There are no ad campaigns to entice soldier dogs to join the military, no jingles about being all the dog you can be. Dogs don’t visit recruiters to weigh the options of civilian versus military life. They have no say about whether they’ll spend their days as couch potatoes or canine combatants.
In the mid-1980s, the Department of Defense started looking toward Europe for dogs. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France sold the U.S. dogs who were essentially castoffs, by-products of the working-dog sports established there for seventy-five to one hundred years or more. Devoted amateurs made it their avocation to breed, rear, and train dogs in police-like work. They would sell their excess dogs to whatever agencies wanted them. This kicked in the demand for more of this kind of dog in Europe, and a market was born.
Soldier dogs are called to serve their country. But their country is unlikely to be their country of origin. If it were, these dogs would serve the military of places like Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although some military dogs are purchased in the U.S., even the bulk of American-bought military dogs originally hail from these parts of Europe. They just happen to be brought back by vendors in the U.S. to be sold here.
The Department of Defense dog program wants to buy American to support American business, so who are these dogs who are so special they have to be imported from Europe? Are they so top-notch that we can’t produce them here? And what about Jake and other average American dogs? Would they have had a stab at being war dogs? Would Jake have passed the stringent testing to become a military working dog, at least back when he was a lad?
I sorted through my questions about soldier dog procurement with Stewart Hilliard, the MWD breeding program manager, who headed dog procurement for years and is still involved in procurement evaluations. “Doc Hilliard,” or “Doc,” as he’s known around here, is a civilian who works at Lackland Air Force Base, set in the dry, rugged terrain on the outskirts of San Antonio. The base is at the center of the military working dog universe. Let’s step inside one of the new buildings here.
To enter, you have to dip the soles of your shoes in a vat of green disinfectant called Roccal-D that looks eerily like the acidic “Dip” from Roger Rabbit. My escort, Gerry Proctor, and I tramped upstairs with slightly damp, smelly shoes.
The “Doc” in Doc Hilliard comes from his PhD in behavioral neuroscience, which he likes to point out “is a fancy term for animal learning.” With a name like Doc, one might expect a short, plump, older, bespectacled man, perhaps with a white fringe of beard. So when a six-foot-four, fit, clean-shaven, brown-haired man walked into the large meeting room, it was a bit surprising.
Doc Hilliard has worked in just about every capacity with big, strong dogs for decades. He began training working dogs in 1980 and went on to specialize in Schutzhund and other dog sports popular in Europe—sports that test dogs for traits like courage, protective instinct, intelligence, and perseverance. These are vital qualities in law-enforcement dogs and military working dogs. Doc made a name for himself in the field and eventually got plucked up by the Military Working Dog Program. He’s been at Lackland since 1997 and has worked in every capacity, from dog behavior evaluator to the director of training for the program. These days, bringing the best dogs for the buck to the U.S. military is his main concern.
About five or six times a year, Doc and a small embassy of veterinarians, vet techs, handlers, and evaluators fly from San Antonio to Europe to buy young dogs they hope will become soldier dogs. During these buy trips, the team visits roughly five dog brokers in Western Europe, primarily in the Netherlands. The team’s goal is to supply hundreds of new working dogs for the Department of Defense annually.
If talking about dogs in terms of brokers sounds impersonal, then the synonymous term vendors is even less warm and fuzzy. But, again, officially these pooches are considered equipment, not soldiers. Vendors buy dogs from breeders in order to sell them to governments and law-enforcement organizations. They develop relationships with breeders, buying hundreds of dogs a year from them, and putting them all up for one-stop shopping for military entities.
Visiting a vendor has been likened to going to a flea market, but other than having dozens or hundreds of items (dogs) in one area, there’s actually little resemblance. The U.S. team isn’t jostling with the military buyers from other countries. On the days Doc Hilliard’s crew goes in to buy, it’s U.S. only. And there is no haggling, no “This dog is worth twice that! You should see what that guy over there from Yemen will give me for him, and don’t get me started on that South African buyer!” Prices are set by strict government purchase rules and regulations. The Department of Defense publishes a requirement, and brokers compete to fulfill the requirement with the lowest possible priced dogs for what the U.S. needs.
No one—not even Doc Hilliard—will officially say how much the dogs cost. The closest Doc will come is “You couldn’t buy a new car with the money, but it’s substantial.” A few sources close to the buying process say when the U.S. buys in bulk, we get dual-purpose (patrol and detection) dogs for somewhere between $3,000 and $4,500. The price adds up when you consider how many dogs we buy each year, but it’s far less than some other countries pay.
The Israeli Defense Forces, for instance, have a reputation for buying the strongest, most resilient dogs available and paying top dollar—upward of $7,000 per standard military dog, and occasionally even double that. Of course, Israel needs far fewer dogs than the U.S. does, so the country can afford to spend more on a dog. But there are plenty of handlers and trainers who wish the U.S. could spend the money needed for superior genetics in order to get dogs who have the ability to better withstand the rigors of war, from their physical robustness to their unflappable mental makeup.
“Compared to the dogs that bring top dollar, our dogs aren’t really the best. The buy teams do whatever they can within the financial limits, and trainers and handlers can make a shit dog into an excellent war dog, but it would be helpful to be able to pay for a better product,” I was told by a longtime MWD trainer.
Doc Hilliard isn’t sure that spending more money is the answer. Training and maturity can take a dog from zero to sixty in no time. “We get a lot of first-class animals. And dogs that don’t look first-class while in training may become awesome working animals in the field with maturity and experience.”
More than one-tenth of the dogs the U.S. buys will end up as washouts, failing to meet the Military Working Dog Program’s physical or behavioral standards. These dogs have problems that weren’t evident during the lengthy testing of the dogs by the dog-buying team. Most of the troubles stem from environmental issues, like fear of loud gunfire and explosions, or the inability to learn necessary basic tasks. Like people, some dogs are just slow learners. “Some are Einsteins, some are rocks,” says veterinarian Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine and military working dog studies at Lackland’s Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital. Since they have only a set amount of time to go through the canine version of basic training, the dogs who take too long to learn aren’t going to make the cut.
Some of the failed dogs become “training aids”—dogs who help students at Lackland’s dog-handler school learn the basics of dog handling. Dogs who aren’t aggressive enough to do both patrol and explosives work can become explosives dogs only and can still deploy. Others can go to local law-enforcement agencies or can be adopted out to the public.
Ten percent isn’t a bad attrition rate compared with what it was just five to six years ago, when more than one-fourth of the dogs bought by the United States would end up washing out. Improved training techniques—with more carrot, less stick—may have a lot to do with the success of these dogs, say those who have been involved with the dog program for the last decade. It makes sense. Would you rather work for someone who gets really nasty when you don’t do something perfectly, or for someone who notices the good stuff and isn’t usually too harsh about the less-than-stellar performances?
Better knowledge of what goes into making a strong military working dog accounts for some of the increase in dog draftees who go on to become soldier dogs. Hilliard and his team spend most of their time at the vendors running tests on the dogs, evaluating everything from general health to the desire to chase a ball, to see if dogs—even those bought on a lean budget—have what it takes.
The nature and nurture of military dogs is complicated because of their breeding and where they come from, to be sure, but it is necessarily diverse because there is such a range of jobs they do. To understand which breeds of dogs get selected for which jobs in the military, it helps to know a little about the range of roles these dogs have. You might think “Seen one military working dog, seen ’em all”—but these dogs are as varied as the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines they work beside.
Just about everything in the military has an acronym, from the sublime (COPPER for Chemoterrorism Operations Policy for Public Emergency) to the ridiculous (POO for Point of Origin; when a dog handler told me about how he had to go back to the POO in order to start his mission, it painted an odd picture). Military working dog jobs are no exception. It is simpler to divide the dogs into some broad categories and then tap into the acronyms.
Single-purpose dogs are used for one purpose only: sniffing out explosives or narcotics (or in the case of combat tracking dogs, humans). They tend to be “sporting” breeds, like Labrador retrievers, golden and Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Viszlas, and various short- and wire-haired pointers. Jack Russell terriers and even small poodles sometimes make appearances.
Single-purpose dogs don’t need to be aggressive. They can be all nose, no bite. Some single-purpose dogs might get naturally protective, but as most handlers of dogs like Labs will attest, they’re more likely to lick you to death. A couple of the jobs (CTDs and MDDs) tend to employ dogs more typically associated with dual-purpose work, like German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and Dutch shepherds.
These dogs are trained to locate either drugs or explosives—never both. You don’t want to have to stand there guessing if Balco M492 is alerting to a stash of heroin or a pressure-plate IED. “When your dog makes an alert, you need to know whether to run away and call the explosives people or whether to go arrest someone,” says Doc Hilliard.
Types of single-purpose dogs and the jobs they do include:
EDD (explosive detector dog)—This is your standard-fare single-purpose dog, used in all branches of the military. The handlers of these dogs are military police who spend months going through dog-handler school at Lackland Air Force Base.
NDD (narcotics detector dog)—Just like the EDD, except this dog detects drugs instead of explosives.
SSD (specialized search dog)—This dog goes a step beyond EDD work. SSD dogs are a special class of dogs trained to work off leash at long distances from a handler in order to find explosives. They work by hand signals and in the marines can also receive commands via radio receivers they wear on their backs. (The air force and the navy don’t have SSDs.) These dogs can also be breeds that are usually reserved as dual-purpose dogs, like German shepherds.
CTD (combat tracker dog)—Explosives dogs and SSDs can detect where IEDs and weapons caches are located, but it’s up to the highly trained CTDs to track down the person who stashed the explosives. This is a marine program only. Although the job is in our single-purpose dog list, combat tracker dogs are more typically dual-purpose dog breeds these days. “Labs were too goofy for the work,” a longtime CTD trainer told me. CTDs generally work on a long retractable leash.
MDD (mine detection dog)—These dogs do slow and steady off-leash searches for buried mines and artillery. This is an army program only. Labs, shepherds, and Malinois are the preferred breeds for this job.
TEDD (tactical explosive detector dog)—Lackland doesn’t procure dogs for the army’s TEDD program. Contractors do, and they generally buy them from U.S. vendors. The program is a temporary one created in response to a request from former general David Petraeus for an influx of special sniffer dogs to help with IED detection. Select infantrymen from deploying units are given short-term training on how to work with these dogs, who are trained by contractors.
IDD (IED detector dog)—As with TEDDs, this is a temporary program created to fulfill the urgent need for bomb dogs. It’s run by the Marine Corps and accounts for the majority of sporting breed dogs in the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Program. The dogs are bought from breeders and vendors around the U.S. by contractors, who train them and the infantrymen who will be their handlers. (The training of IDD handlers and TEDD handlers is far shorter than that of other MWD handlers—many say too short to ensure the safest and most effective dog teams.)
