Ouch! Woman Lost in Finnish Forest Gets Bitten by Police Dog Searching for Her

It turns out that the old maxim about the dog being man's best friend is not universally applicable. A Finnish woman, who lost track of where she was while gathering mushrooms experienced a painful exception to the rule.

The 60-year-old woman was reported missing on Friday afternoon, after she failed to return home in good time from a mushroom picking outing in the forests of Simo, Finnish Lapland, about 50 kilometers from the Swedish border, the Finnish daily Hufvudstadsbladet reported.

The woman did not answer her phone when police tried to contact her, but officials nevertheless managed to track her phone's signal and correctly identify her location on Monday this week.

Local authorities said that a police dog was used in the search effort, which began on Monday evening and resulted in finding the woman in the dark forest. Police also reported that the woman was taken for treatment and a checkup at the Länsi-Pohja Central Hospital in the town of Kemi.

A subsequent report issued by the police revealed, however, that the event was not as peaceful as initially reported. The dog was found to have barked upon finding the woman to alert officers that the target had been found, as police dogs are trained to do, but then went on to bite the woman badly. According to the police report, the dog had been wearing a muzzle, as protocol demands, but it had fallen off for some reason.

The woman is being treated in the city Oulu for serious injuries, the police reported.

The Finnish police forces have approximately 260 dogs in the care of 240 dog handlers. The German Shepherd (Alsatian) and the Belgian Shepherd (Malinois) are the most widely used breeds of police dog. Certain hunting dogs such as the English Springer Spaniel and the Labrador Retriever have also been given training on special occasions, the Finnish Police University College informs.

The police dogs are trained for multiple tasks: use of force, tracking, search and rescue operations, searching for articles and crime scene searches. The dogs are also trained in one specialty such as sniffing out narcotics, explosives, cadavers or traces of flammable liquids.