trained to do, and that's part of what Suthers wants her students to understand.
“We always say never forget, and I hope that they learn that this is something that happened that is now impacting the whole rest of this generation because it changed the way the world is,” Suthers added.
These dogs didn't know what September 11th meant. They didn't understand terrorism or tragedy.
Twenty-five years later, their stories can sometimes be overshadowed by the enormous human toll of that day.
But for Suthers, remembering the attacks also means remembering the animals who stood beside the people responding to it.
“Have empathy for our people who put themselves in the face of danger for our country,” Suthers said.
Their work reminds us that heroism doesn't always look the way we expect. Sometimes, it has four legs, a nose trained to find hope beneath the rubble.