Dual-purpose dogs do both patrol work (protection, aggression when needed) and detection work, along with some basic scouting. Scouting is the ability to track human scent through the air. Dual-purpose dogs are the most common type of dog Hilliard’s team procures for the DOD.
Most dual-purpose dogs are German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, or Dutch shepherds. The shepherds usually hail from Eastern Europe, and the Malinois from the Netherlands and other Western European countries.
The dogs the DOD uses are not usually pedigreed or registered. What the DOD wants is functionality, not pure-breed lines. This can make dogs heartier and less prone to problems. The mixing of breeds is particularly prevalent in the Belgian Malinois.
Want a bigger Malinois? (Malinois have gotten notably larger in recent years.) The breeder won’t hesitate to mingle the Malinois with a Great Dane. Want a stronger dog with more reliable nerves than the more reactive and thin-nerved Malinois? Breed the Malinois to a German shepherd. Doc Hilliard says he’s also seen very distinctive mixes of Malinois with boxer, boxer–pit bull, and boxer–Bouvier, as well.
At times this intermingling can make for dogs who are exactly on the cusp of one dog breed or the other, and it can be hard to tease apart the dog’s background. The difference between calling a dog a Malinois or a German shepherd, for instance, can come down to the type of head the dog has, or the dog’s body angles. A more sloped hind end might be the final arbiter in calling the dog a shepherd.
The list of jobs for these dual-purpose dogs is blissfully short compared with the alphabet soup that makes up their single-purpose counterparts’ job list. Some say it’s best for a dog to have just one job and specialize in it, but most handlers think dual-purpose dogs work just fine.
PEDD (patrol explosive detector dog)—PEDDs are the backbone of the Department of Defense’s war-dog program. The dogs are used by MPs and other law enforcement across all services. In addition to sniffing out bombs and doing patrol work, these dogs have some basic scouting abilities.
PNDD (patrol narcotics detector dog)—These dogs are the drug-sniffing counterparts of PEDDs and are also used in the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines.
Multi-purpose canines are the Cairos of the military. They’re used by Special Operations personnel. MPC is both a category and a job description. In addition to doing everything PEDDs can do, these super-high-drive dogs can be used in parachute or rappel operations. They sometimes wear waterproof tactical vests, night-vision or infrared cameras, and other highly specialized canine equipment. They’re extremely resilient, environmentally sound, and almost unflappable. As Arod says, “They can do all this and pursue a bad guy through a wall of fire and tear you to pieces if they need to.”
The USS Norfolk is a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine reeking of the paint being smoothed onto its surface to keep it black and in stealth mode when deployed. This submarine does serious business.
So why on this hot, sunny July afternoon are people on the dock and on the deck of the sub laughing? “That is hilarious!” chuckles the burly chief of the boat (COB), Senior Chief Machinist Mate Sean Craycraft. Others are smiling and pointing and taking pictures. The source of their mirth? Lars J274, a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier, a wiry seaman, and a master of tight spaces.
“Fear the terriers!” cries a sailor, and everyone laughs some more. Dog handler Navy Master-at-Arms Third Class Cameron Frost hasn’t even had Lars for two weeks, but he’s used to his canine partner drawing this kind of jibe, and he has a ready answer. “I’ve already ordered my Coach bag to carry him in.”
Lars was supposed to be a drug dog, but there was a mix-up at dog school, and he got trained as an explosive detector dog (EDD) instead. That suits him fine. He’s a self-confident, assertive dog with a detectable swagger.
Frost joined the navy because more than anything else in the world he wanted to be a dog handler. From early on in his enlistment he cleaned kennels, fed dogs, did whatever work kennel masters needed done, in order to show how badly he wanted to work with dogs.
Three years later his hard work paid off, and he got to attend the handler course at Lackland Air Force Base. He thrived on the rigors of combat training with German shepherds and Belgian Malinois. When he returned to his home base at the naval weapons station in Yorktown, he was assigned to Rokio L241, a patrol-narcotics German shepherd. They soon deployed to Afghanistan and stayed mostly inside the wire at Bagram Airfield during their deployment. Rokio’s accomplishments consisted mainly of finding drugs coming in with the Afghans working on the base. At the end of the tour, Frost and Rokio returned to the United States and Rokio was assigned to another handler.
Frost was not left without a dog, however. About ten days before I met him at Naval Station Norfolk, he had been assigned Lars, who at age seven is something of a veteran in the world of explosives detection. He has a reputation for an excellent nose and a strong drive to do his job.
But Lars will never deploy. He’s just too small. A wrong step with a boot could prove disastrous for him.
The navy uses Jack Russells to sniff out drugs and explosives in ships and submarines. Originally bred to be ratters, these terriers thrive on squeezing into small places. A number of these energetic little dogs are sprinkled at naval bases throughout the U.S., including Pearl Harbor.
Lars and his small comrades are never trained as patrol dogs. When your shoulders are about one foot off the ground, there’s a limit to how much protection you can offer. But don’t tell this to Lars. He may be small in stature, but he’s big in attitude.
“Lars has ‘little-man syndrome.’ Sometimes he can be a real jerk,” Frost says as he hoists him out of his kennel in a navy police SUV and holds him in the crook of his arm. “Don’t try to take his food bowl unless you have a hose, because he will attack you. Even if you stick your boot toward the kennel, if the bowl is in there he will attack the boot. See all these bite marks on my boot? These are all from Lars.”
Getting Lars’s food bowl out of his kennel requires having a hose handy. Like many of his fellow terriers, Lars does not care for getting wet. Just the sight of the hose is enough to make Lars run to the other side of the kennel while someone grabs the food bowl and closes the kennel door.
But his distaste for water does not extend to water bottles. He is a dog obsessed. Empty bottles, full bottles, crushed-beyond-recognition bottles. If he finds one while searching for explosives, “he’s done until you take it away and he calms down,” explains Frost. He’ll chew it, throw it, drag it, make it make as much noise as possible. Clearly, this is not a good trait in a combat situation, where silence can mean the difference between life and death.
Lars stands out wherever he goes when he’s on duty. He has been on several presidential missions, helping to ensure that no one planted explosives before the commander in chief arrives. He recently spent a week in New York City on duty for the UN General Assembly. He’s the short guy on these missions, Frost says. “There’s German shepherds. There’s Labs. There’s Belgian Malinois. And then there’s Lars.”
It’s clear from the reaction dockside at the USS Norfolk that Jack Russells are not common vessel inspectors. In fact, Craycraft says that in his twenty-one years on subs this is the first time he’s come across a little terrier as a military working dog. The dogs who check for drugs or explosives are usually German shepherds. But shepherds weigh about eighty pounds; you can’t just pass one down the ladder, as you can with Lars. Bigger dogs must be securely harnessed (at Norfolk they use hardy harnesses from K9 Storm, a Canadian company that supplies highly specialized equipment to military and police dogs) and lowered down the twenty to thirty feet by rope. Sometimes, a makeshift pulley system is used. The dogs’ legs are nestled in a sack of sorts so they don’t flail around and hurt themselves.
Perhaps Lars’s greatest achievement to date—he has yet to find a bomb—is that he is saving the backs of countless handlers and sub crews. He does wear a harness, but it’s just his standard-issue gear. During his twenty-foot descent, he appears more like a stuffed toy than a military working dog. Frost stands on top of the submarine and passes him down to a crew member, who is waiting for the dog with outstretched arms, balancing on a narrow rim several feet down. This sort of handoff goes on until Lars reaches the bottom.
I wonder why someone didn’t just take Lars under his arm for the descent, but it quickly becomes evident when I try to go down the ladder.
It is not your standard steep marine ladder. The main ladder of the USS Norfolk is straight up-and-down, shiny steel without even the slightest angle to it. This is my first descent into the belly of a nuclear sub, and I can’t help remembering a cross-country plane trip a few weeks earlier. I sat next to a retired navy submarine engineer who still does contract work for the navy. He told me that back in the day, a bunch of crew members had gone out and gotten snockered. As his pal started down the ladder afterward, he missed a step, or didn’t hang on tight enough, and plummeted thirty feet down to the bottom. His back never recovered.
By the time I get to the bottom, Lars is trotting past officers in quiet meetings and crew members who point and laugh and follow. He is a scruffy pied piper, gathering submariners as he moves jauntily through the sub. Once in the berthing area, Frost and Lars get to work.
Frost, seemingly unfazed by the amusement of his audience, lifts his partner from one stripped bunk to the next. Lars’s nose checks three levels of bunks, plus floor and ceiling. Sometimes Lars shows interest, and Frost releases him and lets him sniff around a bunk on a long leather leash. A few minutes into the exercise, Lars scrambles from Frost’s hands and onto a top bunk. He makes a beeline up the gray-and-white striped mattress to the pillow. After a quick sniff of the pillow, he sits and looks expectantly at Frost. He has found his quarry, an explosive (sans detonator) under a pillow. The onlookers cheer and applaud.
Frost hurls out an enthusiastic and high-pitched, “Good boy, Lars!” and throws a yellow squeaky ball to the top berth. Lars catches it and the tiny quarters fill with squeak squeak as he wags and bites his prize. Down the passageway at their meeting, the officers have to wonder what is going on.
We make our way back to the ladder, and when I next see Lars, he is on the dock, being laughed at by a whole new group of sailors. Frost takes it in stride. “Goes with the territory,” he says and shrugs. Lars jumps his front paws up on Frost’s leg, wags, and stares at him. Frost leans down and scratches Lars behind the ears. “You’re a good boyyyy,” he says in a hushed tone. Frost may not admit it in public, but it’s clear that Lars, small as he is, is growing on him.
Even Lars had to pass a buy team’s muster once upon a time. In order to be considered for any MWD job, dogs undergo careful scrutiny.
The dogs being screened must be between twelve and thirty-six months old (the older ones generally have more training) and need to be in excellent health, with no acute or chronic conditions that would be costly to treat. In addition, buyers evaluate behavior, temperament, and trainability. If anything’s amiss, it’s the equivalent of a human draftee’s flat feet or color blindness.
The testing takes place outdoors and indoors. Indoors is not posh: Depending on the location, it can be a barn, garage, or even a large tent. There needs to be some furniture, like drawers and old couches, but otherwise it’s pretty bare bones.
Since no matter how healthy a dog is or how good he is at basics like being interested in a ball or performing a good bite, if a military working dog is skittish and balky from the get-go, he won’t fare well in the dog program. Bombs and ammo and thin nerves don’t mix, so the first tests given are preliminary environmental stability tests.
