Sabi, a black Labrador military working dog with the Australian forces, was recently found 14 months after being declared “missing in action” in Afghanistan. (She’d been separated from her human comrades during an ambush.)

First Muffy – the mongrel who got home from Melbourne after nine years and a journey of hundreds of miles – and now this. There seems to be something special about Australian dogs.

Sabi’s homecoming began when an American soldier saw her with an Afghan man and discovered she understood English commands. We’ve learned recently that dogs can understand up to 250 words, but this shows that they can also remember words after months of not hearing them. Probably, also, Sabi had to learn some new commands while living in her temporary Afghan home. Maybe she wasn’t up to the limit of her vocabulary when she got lost, or maybe she forgot some English words to make room for new ones. Either way, she can now be called bilingual.

Dogs who accompany the troops go through difficult and sometimes tragic experiences, as they search out bombs, drugs, and people. As I learned from this Department of Defense article, dogs can suffer from combat stress. The weather can be rough on them, just as it can on humans. However, once they get used to it, many dogs seem to enjoy deployments. Maybe, as a kennel master in the article says, it’s because in a war zone they get to live in their handlers’ rooms instead of being put in kennels. Everyone knows how important companionship and a sense of belonging are to dogs.

The dogs are there because humans have learned how capable they are – and the story of Sabi shows they may be capable of even more.