When you walk by an empty dog trailer, it’s supposed to be silent. And when Marine Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight—known to his commanding officer, Captain John “Brandon” Bowe, as “the smartest and most amazing man on the planet to train dogs”—passes within two feet of a trailer’s empty kennels on a 110-degree August afternoon at the Yuma Proving Ground, it is indeed mute. But when I walk past it a few seconds later, I’m surprised when a series of hefty barks fly out of a lone dog, Rocky P506. He’s waiting in semi air-conditioned comfort while the rest of his class tracks faux bad guys in the distance. He is there as backup, in case any of the dogs are too spooked to track well after a hair-raising helicopter ride that was part of the day’s training. He won’t stop barking at me, even when I’m twenty feet away.
“Hey, Gunny, why didn’t that dog bark at you?” I ask.
“Heh heh,” he answers and we walk on.
We return about an hour later after watching the dog’s colleagues at work, and Gunny passes by the trailer. Once again, silence. As soon as I get within a few feet, a deep RAW RAW RAW staccatos at me.
“Gunny, why is he only barking at me?” Dogs always like me. What’s up with this one?
“Could be any number of factors, even something like you’re not in a uniform. He’s used to people in uniform,” he explains.
The barking continues and Gunny Knight walks toward the trailer. “Watch this. You can breathe on him and calm him down.” He goes up to the German shepherd, who is still barking in my direction behind the metal bars of his kennel. Gunny blows a stream of air gently on his head, and the dog almost instantaneously quiets down and sits.
Bowe told me that Gunny has a way with dogs that no one else has. “He talks dog. That’s the thing about Gunny Knight. He speaks their language. He speaks dog slang. He speaks dog En-glish. He speaks dog Ebonics. No matter what language, he knows how to read dogs, talk dogs, train dogs, and I’ve never seen in all my years in the Marine Corps—and that’s going on twenty—anyone who can work with dogs like him.”
I get closer to look at this transformed canine, in awe of what Gunny has done. Suddenly Rocky starts in at me again.
“Go ahead, breathe on him,” Gunny instructs. “Let him smell that you are calm and can control him, you are in charge.”
I conjure up the words “I’m the calm boss” in my brain, and I exhale gently on Rocky’s head. It doesn’t work. I realize that while I’m calm, I’m not feeling like the boss, just making up the words. So I channel Gunny Knight as my persona. No words this time, just a feeling—a benevolent authority; I am momentarily muscle-bound, with a big cocky grin. I exhale, briefly becoming Gunny Knight, breathing Gunny Knight vibes onto Rocky’s head.
Rocky suddenly stops. He sits and looks at me, mouth slightly open, seeming almost relaxed. He stays like that even as I walk away with Gunny.
What just happened?
Gunny tells me that he uses this technique to calm down dogs and let them smell the chemical cocktail that is uniquely him. “By doing so, the dog is able to determine multiple factors about me—confidence, fear, threatening behaviors, trust, calm nature, etc.”
I later ran the incident by canine cognition expert Alexandra Horowitz. I thought she’d know exactly what magic Gunny had worked. But somewhat surprisingly, she said that it’s common wisdom in dog circles that blowing on a dog’s face is an aggressive action. “I could conjecture that a dog who is blown on might stop being restless, but not necessarily because they feel calm. They might feel alarmed, too. I would have to see the rest of the dog’s behavior and posture in context to get a read on this marine’s dogs.”
If Horowitz had been dealing with a standard military dog trainer, her desire to observe and understand the situation might have paid off with scientifically based insights drawn from other similar observations. But there is nothing standard about Gunny Knight.
And there’s nothing terribly ordinary about the predeployment course for dogs and handlers he runs in this arid corner of Arizona bordering Mexico and California. I learned this one dark June morning, at 4:30 A.M., when I first set foot on the Yuma Proving Ground.
A full moon hovers over rows of open-air kennels, where the cacophony of barking punctuates the warm predawn desert air. Sixteen handlers in camo greet their excited dogs and leash them up for their morning constitutionals. Two klicks away, down a dusty road, an ammo recovery team sets out explosives in Taliban fashion, hiding them, covering them with dirt and pebbles, making them look just like any other part of the terrain.
Gunny Knight calls over to me and has me hop into his Isuzu VehiCROSS—one of only four thousand that were ever sold in the U.S. over several years, he will tell you.
We drive to a place called Site 2. As we’re driving, the sun climbs over the horizon, casting new light on what was only a milky visage moments ago. Flat, dry, unforgiving Sonoran Desert terrain spreads out for miles in every direction, with low, jagged mountains fringing the desolate landscape. You would not want to be lost here.