Here’s the official Department of Defense standard, from the Statement of Work: Potential Military Working Dogs, 341st Training Squadron:
Testing of the potential detector dog begins with introducing the dog to a complex environment while walked on leash by a DOD handler. Ideally, this environment is unfamiliar to the dog and features a number of intense stimuli that can be used to test the animal’s environmental stability, or “boldness.” Stimuli of interest include tight spaces such as closets and cabinets, slick floors, elevated footing, obstacles, stairs, noisy and startling objects, and groups of people. Any and all such stimuli may be used at the Evaluators’ discretion to assess the stability and “boldness” of dogs presented to DOD for possible purchase. The dog will not be played with or stimulated with a reward object (e.g., Kong or ball) during this testing. To be eligible for DOD purchase, the dog shall behave boldly and fearlessly. If the animal is momentarily fearful, it may still be considered for purchase if it recovers quickly and if it displays sufficient willingness to confront stressful stimuli when coaxed. DOD will not accept dogs that are consistently or severely fearful or shy or retiring; that are noise-sensitive; that are strongly aggressive to handlers or bystanders and other neutral parties; or that refuse to negotiate obstacles such as stairs or slick floors.
It doesn’t sound like it would be too hard to find dogs who fit the bill. Jake would pass this part of the test without a problem. This ninety-pound mellow yellow Lab has nerves of steel. He sleeps through earthquakes, will walk or run on any surface (especially if there’s something delectable to eat or to roll on as a goal), and has never flinched during the very loud fireworks people set off on our nearby beach for the Fourth of July and the Lunar New Year.
The only thing he’s ever been scared of is the Golden Gate Bridge. The vibrations made him pull away once when we were in full tourist mode with some visiting friends. But as soon as I brought out some dog treats, he forgot all about the fact that he was vibrating more than two hundred feet above the cold, unforgiving ocean waters and marched on like the brave and always-hungry soldier he is.
Jake—Passes the environmental stability test with ease.
Medical evaluations come later on the test day, with vet techs drawing blood from candidates who are temperamentally suited to the job, and vets examining the dogs, and sometimes even anesthetizing an occasional dog in order to take X-rays of the hips, elbows, and lumbar spine. (X-rays happen only after a dog has passed all behavioral testing.) Dysplasia and other structural abnormalities have done in many a military working dog, so even though vendors have often already submitted radiographs, vets may want to do their own. Besides a thorough medical check, dogs who will be doing patrol work need to have good teeth and jaws, with all four canine teeth present and in excellent condition. The better to bite bad guys with …
Jake may or may not have passed the physical evaluation. He has no major health issues at all, but he has always been the owner of a set of funky hips. Shortly after we adopted him at six months old, we noticed that he ran like a sack of potatoes whenever at the beach or Golden Gate Park. We eventually had him X-rayed and were told he might have hip issues down the road. We’re nine years down that road, and it’s been an adventure filled with running and jumping and living life to the fullest. So far, he’s OK. So for argument’s sake, we’ll say Jake would pass the medical portion of the test.
Jake—Passes the physical, but will need his hips reexamined quickly if anything becomes a problem.
Next up on test day, all dogs get evaluated for drive in retrieving and detection. For dual-purpose dogs, the team will also look for drive and competence and confidence in biting. It’s now time for dogs to have a ball—and an arm or leg, for dogs who will be patrolling. We’ll move inside the big, drafty barn for this portion.
Most dogs have been taught by breeders to covet a ball or a Kong toy. The majority of dogs have come to love their Kong, even if they weren’t born with a natural drive to obsess over it. Breeders work to boost interest in dogs who would rather just sit outside and stare at butterflies. The reason this is important is because it’s the rubber Kong toy that most trainers and handlers will use as a reward, and in order for a dog to want to do various tasks, he’s going to want to know there’s pay at the end. Pay for a military working dog is a Kong or a ball, or anything the handler lets him bite. And of course, great praise from the handler.
The dogs being tested generally have little to no training in detection work. Detection at this evaluation stage is much simpler than actually seeking out explosives or drugs. It really comes to a dog’s desire to play with a ball and to search for a ball he can’t see. Testers show the dog the ball and then hide it (usually in one of those drawers mentioned earlier) and watch to see how much the dog wants to find it. The evaluators are looking for a dog who wants the ball so much that he’s clearly thinking about it even if he can’t see it, and he’s excited and will search tirelessly and intensively until he locates the ball. You can imagine the energy a dog like this has.
Once the dog has the ball, Doc and the team look at how jealously he guards the ball in order to keep it, and how enduring and vigorous his interest is in playing with the ball. In essence, the dog has to have a passionate desire to have a toy in his mouth and a very strong olfactory search drive in order to pass this part of the test.
“It’s actually an unnatural desire to play with an object. It’s a specially bred mutated form of hunting behavior, selected for by dog breeders over hundreds of years,” according to Doc Hilliard. “Every dog we’re looking for needs to have it.”
Jake—Barely passes the ball test. He loves the ball and will search for it tirelessly, but once he has the ball, he is happy to share it with whoever wants it. Doc says it’s not ideal, but that the possessiveness can be trained into him, at least to an extent. Our now-deceased springer spaniel, Nisha, was completely ball obsessed, and if you tried to take a ball from her, you had to be prepared to do battle.
But it’s hard to judge every dog’s passion for the ball. Sometimes a dog goes to the United States and passes through training, only to fail in advanced training school.
I watched an army dog and his handler, who would be deploying to Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as they tried to work on exercises at the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The dog was listless and didn’t seem to want to do the exercises. The ball didn’t mean much to him when he got it. He’d take it for a few seconds and drop it. Part of it may have been the heat (114 degrees Fahrenheit), but some of the problem was simply that he didn’t care enough about the ball to go through the rigors of this level of training. The man in charge of the course, Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight, said he could tell when he first saw the dog that the dog didn’t care enough about the reward.
“If I made you run three klicks in this heat and told you ‘OK, now do what I tell you and I’ll give you this nice cold water,’ you’d do just about anything for that water at that point. That’s how a strong dog feels about his toy. That’s the passion this dog lacks.” The dog did not end up deploying and is working with his handler on trying to improve his love for his “paycheck.” If that doesn’t work, he will no longer be a soldier dog.
The buy team also makes time to test an innate skill that’s vital to a good sniffer dog: how quickly a dog can learn to associate a ball with a weird odor. It’s the cornerstone of detection training, and once at dog school in the United States, dogs have only sixty days to master detect eight explosives scents, so the team does not want slow learners. How does a dog come to associate a ball with an odor?
Doc or someone on the team gets a dog searching for her ball inside the barn. Suddenly the dog hits this weird-smelling scent she’s probably never encountered before. Testers used to use substances like marijuana or potassium chlorate, but these days they don’t want to expose a dog to narcotics or drugs so early in the game. There’s a chance it could confuse a dog if, for example, she was exposed to marijuana during testing and went on to become an explosives detector. There’s a lot of weed in Afghanistan, and you don’t want an explosives dog alerting to it. This olfactory separation is even more important for narcotics dogs. If a drug dog alerts to that early memory of potassium chlorate, but handlers think she’s found a stash of drugs, it could be a very big problem.
The scent that the team uses for testing could be something as simple as vanilla or licorice, which Doc refers to as “arbitrary odors.” When the dog, who is looking for her ball, hits this new odor, all sorts of things happen. The dog thinks, “I’ve never smelled this before!” and shows a tiny change of behavior, perhaps stopping or wagging or tilting her head. At that moment, someone throws the ball so it lands right on the source of the odor, and the dog is cheered on for her “feat.”
This happens a few more times, placing the odor in various places in the room and having a ball “magically” land on it when the dog successfully sniffs the odor. Many dogs learn extremely rapidly to associate an odor and a ball. The odor becomes a totem for the ball. It’s a Pavlovian process that works wonders. Once they are at dog school, it becomes the way dogs once again begin associating scents with a reward—only the scents at school will be the real deal and not something you’d find in Granny’s pantry.
Dogs who will do patrol work have more testing ahead of them. This is something the breeders and their trainers have worked on extensively. The dogs need to show aggression in response to a decoy (a human posing as a “bad guy”) dressed without obvious bite equipment, and they must show great interest in biting and holding decoys who are wearing bite sleeves. The bites need to be strong and full, and the dog has to hold steady while biting, even if under threat. The type of bite is important. A shallow, weak, or shifting bite (in which the dog does something known as “typewriting”) is not desirable and could be cause for elimination.
The buy team’s goal is to buy sixty to one hundred dogs per visit to Europe; some dogs will go to the TSA’s detector dog program, the rest to the Department of Defense’s dog school at Lackland, for basic training. Once the dogs have been chosen, they tend not to stick around with the vendors for long.
Let’s say the team finishes at the barn site, where members selected several dogs. Often within hours, the dogs are packed up and driven via truck to Frankfurt, where they are taken out of shipping crates, walked, and their crates cleaned. There, they wait for the eleven- or twelve-hour flight to Houston, which they’ll make in the cargo hold of a commercial airliner. Once the dogs land, they’re put in an air-conditioned truck for a three-hour drive to Lackland. They’re met by handlers, veterinarians, and technicians at Lackland’s Medina base kennels. The dogs—who have been on the road for between two and six days, depending on transportation availability—are unloaded and given a cursory exam.
Veterinarians at Lackland occasionally find dogs arriving from overseas to be underweight and to harbor skin, ear, or other infections. It’s surprising, because the buy teams would have seen the dogs from two to six days earlier. The teams tend not to take dogs with these problems, because, as Doc Hilliard says, “we don’t subsidize neglect of dogs.” The problems are treatable, but if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on a dog, you would hope that the dog would have been given adequate kibble and care before arriving.
On a visit to the Medina clinic, one of the many dogs I saw being checked out was Lobo R705. He was a long-haired black shepherd, but you could hardly tell. He had received a buzz cut the previous week in order to get rid of the badly matted fur he arrived with from the vendor in Europe. Under the mats his entire chest had been bright red and inflamed from urine burns. He also had a raging ear infection. A veterinarian prescribed a regimen of antibiotic salves and ear meds. Upon recheck, Lobo’s skin had healed, as had his ears. A staffer congratulated him. “Good job, boy!”
Of course, many of these freshly arrived dogs don’t speak English; that is, they don’t know English commands, so trainers may start saying things like “Bravver hund!” (Good dog!) or “Aus!” (Let go!). Eventually the dogs learn English. The only vestige of their foreign tongue may soon be their name.
Dogs are named by their breeders, so when you’re among military working dogs who hail from the kinds of places these dogs do, it is not surprising to hear names like Patja, Fritz, Pasha, Frenke, Caffu, Biko, Banzi, or Wolka. Or Fenji.
