Bahrain Dog Names

For those of us who have small, “poofy” lapdogs, who are so pampered that you have to point them toward the food bowl may not appreciate some of the abilities built into canines.  Some of those skills include tracking, retrieving, guarding and a variety of uses of their superb noses.  Our pop culture spotlight for today is Sabi, a.k.a. Sarbi, a female black Labrador Retriever Newfoundland mix who used her extraordinary scent skill, and who knows what others in addition to hunting abilities to perform in a manner of which our pampered pooches can only dream.

Sabi is a military dog, trained to detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs) along the roads and areas as an extra defense for the military men assigned with her.  Though she was an Australian Special Forces Explosive Detection dog from September 2002 to March 2015, in Arabic and Muslim her name means “young girl”, both of which are predominant ethnicities in Bahrain. On September 2, 2008, during a combined military action consisting of the Australians and Afghans, the group was ambushed by a Taliban militant group.  In the fierce firefight that ensued, a total of nine people wounded, this number including her handler.  At some point during the fight, Sabi went missing.  When the dust and smoke settled, the soldiers searched for her and made several subsequent attempts to locate her, without success.  

Her handler, SAS Trooper Mark Donaldson, was awarded the distinguished Victoria Cross, the highest military honor in Britain and the Commonwealth, for the bravery he displayed when he rescued a wounded interpreter during the battle while under heavy machine gun barrage.  While the honor was great for Mark, the loss of Sabi weighed heavily on him as well as all of the men who fought that day.  The puzzle was coming together, but there was still one vital missing piece!  

In November 2009, an exciting event occurred - Sabi reappeared!  Fourteen months after her disappearance, Sabi had been located, surviving all of that time in the desert.  She was found in a remote patrol base in northeastern Uruzgan and returned by a U.S. soldier who reported seeing her with an Afghan man, believed to have cared for her in her absence, who suspected that she was a military dog. To assure her identity, her handler Mark Donaldson kicked a ball to her to see if she would retrieve and return it - a game they had played during and after her training period.  At last, the puzzle was complete, confirmed by her response to her favorite ball.  She was quite the morale boost for her teammates who shared in Donaldson’s celebration of her return.