But the most common four dog names across the services, I found out after the Defense Department did a little digging for me, are Rex, Max, Nero, and Rocky. I know of no dogs in civilian life named Rex (or Fido, for that matter), so it’s nice to know that this old-fashioned name, which means “King,” is still being used for these noble dogs.
Not all names are so magisterial, though. In fact, dog program administrators and some handlers who are in the loop seem to think that breeders may sit back and chuckle when they name some of their dogs—dogs who will be at the forefront of the war on terror, being called time and time again by whatever name the breeder assigned them. “I’m pretty sure they’re messing with us sometimes,” says one insider. And a military veterinarian chuckled and shook his head when he told me, “I think they do it on purpose.”
This would account for a brave war dog, Davy, whom we’ve already met. The name wouldn’t be a problem, except, as you may recall, Davy is a girl. So is Bob. The gender switching seems to go the other way around most of the time, though, with big, tough boy dogs getting girly names. To wit: Freida, Kitty, and Judy. “Calling him Freida bothered me,” former handler John Engstrom said. “It was just wrong.”
I’ve heard stories about two male dogs named Kitty in the military. Both had reputations as very aggressive dogs. Remember Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue”? Same syndrome, perhaps.
Then there are the awkward names, including a dog named Bad. Talk about sending mixed messages when calling your dog. And let’s not forget Sid. “Anytime you said Sid, it sat,” Engstrom told me.
It seems that breeders in foreign countries are greatly influenced by American pop culture for kids. Perhaps they even let their children name the dogs. On a list of thousands of military working dog names from the last several years, there are the requisite Sesame Street characters, including Ernie, Bert, Elmo, and Oscar. Disney classic animation characters score big, with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Duey, Louie, Pluto, Goofy, Winnie, Tigger, Baloo, King Louie, Mowgli, Bambi, Beauty, Beast, Belle, Ariel, and Simba. Breeders also borrow from any famous dogs out there, including Snoopy, Benji, Scooby Doo, Toto, and Rin Tin Tin.
Let’s not forget the oddball names. Some are embarrassing, others are just weird. Imagine being downrange in a life-or-death situation and shouting for “Baby Cakes!” “Baby Bear!” “Busty!” or “Moo!” Breeders may have been hungry or thirsty when they named Cheddar, Cherry, Chips, Cider, Coffee, Cookie, Ihop, and Kimchee.
Some names seem to be commentaries on a dog’s personality: Bleak, Calamity, Funny, Grief (RIP: he died in Afghanistan not long ago), Grim, and Icky. Wait a minute. Icky?! Time for a serious, calm chat with one’s commanding officer about just changing this poor dog’s name.
Going to Europe to buy dogs is a necessity, says Doc Hilliard, because there just aren’t enough strong military dog candidates in the United States. Thanks to the long tradition of dog sports like Schutzhund and institutions like the Royal Dutch Police Dog Association, Europeans have a deeply entrenched source of dogs cut out for the types of duties military working dogs perform. “I’d love nothing better than to be able to buy American, but the dogs just aren’t here,” Doc says.
American vendors sell dogs to Lackland in much the same fashion as European vendors do, but because they sell in rather small numbers, the vendors usually go to Lackland with their dogs rather than have a buy team visit. Ironically, most of the dogs the U.S. vendors sell to the Defense Department were purchased in Europe.
The dog program still has a policy of accepting donations from average citizens or breeders. Every now and then, Doc and his people get a phone call from Ma and Pa wanting to donate their German shepherd to protect the U.S. But the odds the dog can pass the tests are astronomically low, he says. The genetics and intensive training just aren’t there. The dog program won’t take a dog in if it can’t use him, so Ma and Pa—if they’ve come all the way to Lackland even after all the warnings about the testing—will likely end up driving home with their dog, who couldn’t meet program standards.
What about shelters? Aren’t they filled with dogs who are available for next to nothing and are highly trainable? The British military has been saving the lives of shelter dogs for years, training them and providing them for its armed forces, according to animal scientist John Bradshaw, who has done extensive work with England’s Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray, near Leicester. (It is roughly the equivalent of Lackland Air Force Base as far as dog procurement and training goes.)
The Defence Animal Centre also relies heavily on public donations of dogs. There’s even a Web site with FAQs for those who want to donate. The Centre is interested in German shepherds, Belgian shepherds, or “gun dog” breeds between the ages of one and three years of age. The intake procedure is relatively easy, and on the Web site there’s even space devoted to reassuring potential donors that their dogs will be in good hands:
If you are considering donating or selling your dog to us, rest assured that your dog will be cared for, stimulated and trained through positive reward-based training, i.e., plenty of ball work, play and focused games.
When you have made the decision to support your country by donating your dog and the dog has passed all the necessary assessments you can rest assured that they are being well cared for. The Defence Animal Centre pledges to endeavour to meet The Five Freedoms:
• Freedom from hunger
• Freedom from pain, injury and disease
• Freedom from fear and distress
• Freedom from physical discomfort
• Freedom to perform most normal forms of behaviour
The U.S. Department of Defense has recently begun making limited experiments obtaining dogs from shelters. But this has not proven successful. In the last year, consignment evaluators have been going to shelters in the San Antonio area and looking at hundreds of dogs. Only one has passed. His name is Lucky, and he’s a Labrador. The program is not encouraged by the high-labor, low-yield results, so don’t expect to see dogs flying out of shelters and into the armed forces in the U.S. anytime soon. Our standards, it seems, are different from those in the UK.
So if we have a desire to procure dogs closer to home but just can’t, are there any other options? Yes, and as it turns out, it’s the reason anyone who enters Hilliard’s building has to dip his or her feet in green disinfectant.
The Defense Department is making its very own Belgian Malinois puppies: Seventy-five were whelped here in 2010, 115 in 2009. The goal is to whelp two hundred puppies a year. About half the puppies won’t make the cut, so once the goal is reached, there will be one hundred fewer dogs to buy overseas.
Why the Malinois? Mostly because they tend to be more durable than German shepherds, who are known for their hip, elbow, and back problems. Plus, according to some trainers I’ve spoken with, it’s because the Malinois don’t let thinking get in their way. They say that a shepherd will often think about what you tell him to do, or about his situation, but a Malinois just acts as he’s trained to. Many prefer this. I don’t know if Rin Tin Tin would applaud this rationale, but there’s no turning back now. The program has been in place since 1998, at first as an experimental one and now as a full-fledged program, run by Doc Hilliard himself.
We head downstairs from our meeting place to go see the puppies. To get access, we have to dip our soles at another disinfectant station. I’m not allowed to stop in at the whelping kennels to see the newest litter, because I spent the morning in the company of other dogs, and I could end up carrying disease to the vulnerable pups. But I do get to visit a batch of seven-week-old puppies from the pairing of a Netherlands stud named Robbie—who has sired some serious champion working dogs—and a bitch named Heska. Hilliard bought Heska overseas and bred her to Robbie while in the Netherlands. She came to Lackland to be monitored through her pregnancy and have her puppies on U.S. soil.
Her pups are fawn-colored, with downy fur and dark brown/black faces that look up from their exercise pen with a plaintive “Pick me up, please!” expression. Some still have a floppy ear or two, but for the most part, their ears have become upright. They’re from the A litter, so every pup’s name will start with the letter A. To distinguish puppy-program dogs from other MWDs, all dogs from the puppy program are given double letters to start their name. So this litter is made up of dogs with names like Aangus, Aatlas, and Aalice.
Aalice has caught my eye. She is still floppy-eared, and she appears extremely social, making eye contact and standing with paws propped on the enclosure to get my attention. But since I’ve been with other dogs earlier in the day, I can’t hold her. The pups are still not fully immunized, and it wouldn’t be safe.
So Doc Hilliard picks her up instead, and she snuggles right into his arms, and then uses his arms as a place to prop her paw, and starts licking his neck and then up to his jaw and cheek. It’s hard for him to carry on the conversation while Aalice is slathering him with such adulation, so he passes her to a staffer who’s more than happy to take her off his hands.
Puppies in the puppy program leave Lackland pretty early in life. They’re with their mom for several weeks, and then they get placed in foster homes until they’re seven months old, when they return to Lackland and go through a sort of puppy preschool to see which ones may have what it takes to become a military working dog.
Ask anyone who has fostered a Malinois puppy, and they’ll tell you two things:
1. It’s a great way to be an intimate part of helping the military working dog world.
2. Hide your shoes, socks, slippers, and furniture.
There’s a reason these pups are nicknamed “malligators.” They are all mouth and teeth. Arod has fostered three. “They ate our entire home,” he says. He and his family ended up adopting the last one, Ttrina, after she didn’t make the cut as a military working dog. Despite her propensity to malligator herself around the house, they took her in because they’d grown attached to her—teeth and all.
The puppy program is always looking for foster homes. To qualify, volunteers have to live within three hours of San Antonio so they can drive back for monthly appointments. A fenced yard is ideal. Fosters have to disclose how many other pets they have and what kind. “If you have five cats, we need to know that,” says David Garcia, dog program foster consultant. “We’ll find you a low-drive dog that will be a better fit.”
Foster homes aren’t expected to do formal training. That’s what dog school is for. But they do help a puppy become comfortable with various environments and stimuli, such as busy streets, stairs, loud vacuums, and crowds. Fosters can also work on increasing a dog’s desire to find a toy or a training treat; this is good for future training, when finding objects is a dog’s core mission.
When I met with Garcia, he was in a slight panic. He needed to find twelve homes for the A litter (Aalice and her brothers and sisters) within two weeks. It wasn’t looking good. The program had just expanded the distance limits for foster homes in order to include Austin residents, but word hadn’t gotten out yet. Garcia was going to be calling some previous repeat fosters and was planning on attending a puppy expo as well.
“Once you see them and know them, they’re pretty hard to resist,” he says. He adds that it’s not that hard to puppy-proof a home. And he talks about how gratifying it can be to raise a puppy who will go on to save the lives of servicemen and -women. “It’s not every day you get to raise a future hero.”
Doc and his staff are investing heavily in making the puppy program a success. They’ve bought some frozen sperm from sought-after studs and also brought back a male named Arnold, who they hope will father some great pups. When Hilliard and staff go to Europe on future trips, he says they’ll be looking for some “interesting” dogs for breeding.
They recently purchased a female Malinois puppy named Boudin, whose dad is Robbie (Aalice’s father) and mom is Kyra (pronounced Keera). The pairing of Robbie and Kyra has produced some very successful working dogs in Europe. Doc wants the Military Working Dog Program to have some of this bloodline, some of these champion genetics, so the puppy program bought Boudin and a full brother named Bruno. Both are registered pedigree dogs. (They will not be paired, for obvious reasons.)
As a rule, Doc doesn’t like to get registered pedigree Malinois, because he thinks they don’t deal with stress as well as non-pedigreed dogs and because they tend to be smaller and less robust, more susceptible to stress. But these dogs are different, he hopes. I spent a few hours one afternoon with eight-week-old Boudin at her brand-new foster home near Lackland, with her foster dad, Air Force Technical Sergeant Joe Null. Despite her crazy puppy energy and frequent and high-pitched barking, she looks like she has the makings of an excellent dog: She’s strong, has a committed bite when playing with a tug toy, and doesn’t give up when hunting for a Kong.
But there’s more to becoming a military working dog than getting bred or drafted. That’s the easy part. Making it through the rigors of dog school is another matter altogether. Some dogs might decide to be draft dodgers if they knew what was up next.
Veterinarian Ronnie Nye, a retired army lieutenant colonel, has an easygoing, friendly manner that would put most human patients at ease if he were an MD. But Fred, a Netherlands-born German shorthaired pointer, looks like he would rather be somewhere else. His stub of a tail stays tucked down even as Nye strokes him and tells him with a confident, knowing smile that it’s going to be all right.
After an injection of a cocktail of sedatives, Fred appears a little drunk and within a couple of minutes slumps into the waiting arms of a vet assistant, who helps steady him onto the stainless-steel operating table. When Fred is completely out, assistants turn him onto his back, withdraw some urine from his bladder via a needle and syringe, put an endotracheal tube down his throat for anesthesia, and secure his paws to the table with ties. His floppy ears, splayed out on the steel, make an easy surface for the vet tech, who spends about twenty minutes tattooing his assigned number (R739) on the underside of his left ear. As her tattoo pen buzzes away, Nye shaves the dog’s stomach, vacuums the loose fur off the dog, isolates the incision area with blue surgical drapes, and poises a scalpel over Fred’s bare belly….
Won’t hurt a bit.
The world’s largest dog school—aka the Department of Defense Military Working Dog School, 341st Training Squadron—lies on a flat, featureless chunk of land on the outskirts of San Antonio, at Lackland Air Force Base. Sprawled out on nearly seven thousand arid acres, Lackland is a place for newcomers. Each year, thirty-five thousand air force recruits come here for basic training.
Also among Lackland’s newcomers every year are the 340 relatively young dogs who will be trained as military working dogs and the 460 two-legged students who come through Lackland to learn the basics of dog handling.
The boot camp program where trainers build military working dogs from the ground up is referred to as dog school. The program that teaches handler skills is called the handler course. Pretty much all soldier dogs and handlers across the military are trained here. (The exceptions are Special Operations dogs and dogs for the IDD and TEDD programs, which are dedicated to a faster turnaround time for certain explosives detector dogs. These dogs are trained by contractors.)
Dogs who are selected to go the dual-purpose route—and that’s the vast majority of the dogs—will have a total of 120 days to learn all the skills necessary to certify in explosives or narcotics detection as well as patrol work. Single-purpose detection-only dogs do it in about 90. Contrary to what many on the outside think, with the exception of a couple of smaller programs (combat tracking dogs and specialized search dogs), dogs are not matched up with handlers at Lackland; they’re assigned to handlers once they’re shipped to the bases that request them.
But before the dogs can even start to get the rigorous training they need in order to one day become soldier dogs, they have to go through a rather grueling initial time at Lackland—one that may make boot camp for their two-legged friends look like a walk in the park.
Every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine must go through some form of induction when entering the military. A haircut, health exams, reams of paperwork—all the less glamorous aspects of serving one’s country need to be taken care of before getting down to the business of boot camp.
Soldier dogs go through a more rigorous induction process, including time on the operating table. The road to becoming a military working dog entails being poked, prodded, cut open, sealed shut, and wearing a bucket around your head for a few days.
After a ten-day quarantine, during which they’re visually evaluated every two hours, the dogs get physicals, blood work, vaccinations, and flea and heartworm treatments. The rest of a dog’s induction is done under full anesthesia. Female dogs get spayed, males with undescended testicles get neutered. (The U.S. has one of the few militaries that will purchase these “cryptorchid” dogs.) But otherwise males generally remain intact. The thinking is that these dogs are more aggressive and primed for action with those hormones coursing through their bodies. Also on the list of induction events: Both sexes get their tattoo number inked into the inside of their left ear while anesthetized.
And these days, every dog over thirty-five pounds also undergoes a potentially lifesaving surgery called a gastropexy. The surgery will prevent a syndrome known as bloat from becoming fatal. Not long ago, 9 percent of U.S. military working dog losses resulted from complications of bloat. That number has dropped to zero since all large dogs started getting “pexied,” as it’s called in soldier dog circles.
Bloat, aka gastric dilation-volvulus, is a dangerous condition that mainly affects large, deep-chested dogs—precisely the kind the military favors. Bloat occurs when the stomach becomes overdistended with gas for any of a variety of reasons—not all known. This alone can be deadly, since it can cut off normal circulation when the enlarged stomach presses against major veins. Respiration can also be affected, since the stomach is pressing against the lungs. If you ever ate way too much in one sitting and found it hard to take a good breath, you’ll have a feel for what the beginning of that phase of bloat can feel like.
But it’s when the stomach twists at both ends (at the top the esophagus and at the bottom the pyloric valve) that bloat becomes especially lethal. Gas in the stomach can no longer escape either way, and circulation is severely impaired, leaving irreversible cell damage. Shock and cardiac arrest can occur within hours without emergency treatment.
On a visit to Lackland’s brand-new Medina Military Working Dog Clinic—so new you can still smell the happy scent of paint over the scent of dog—I watch Nye operate on his reluctant patient. He has done at least four hundred of these surgeries in the last few years. Fred may not realize it, but he is in good hands.
As Michael Jackson’s “Ben” cuts through the static of the radio that’s propped up on a shelf, Nye makes the incision. It’s only about three inches long. The surgery will take no more than an hour, and in the end, Fred’s stomach will be sutured to his ventral abdominal wall. His chances of dying of bloat will have been virtually eliminated.
Nye stitches Fred’s abdomen, the dog’s paws are unstrapped, tubes are withdrawn, and Fred is taken back to a recovery kennel. He will be checked frequently to make sure the Rimadyl and opiates he’s getting are keeping the pain at bay and that the incision is healing well.
To keep Fred’s mouth and teeth from exploring the surgery site, and to prevent his back paws from scratching at his fresh tattoo, Fred will wear a bucket over his head for the next several days. It’s an old, scratched-up, dark blue plastic bucket with the bottom cut out, and it’s fitted with ties that secure it to his collar so he won’t be able to get it off. Not exactly the traditional “Elizabethan” collar civilian dogs wear after surgical procedures, but Fred doesn’t mind.
Air Force Staff Sergeant Richard Crotty was stationed in Iraq when he got in touch with me. He wanted to relate this story of his first working dog, Ben B190, a German shepherd.
For seven months in 2006 Crotty and Ben served at the Eskan Village Air Base in Saudi Arabia, with the Sixty-fourth Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron. Their main duties were to search vehicles, conduct foot patrols, and participate in random antiterrorism exercises in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They lived the life of expats, in a villa on base where they could have Chinese food or pizza delivered. Ben spent most nights on Crotty’s bed. It was the good life for the pair, who preferred being together nearly 24/7 to life in the States, where dogs have to spend most of their days and nights in kennels.
They returned to Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico in August 2006, and Ben’s nights were once again spent in kennels. Crotty missed the camaraderie of those days and nights in Saudi Arabia, but he knew there was nothing he could do to keep his dog with him Stateside. On the night of January 7, 2007, Crotty went to say good night to Ben in his kennel and found Ben lying on his side—something the dog never did. When Crotty went to pet him, Ben urinated. Crotty noticed that the dog’s stomach was rock hard—a sign he could have bloat. Ben had not had prophylactic gastropexy. Most male dogs back then hadn’t.
With no time to lose, Crotty picked Ben up, put him in a patrol truck, and raced to the vet, sirens blaring. The immediate diagnosis called for emergency surgery. As he looked down at his dog on the operating table, Crotty’s eyes were so filled with tears that “I could not see him as I was looking down. It was like it was my child. When the vet finally cut him open, the floor turned completely red.”
It was too much. Crotty left the operating room. “When my kennel master came out of the operating room, he just shook his head. I lost it right there. My best friend for the last two years was gone.”
In the end, the cause of Ben’s fatal condition was not bloat. The vet had found inflammation of many organs, which had caused internal bleeding. Crotty was never told the reason for Ben’s death, and he’s not sure the veterinarian ever figured it out.
Students enrolled in the handler course at Lackland have paid their dues typically for months, but sometimes years, helping around kennels at their bases, cleaning poop, working the dogs, assisting handlers with their duties, and generally proving to their field commanders and kennel masters that they are devoted.
Nearly all students in the handler course are military police. They’ve had to go through some intensive training in order to get to become MPs (or MAs—masters-at-arms—in the navy, or security forces in the air force). But little can prepare them for one of their first exercises:
Pretending that an old .40-caliber metal ammo can is actually a dog.
For three days or so.
In front of all their classmates and anyone else who walks by.
These cans are referred to as buckets—not to be confused with the bucket that Fred had to wear over his head. The buckets were once used to safely transport ammunition, but now, through the magic of the imagination, and the embarrassment of the majority of the students in the class, they have been transformed into dogs.
The buckets are shaped sort of like extra tall shoe boxes and are usually olive or khaki colored. They have two handles at the top and sometimes writing or lettering on the side. They look nothing whatsoever like dogs.
But that’s the whole point. Just as medical students don’t start out operating on living humans, handler students don’t begin their training with a real live dog. It’s too risky for the dogs and the students.
The real dogs the handlers train with aren’t actually military working dogs, either. These dogs are “training aids.” They live at Lackland and are assigned to handler classes throughout the year. Most training-aid dogs are here because they didn’t quite cut it as working military dogs. Some washed out of dog school but are perfectly good as canine partners at the school. Others may have already served overseas or at their home bases but, for health or behavioral reasons, cannot work as fully functioning working dogs in the field. Even though they’re not deployable, they’re valuable assets to the military, and the dog program doesn’t want any green handlers messing them up.
By the time they meet their buckets, the students have already gone through a few days of classroom work. These are small, intimate groupings, with twelve students maximum per class. They get plenty of hands-on time with three stuffed German shepherd toy dogs, learning the very basics, like how to put choke collars on them the right way, how to talk to them, and some basic commands. The dogs, though, are stuck in the sitting position, get knocked down easily, and get dirty far too quickly for anything more than classroom training. Since function is far more important than form around here, the buckets are dragged out for the next step in training handlers.
Handlers name their buckets to make these exercises more realistic. Brandon Liebert, the former marine dog handler we met earlier in the book, called his bucket Cananine (pronounced Can-a-nine) because it was a can and it had a 9 spray-painted on the side. “It helped make it a little more believable that this was a dog,” he says.
The idea is to do with the buckets just about everything handlers would normally do in the beginning stages of working with a canine training aid. Students have to tell the buckets to sit and lie down; they put two collars on their bucket’s handles, making sure they have the choke chain going in the right direction and learning how to change from a dual collar to just a choke. They learn to keep proper safety distance from other students’ buckets. They even do drill movements (for those not in the military, that’s the “left face” business)—no easy feat with a bucket, or a dog.
One of the first things students are taught when working with these military working buckets is how to offer praise. Genuine, heartfelt praise is essential to building a bond between dog and handler. In the working world of these dogs, you don’t just say “Good boy!” in a slightly enthusiastic tone. You go crazy for the great deed the dog has done. Your voice goes up at least an octave, often more, just about as high as you can get it and not sound squeaky. You talk fast, and the vowels of your words are pulled longer, and sometimes you’re not even understandable, and you’re so enthusiastic that if you had a tail it would be wagging like mad. Many experienced handlers even throw in a “Woooo!” At Lackland, the trainers of new MWDs often add an exuberant “Yeeeehawwwww, hoooo dogggyyyyyyy!” in cowboy fashion. And for extra emphasis, on occasion, “Touchdown Texas!”
When in the presence of handlers and trainers working their dogs—as opposed to buckets—you’ll sometimes hear what sounds like the most enthusiastic praise, but then you realize that the words are all wrong. The tone is thrilled, but instead of words like “What a good boyyyy! Great fiiiiiiiiiiind!” they go something to the effect of “Oh my goddddd! How come you took so long to find that, you little dummy?!” It’s a handler’s way of expressing a little frustration while the dog remains encouraged about his efforts.
Talking to a real dog with such gusto can take some getting used to. Praising a bucket in such a fashion makes for a real challenge.
“A lot of students get embarrassed. They get red-faced. Some get real quiet, even if they didn’t start out that way,” says Air Force Technical Sergeant Justin Marshall, instructor supervisor at Lackland. “We let them know that every single canine handler out there right now has gone through this. That seems to help a little.”
And heaven forbid a bucket gets loose. Someone yells out “loose dog,” and everyone who hears it has to repeat it so everyone else can know what exactly is going on. Handlers who have a bucket on leash have to choke up (grab as close to the leash clasp as possible) on the leash. If the leashed bucket were a real dog, the handlers would then have to put their dog’s face in their crotch area so the dog wouldn’t see the loose dog coming, and therefore would likely not react aggressively. (Military working dogs are often aggressive with each other, and fights can break out in an instant. Practicing these maneuvers with buckets is best for everyone’s sake.)
Bucket training goes on until the students all seem to have a firm grasp of techniques. It usually takes two or three days. At the end, there’s a friendly competition in which students try to make the fewest mistakes in handling their buckets. The prize is a good one: The winner gets to choose which real dog he will be working with for the detection portion of the handler course. Other students can decide on their dogs based on how they ranked in the game, but sometimes instructors match students with dogs themselves, especially if they feel a student will do better with a certain type of dog personality. (A timid handler and an extra-bold, assertive dog may not make the best pairing, for instance.)
The buckets are stored away for the next class, and the bucket graduates head to the kennels to get their dogs. Most students are thrilled to finally be working with a flesh-and-blood dog. But for a few—usually those who had little experience with dogs before—it can be daunting. “Some just get scared when they get to the kennel and have to get the dog out. They feel overwhelmed, especially if the dog is really excited,” says Marshall. Buckets don’t spin in mad circles, and they don’t accidentally bite you or bark until your eardrums throb. The energy of these dogs can prove too much for these students, and they turn in their leash shortly after being introduced to their dog.
For the most part, the dogs who work as training aids are old hands at this. They’ve done this before, sometimes many times before, and some almost seem to try to help students get through the training: “C’mon, just follow me, and I’ll find the explosive and I’ll make you look good, pal. Then you praise me up and give me my Kong and we’ll be square.”
For the remainder of the handler course, the dogs will help their students learn the basics of dog handling. Collars will inevitably be pulled too tight, commands won’t be clear, students will balk or move the wrong way when doing bite training, but the dogs persevere. They’re happy to be out of their kennels and working. They relish a handler’s enthusiasm and praise, and the Kong or ball they get whenever there’s a job well done, and the daily, long grooming/bonding sessions from their temporary assignment.
Most students make it through the eleven-week program. By graduation, a couple of students may already have the makings of scars from when a body part was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seasoned handlers usually have several, all with good stories attached.
Graduation is held in a large fluorescently lit auditorium with mustard-colored walls. On the walls are photographs of handlers who died in the line of duty—a somber reminder of the reality of the noble profession they are entering. It doesn’t stop the high fives and cheering of the small band of green handlers who are about to embark on a career with a built-in best friend.
It takes about five weeks longer to create a standard-issue dual-purpose military working dog than it does to graduate a handler. During this time, dog school instructors teach dogs fundamental obedience, detection, and patrol work. In the end, the dog will have a set of basic skills that can be built upon when he is assigned to a home base, where the dog will expand on the previous training.
Air Force Technical Sergeant Jason Barken, a master trainer and training team leader at Lackland, likens dog school to an assembly line. With eighteen to twenty-two dogs per team of trainers, and nine or ten teams of trainers at a time, some two hundred dogs can be going through training here, albeit at different stages of dog school. They’re staggered so not all dogs end up in one place at one time.
Each team is made up of five to seven trainers, including a “red patch,” or training supervisor. The red patches wear a red triangular-shaped patch on their tan overalls, which distinguishes them from all the other trainers wearing tan overalls on the team. When a team gets a trailer of dogs, they divvy them up. So for a typical trailer of eighteen dogs and a six-trainer team that will teach them the ropes, each trainer ends up with three.
While many dogs will already have some familiarity with bite training because the Department of Defense won’t buy them if they don’t have a decent bite, many don’t know even the most elemental obedience. Most don’t even know the command for “sit” or “lie down.” And if they do, it may well be in Dutch or German.
Dogs go through detection training first. They’ll learn eight explosives scents here (or a variety of narcotic scents), starting out in much the same fashion they did when they were chosen for this work from the vendors. Only this time instead of vanilla or licorice, trainers use real commercial explosives.
A dog may have a slight change of behavior when he smells a new scent like potassium chlorate—kind of like a “Whoa, that was weird! Let me give that an extra sniff” reaction. It can be very subtle. Sometimes it’s just a little extra time spent on a scent. When the dog has clearly detected the odor, a trainer “pays on sniff” by throwing a Kong over the dog’s head so it lands on the scent. It seems to the dog like it’s not the trainer who pays him, but the scent.
That dogs can believe the scent of potassium chlorate magically creates a bouncing Kong is just one of those things that makes them lovable. The trainer doing the high-pitched happy cheerleading for the dog’s deed might seem a little odd to the dog at first. One wonders if the dog thinks the handler is just as happy to see the Kong appear from the explosive as the dog himself is.
The reason for the ball coming from the odor and not from a trainer at this early stage is that the dog shouldn’t always be looking to the trainer to see if he’s on the right track. A dog can’t have this kind of dependence in theater, since handlers have no idea where IEDs may be. Looking for approval or reward in a wartime situation can lead to a dog stepping onto an IED instead of detecting it first.
After a while, when a dog detects the scent, he’ll stare at it, which of course leads to the reward. Trainers then introduce the “sit” command when a dog sniffs an odor, because it’s important that dogs don’t keep wandering around once they’ve detected something, and because sitting makes it clear that the dog isn’t just staring at a passing beetle. The technique where a dog sits and stares at an odor is known as deferred final response. Some dogs may lie down instead if the odor source is low or it’s under something like a car.
Once a dog learns the technique for one scent, other scents can be fairly quick to follow. It’s as if a lightbulb goes off: “Ah, here’s a new, weird, unnatural, potent scent. Let’s see if a Kong comes out of it!” After a while, the Kong doesn’t even have to be used in this manner anymore, but it’s inevitably part of the reward. The scents that dogs learn to detect at the 341st are just the start of a bouquet of narcotic or explosives scents they’ll be able to uncover. Many more will be added as they continue their training at their home bases and beyond.
The detection portion of dog school takes about sixty days. In order to certify as a detection dog, drug dogs need to have 90 percent accuracy. Explosives dogs must have 95 percent, missing a maximum of one out of the twenty aids.
Then it’s on to the patrol section of schooling. This starts with basic obedience, then ramps up to an obstacle course, with tunnels, a jump, stairs, and other structures similar to what dogs might encounter during a mission. Labradors and other dogs destined for a single-purpose career stop training here.
The shepherds and Malinois move on to the next phase of the dog school syllabus: the bite. Most dual-purpose dogs these days seldom need to use their bite skills in real life. But the deterrent factor may be part of the reason the dogs so rarely have to go into bite mode. Most people will back off when they see these dogs, or when the barking begins.
The dual-purpose dogs the Department of Defense purchases are already trained to bite, so the bite work is finessed and taken to the next level at Lackland. The dogs generally know how to run and attack a decoy’s arm that’s protected by a bite sleeve. It is deeply satisfying for a dog to chomp into it; in fact, the bite is the reward—no Kong needed.
But what about stopping someone who’s running away? The dogs here work on an exercise called a field interview, where the handler is questioning a “bad guy,” maybe frisking him. The decoy in this scenario is often clad in full-body protective gear, known affectionately as a marshmallow suit. It makes him look rather like the Michelin Man wearing a dark-colored coverall with thick fabric. The wearer’s head is usually the only part that’s not protected.
The dog stands guard. The person bolts. The handler shouts for him to stop, but he doesn’t. Meanwhile the dog is completely at attention, ears forward, body stiff, tail rigid, eyes focused. The decoy is like a giant rabbit, and to a dog with a strong prey, hunt, or play drive, it’s one of the most fun games there is.
(In case you ever get apprehended by a MWD or any law-enforcement canine, you might like to note that these dogs tend to bite the part of you that’s moving the most. When you’re sprawled out on the ground after a dog knocks you down, consider waving a white flag. And don’t think about playing dead. The dog will liven you up very quickly.)
“Git him!” the trainer exhorts. Music to a dog’s ears. The dog gallops to his quarry and grabs whatever body part is convenient. The force often knocks down the decoy. Whether the decoy remains standing or gets sent to the ground, a well-trained dog will bite and hang on until the trainer calls him off. Most dogs don’t want to give up the bite. Some release immediately, others grab and shake until more firmly commanded—or even physically pried off. With more training, the release comes more quickly.
And what happens if, during the initial pursuit, the “bad guy” gives up and stops running? The dog needs to be able to stop in his tracks and resist every urge to finish the pursuit and bite the crap out of him until told to stop. This is called a standoff. The handler or trainer yells, “Out,” very loudly, and the dog is supposed to stop in his tracks and stand guard next to the suspect. The dog learns how to escort the suspect away, heeling close at his side. If the person makes a move to escape, the dog can grab him if the handler doesn’t get to him first.
I’ve watched this type of dramatic exercise at a few different military bases, with the big padded man or woman flouting the law and running away. It made me wonder if dogs think that all bad guys are obese. The message seems to be “Great big person runs away, I get to bite.” I’ve been assured that this isn’t the case. It’s the chase that kicks in a dog’s instincts, not the size of the person. In fact, as a dog gets more advanced, there’s special protective gear that’s a lot less bulky than the marshmallow suit. It doesn’t protect as well, so it’s not used that much. But it helps make the scenario more realistic.
My question about bite-protection gear wasn’t entirely unfounded, as it turned out. Over lunch at Chili’s, Air Force Technical Sergeant Joe Null, the noncommissioned officer in charge of military working dog logistics, told me that there are some dogs who are so used to an obvious padded target—like a bite sleeve or full-body gear—that they’re flummoxed when these are absent.
He pointed me to a grainy video on YouTube that shows what appears to be a real-life situation, taken from a helicopter camera that doesn’t have the world’s best zoom, of a police dog chasing a suspect. But as the dog gets ready to take down the man, you can see by the dog’s body language that he’s a little confused. Null says the dog is wondering, “Where’s the bite sleeve? Where’s the padding?” He passes the man by, slows his pace, and for the remainder of the short video, man and dog weave around each other along the road, the dog now looking like he’s merrily cantering around—no longer an aggressor but more a happy cartoon character. When the music shifts from a dramatic chase riff to the Looney Tunes theme, it fits perfectly.
“The moral for handlers,” says Null. “Don’t let this happen to you.”
But it’s easy to see why some dogs are motivated by the sight and scent of a good bite sleeve—a big, thick, almost castlike arm protector. Everywhere I went at Lackland’s patrol area, dogs with heads held high and tails wagging hard paraded around with what looked like giant, stiff arms. After certain types of exercises—like finding a bad guy behind a closed door in a barren building with many doors—dogs would get the sleeve as a reward for about a minute, and they’d beam as they toted around the biggest and most outlandish “bones” ever. It’s no wonder the dog in the video was holding out for his. (Another theory about that dog is that he didn’t want to hurt the man. He probably learned that handlers are not happy when you bite into a body part that’s not protected.)
What starts as a fun game propelled by a dog’s play, prey, and hunt drives develops over months and even years into a drive to defend and protect. “The goal is to develop the ultimate working dog that will defend itself and its pack members under any condition,” Arod says. If a handler is wounded and unable to speak, the dog won’t just stand there waiting for the command. He’ll go into full protection mode.
The trainers at Lackland plant the seeds of this drive. They teach a dog to attack when the “bad guy” starts fighting, or even when a suspect raises his arm while being questioned in a mock field interview.
Not all dogs will make it through this part of dog school. Patrol is not for everyone. Just as Ferdinand the fictional bull preferred to just sit and sniff the flowers, some tough-looking military working dogs really don’t want to attack people. There are softies in the dog world, and no matter what you do, they’re not going to be reliable aggressors. “They just want to be your friend,” says Null.
The military knows this, which is why dogs certify in detection work first. These dogs can be perfectly good sniffer dogs, and they have the bonus feature of looking like they could eat you for lunch, even if they’d rather just come over for a good ear rub.
I’ve been watching bite-training work at Lackland for much of the morning when I meet up with Navy Master-at-Arms First Class Ekali Brooks. He’s training new students at the handler course on the basics of “catching” a dog.
When you catch a dog, the dog—generally a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois—careens toward you at top speed, intent on biting into the part of your body that’s easiest to access and that’s moving the most. This can be rather dangerous, so you wear a bite sleeve. If you catch a dog right, you won’t be hurt. Mess up, and you might know what a few hundred psi of dog bite feels like.
Brooks explains that as the dog runs at you, the sleeve needs to be a few inches away from your body so there’s a cushion when the impact occurs. More experienced handlers and trainers can be running away from the dog and turn at the last second for the dog to bite into the sleeve. New students just stand there facing the dog, knees bent, ready to absorb the impact. In either case, as the dog runs toward you, you want to agitate the sleeve, shaking your arm so the dog is attracted to the sleeve and not to any of the many unprotected parts of the body.
As I watch dogs fly by on the field of dry grass on this scorching Texas summer day, I realize a lot of things can go wrong if you don’t do this decoy business right. (Brooks tells me that “decoy” is a more appropriate term for what I’d been calling the “dog catcher” or once even, carelessly, the “victim.”) Besides the scars so many handlers and trainers bear, Brooks says these men and women are notorious for having shoulder problems.
Then he asks someone nearby a question: “You want to catch a dog?”
I look around for the decoy candidate he’s talking to, but there’s no one else close enough to hear that question.
“You want to try it?”
Oh God, the man is looking at me. And he’s smiling in that benevolent “here is a gift I know you will love” kind of way. How can I say no?
“Sure, that’d be great!” Suddenly the hot day feels much warmer.
Brooks calls over a husky student wearing army camouflage and asks for his sleeve. It looks like the arm of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, only with a jute fiber cover over hard plastic. It’s a Gappay brand—one of the best, Arod would later tell me—and starts at the shoulder, bends ninety degrees at the elbow, and ends well past the hand, which is sealed off in case of overly enthusiastic dogs.
Brooks hands it to me, and I try not to notice that there’s blood on the outside. The jute should be a nice haylike color. And it mostly is. But there’s one area that’s the color and demeanor of the piece of absorbent material that’s on the bottom of a package of hamburger meat. I didn’t want to ask what happened. Better not to know right now.
(I later learn that the blood is from the friction of a dog’s gums against the jute, not from a handler mishap. It’s uncommon that a dog bites in such a way that the gums scrape and bleed, but the sleeve I was wearing was pretty tattered and had clearly caught hundreds of dogs, and rubbed at least one dog’s gums the wrong way.)
I slip my arm into the thing. Inside there’s foam cushioning and a bar of protective steel running the length of it. The cushioning has a sticky, grungy, spongy wetness from the sweat of the handlers who’ve been practicing this morning. Outside, the jute is shredded and damp from the saliva of dogs with great big canine teeth and an even bigger prey drive. The dog I’m about to catch—a smaller, older Belgian Malinois named Laika H267—eyes me and my giant arm from afar. She looks like she wants a piece of me. I tuck away any thoughts of arms as hamburger meat and get my instructions from Brooks.
He is confident and calm in manner and has done this for years. He has an enthusiasm about working with dogs that’s conveniently contagious. “They actually pay us to work with dogs like this! There aren’t too many people who like what they do, and I love what I do. It doesn’t get any better than working with these dogs.”
My arm is in good hands.
I’m positioned, knees slightly bent, arm a few inches from torso. Bring on the Malinois!
Then I remember the missing ear.
It’s earlier that same morning, around 6:30 A.M., not too warm just yet for the birds in a pleasant grove of trees to pack up their songs for the day. Shade is a precious commodity at Lackland, and about ten new handler course students are starting their day under the trees, bonding with the dogs. They’ve been assigned these dogs for a few weeks now, and some are really getting attached.
The students smooth their hands down their dogs’ coats repeatedly, and they talk to them. It’s a practice called rapport work. The touch and closeness helps establish the students as people the dogs should care about. And it helps the students get to know their dogs as well. Some dogs don’t even seem to notice all the attention and spend the time barking at another dog or running back and forth as far as their leash will allow. But most dogs revel in it.
I approach a navy student handler whose dog is standing still, eyes slightly shut, as he enjoys the military’s version of a dog massage. The dog is a large shepherd with bushy fur around his ears. His real name is Hugo P128, but Navy Master-at-Arms Seaman Glenn Patton calls him Chewbacca because of the dog’s similarity to the hirsute Star Wars character. Patton beams as he strokes his dog.
“Oh, I love him. I’d take him home if I could,” he tells me when I ask how they’re getting on. As we talk about his lifelong love for dogs, and how he has dreamed of being a military dog handler for years, he turns his head slightly to the left, and I notice that the upper third of his right ear is missing.
The top edge of what’s left of the ear is jagged and red, almost like someone or something recently bit it off. This turns out to be an accurate assessment. He explains, after some coaxing, that another dog had bolted away from his handler the previous week and tried to attack Hugo. Patton came between, and the aggressor bit into his ear and ripped it off.
I found out later that a group of handlers and instructors searched for the ear in the vicinity of the attack for a long time and couldn’t find it. In an effort to leave no stone unturned, the perpetrator dog was brought to the vet and given an emetic to induce vomiting. But when he threw up, there was no ear.
Patton says the mishap hasn’t discouraged him from his calling. “In a weird way, it’s made me love it even more. It shows me that my love for the program is as deep as I thought it would be. It doesn’t bother me what happened. I just keep loving working with dogs and can’t believe my good luck that I’m here.”
“Get her!”
Laika lunges toward me. I start shaking my giant, sleeved arm at the Malinois as instructed, so she’ll be attracted to that part of my body and not (oh, just for instance) my ear. As she runs toward me, Brooks tells me to freeze. I stop moving so she’ll get a good bite on the targeted body part.
Laika is on a long leash just in case, but the impact is strong. She sends me reeling back a step, and the sleeve crashes into my body. She starts tearing at the sleeve, and as I agitate it again she digs in, front paws pushing against my stomach and then my thigh for more leverage. Her bite is steady and strong. The power of this dog’s mouth is awesome. Without the sleeve, I’d be a bloody mess.
Having Laika on my arm starts to be almost fun. Brooks tells me I can growl at her, so I do and she digs in harder. Then he tells me they always praise a dog, so I tell her what a good girl she is before I realize that as the bad guy I’m probably not the one who is supposed to praise her. But she continues biting just as hard, unfazed by my complimentary words, and perhaps a little concerned about my apparent mood swings. Then Brooks comes over and gives Laika a friendly “atta girl” pat.
“Decoy, stop resisting!” he shouts to me, and I stop moving my arm. “Out!” he calls to the dog. Laika stops biting, but on the way down, quickly butts my torso with her nose. “Sit!” She sits. “Stay.” I back away several steps when Brooks tells me to. Laika trots off with her handler, and as she does, she turns around and looks at me with what could only be described as a “Wait till next time” expression.
Laika’s reward—aka “pay”—was twofold: biting my arm, and the praise from Brooks. If she wanted a piece of me again, maybe it was only because dogs love the rewards of the job.
I came to Lackland wondering what style of training would be used on the dogs. These are strong dogs with great fortitude and will. I expected to witness some manhandling but hoped there would be nothing too brutal.
So I was surprised to see that training here is mostly about positive reinforcement. Dogs who did well got their rewards and heaps of happy praise. In detection work, failure to notice a scent just meant no reward. There was no yelling, no dragging the dog over and shoving his nose in the odor. The patrol side was only slightly different. Praise and Kongs and bite sleeves flew all around, but if a dog didn’t listen to a command during bite work—for instance, if he didn’t stop when a trainer shouted “Out!”—he’d get a quick, light jerk on his choke chain, and he’d be walked back to start the exercise again.
“It’s much more fun, much more rewarding, less inhibiting than other training methods,” says Arod. “Since you don’t use compulsion or what would be considered traditional punishment, it doesn’t affect the softer dogs badly.”
Months after my visits to Lackland, I ran into dog trainer Victoria Stillwell at the American Humane Association Hero Dog Awards in Beverly Hills. She has drawn a tremendous audience by espousing positive training only. We got to talking, and I thought she’d be pretty happy with the positive training I generally saw wherever I went for the book research. But she said she still thinks there’s room for improvement in military working dog training. “You can train even really aggressive dogs in a positive manner. You don’t need to jerk a collar. Dogs should not have to have choke collars at all.”
Doc Hilliard, who has been instrumental in developing training techniques for the dog school, says that patrol can be done without any sort of correction for some special dogs, “but takes a lot of time. We don’t have this kind of time, and the dogs we get are not prepared for pure positive training.”
In my travels to military dog training areas, I have never seen anything more than a collar jerk. Even when a dog ran hundreds of yards away from his handler during off-leash exercises in the Arizona desert, he did not get chastised when the handler and an instructor found him. In fact, he got extra care. “Get him water. Take his temperature. Put him in the trailer so he has some AC.” It was no act put on because a reporter was there. You could tell this was just protocol. I was amazed at the restraint. Even I might have had a few words with Jake had he made me run a few hundred yards in 112-degree weather.
Military working dog training has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, according to Doc Hilliard. As he explains it, traditional methods used to involve compelling a dog to perform obedience by using corrections, normally by jerking or by tightening a chain choke collar. The reward was understood to be release from this pressure, combined with petting and praise. While the praise was positive, the system was fundamentally “compulsive” in outlook because the dog was not given any choices; he was compelled to do as the trainer demanded.
The system worked, but sometimes produced dogs who feared their trainers and did not like work. These days, the dog program is moving toward more “inducive” systems of training, in which training is broken into three stages. In the first stage the dog is taught what commands mean by using a reward like a Kong or a ball. This reward is used to “lure” the animal into a correct position (for example, lying down) and then the dog is rewarded. If the dog does not carry out the command, there is no penalty other than simply not giving the dog the reward. In the second phase, trainers layer on some physical correction such as a soft pop on the leash. They teach the dog that this pop on the leash is associated, for instance, with breaking the down position before permission from the handler. This is how a dog comes to understand that certain actions are associated with collar pressure and certain others with lack of collar pressure.
In the final phase, the dog learns that he must carry out commands, no matter what the situation or how many distractions. In this phase, sharper collar corrections are used, and the dog is not given the option to do as he wishes. However, throughout all three phases, even the last, rewards such as a toy are still given to the dog when he performs correctly. As a result, trainers produce a dog who understands his work clearly, understands that corrections will be associated with mistakes or disobedience, but fundamentally likes his work because he has a clear understanding of what is expected—and because he often receives rewards.
That’s not to say harsher methods are never used, at least once the dogs are beyond boot camp level. There are “harder,” very aggressive dogs for whom I’m told nothing else has worked. The trick, say the handlers, is to remain calm and in control while getting the dog’s attention via a little “ass whupping.” A dog who’s not backing off an attack on another dog or handler can be thrown on his back and slapped (not hard) on his face, for instance, and no other handlers are likely to cry foul. The idea is not to hurt the dog, but to let him know in no uncertain terms that this behavior will not be tolerated.
But every so often, a handler will go too far. These seem to be blissfully rare events, but they’re disturbing nonetheless. An out-of-control handler may kick or punch a dog, pick him up high and slam him hard to the ground, use a cattle prod, or even helicopter a dog. (The latter, unfortunately, sounds like what it is, with spinning and fear involved. It can end with a slam to the ground if the handler has really lost it.)
These methods are not only highly discouraged, an individual can be brought up on Uniform Code of Military Justice charges for abusing a dog. The consequences can range from being given extra work to loss of rank or even dog-handler status, or full court-martial that could result in a felony conviction. Marine Captain John “Brandon” Bowe says most cases never go to court-martial but are taken care of in a process called nonjudicial punishment (NJP). “Dog handlers tend to be a cut above, so NJP usually solves matters.”
Justice can come from unexpected places. It is not unheard of for instructors or other handlers to mete out quid pro quo punishment. Kick a dog hard in the belly when he’s already on his back, for instance, and don’t be surprised when what goes around comes around.
I heard about a situation that didn’t involve abuse, but accidental neglect. A handler forgot his dog in the dog trailer on a hot summer day. The AC wasn’t on, because the dogs were all supposed to be out of the trailer. The dog could have died but was found in time. So he would never forget his dog again, the handler was tied up, shoved in a kennel, and driven out to the training area. He stayed there for a few hours. There are no reports of him forgetting another dog.
With the way that dogs have become a deeply integral part of our families and our lives in the last couple of decades, it’s natural to think that the military’s stand on positive reinforcement training is a recent development—one that adheres to philosophies like the following, from a book about training war dogs:
The highest qualities of mind—love and duty—have to be appealed to and cultivated…. The whole training is based on appeal. To this end the dog is gently taught to associate everything pleasant with its working hours. Under no circumstances whatever must it be roughly handled or roughly spoken to. If it makes a mistake, or is slack in its work when being trained, it is never chastised, but is merely shown how to do it over again. If any of the men under instruction are observed to display roughness or lack of sympathy with the dogs, they should be instantly dismissed, as a promising young dog could easily be thrown back in his training, or even spoiled altogether, by sharp handling…. No whips should exist in the training school and are never necessary; gentle, steady routine work is the right method of impressing the dog’s intelligence, and kindly encouragement and caresses will meet its desire to understand, better than coercive measures or rebukes.
Modern thinking, to be sure. Only the author, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin H. Richardson, founder of the British War Dog School, wrote it in 1920. It’s from his book British War Dogs: Their Training and Psychology, which—together with his articles and influence during both World War I and II—helped set the stage for how the U.S. would train war dogs when this country finally got our program going during World War II.
Richardson believed that positive reinforcement was the only way to successfully train a dog, that in the end you had to appeal to a dog’s good nature and desire to please. War-dog historian Michael Lemish says that the military followed this doctrine of positive reinforcement and never supported brutality or harsh treatment. But it hasn’t all been ear scratches and rubber balls for soldier dogs. For instance, mine-detecting dogs in World War II were frequently trained using electric shock collars.
And one form of training for sentry dogs in Vietnam sounds pretty crazy. It was called the agitation method and is described as “getting the dog excited about attacking his prey. Usually a small branch would be used and whacked across his backside to make the dog even more excited about going after his prey. It was not punishment.”
Those were some of the few real sticks officially used. These days, carrots are everything.
A handler told me about the first bomb dog he had. The dog was a veteran and knew exactly what was expected of him. “He’d be like, ‘Get my Kong ready and get set to praise me up, and I’ll go find a bomb for you.’ When you think of what this rubber toy inspires, it’s just incredible.”
The training and handling of military working dogs today just wouldn’t be the same without the Kong. It was, fittingly, a retired police dog named Fritz who inspired the creation of this hard rubber toy. Back in the mid-1970s, the German shepherd was always chewing rocks, cans, anything hard he could get his mouth around. It frustrated his owner, Joe Markham, to no end. One day, as Markham was doing some repairs to his 1967 Volkswagen van, Fritz started chewing rocks again. To distract him, Markham threw Fritz various van parts he was through with. The dog took no interest in the radiator hoses and other bits flying toward him, until Markham tossed a hard rubber suspension part to his dog. Fritz went mad for it.
Markham knew he was on to something. He finessed a design and found a rubber manufacturing plant near his Colorado home. After seeing the prototype, his business partner said it looked like an earplug for King Kong, and a name was born. Kongs are still made in Colorado, of a proprietary superstrong rubber. They dominate the dog-toy market.
Kongs are ubiquitous in the military working dog world. You’ll find Kongs at every military kennel and, really, anyplace in the world where there are U.S. military dogs. Lackland ordered nearly one thousand Kong toys in 2010, just for the dog school and handler course. Kongs even show up all over Afghanistan now, thanks to the presence of working dogs there. A Kong representative says the company donates thousands of Kongs annually to military dog facilities and handlers.
Kong is not one toy but actually a line of hard rubber dog toys. The most popular Kongs in the military are red or black, with what looks like three balls of different sizes fused together in a snowmanlike configuration. They’re hollow inside, and many civilians like to stuff treats into them to keep their dogs occupied with getting them out.
But in the military, Kongs are not used in this manner. They’re bouncy rewards that supplement the dog’s primary reward of pleasing the handler. (Some trainers say that the reverse is true—that handlers are secondary rewards to Kongs and other toys. It likely depends on the dog and handler.) Kongs gratify a dog’s prey and play drives. Toss a Kong on the ground, and it doesn’t bounce true, as a tennis ball does. (Military dogs also get tennis balls as rewards. Even a glove will do in a pinch.) Its odd shape causes the Kong to bounce and skip erratically, much like a fleeing rabbit or other prey. Dogs chase, catch, and experience what’s apparently the unparalleled feeling of the toy/prey in their mouths.
“To the dog with a high prey drive, the Kong is a million-dollar paycheck. You throw it and it’s run, chase, bite! They can’t help themselves,” says Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight. But there are soldier dogs whose prey drive isn’t so strong. Kongs or praise or even food rewards may not be enough pay for them to do their jobs well. These dogs may certify at dog school and even do passably well at their home bases. But when they deploy to a place like Afghanistan, the motivation to sniff for IEDs can be the sole factor that separates life and death—for the dogs, their handlers, and anyone nearby.
Gunfire, mortar blasts, IED explosions, and intense heat are part of the canvas of extreme conditions troops and dogs have to deal with in that war-ravaged country. Even dogs with fine prey drives can have difficulty functioning well once they deploy to this foreign, oft-hostile setting.
Fortunately, soldier dogs and handlers have a Stateside location where they go to prepare for the rigors of deploying to this kind of environment. If you were blindfolded and taken there, you could easily think you were already deployed.