I’m thinking about how much it looks like images I’ve seen of parts of Afghanistan, when I spot people falling out of the sky. They’re dangling from parachutes, twenty of them, getting almost alarmingly close to us. I’m fascinated. They’re clearly Special Ops guys of some form—who knows, maybe even related to Cairo’s people. My excitement is lost on Gunny. He scoffs. “Clowns. When’s the last time anyone ever parachuted into combat?”
We drive around for awhile so I can get the lay of the land, and by the time we arrive at our destination, eight handlers are finishing a long run. It’s already eighty-three degrees. Some are sweating and red, others (marines, mostly) look like they just stepped out of a cool cafe. Then it’s military push-up time. As they wrap up PT, the moon disappears, and the dogs who have been barking in their trailers come out and chug water from gallon jugs. It’s now 6 A.M. and time to start the day.
Military working dog handlers deploying to work outside the wire are supposed to go through rigorous predeployment training, generally at a course designed to prepare them and their dogs for the grueling demands of war. There’s a canine team predeployment course at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and one at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
But the course that every handler and instructor I talked with across all four services says is the course to attend is the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, here at the Yuma Proving Ground. It is the only advanced course among the three, and it focuses entirely on matters essential to dog teams. In addition, it’s the only course that accepts dog handlers from all four services. Those who have gone through this Marine Corps–run program rave about the training, despite its rigors: “No other course compares.” “It’ll save your life, and maybe a lot of other lives.” “A killer, but the best training in the entire military.” “Should be mandatory for every handler deploying.” “Gunny Knight knows his shit like no one else.”
The course takes advantage of its location, and at thirteen hundred square miles, it is one of the largest military installations in the world. YPG is known for testing munitions systems and weapons, military vehicles, and manned and unmanned aviation systems. In addition, some thirty-six thousand parachute drops take place annually here—apparently much to Gunny Knight’s annoyance. As the day goes on, and the sky divers drop from planes like tiny bursts of rain, there is always a new name. This time it’s “Damned glory children!” You get the impression that these parachutists are in the same category as mosquitoes to this man. Or maybe it goes deeper than that.
The terrain and the climate make the Yuma Proving Ground a popular training area for all kinds of units that will be deploying. The IASK course adds some authentic man-made touches, with a mock “Middle East” village; it’s home to a mosque, mud and concrete buildings, and a small marketplace. At Site 2 there’s a two-story compound surrounded by walls—a small and simpler version of Bin Laden’s final manse. And because this is a test facility, the course gets munitions and ordnance no other military working dog courses can.
During the course, which runs for nineteen days, dogs and handlers take part in realistic raids, night operations, and route-clearance exercises. The machines that simulate ammo, IED, and mortar blasts are deafening, the humps are long and arduous, and the heat is stultifying. “A lot of dogs who are good at their home station in a cooler area come here and shit the bed. Like ‘Sweet Jesus, I can’t feel my balls and I can’t breathe by 11 A.M.!’
“But if you have not subjected your dog to this terrain, to this temperature, you really don’t know how he’s going to perform. You don’t know how you’re going to do, either,” Gunny says as he watches a navy handler struggle to put on his pack.
One of the most valuable parts of the course is the exposure to homemade explosives (HMEs). It’s estimated that HMEs account for 90 percent of the explosives being used in Afghanistan right now. It’s so important that dogs get imprinted with these scents that Gunny Knight even offers a special mini-course that handlers can come here for.
Before Corporal Max Donahue and his dog, Fenji, deployed to Afghanistan, they took the HME course. They did very well here, and Donahue spread the word to other marine handlers that the HME course was not to be missed. “It’s going to save you, your dog, and all those guys following you,” he would tell them.
He got it straight from Gunny Knight. “If your dog has never been subject to HMEs, what’s the point of even going to Afghanistan? It’s like going to combat with a rifle and no ammo.” You can’t expect a dog to find something he was never trained to find. Ammonium nitrate? It might as well be a bowl of grapes to your dog, because if he’s never been rewarded for locating it and responding to it, why would he place any value on it?
When Master Chief Scott Thompson headed dog operations in Afghanistan from 2010 to mid-2011, he was in frequent communication with Gunny Knight, letting him know the most recent Taliban trends in explosives and IED placement methods. Now it’s pretty much the handlers doing it. They hear what to watch out for pretty fast from other handlers over there. They tell Gunny and his staff, and they’re on it. Handlers who have been through this course say they were very well prepared for the Taliban’s latest tricks.
Seven A.M. and Air Force Technical Sergeant Gwendolyn Dodd is giving the first handler of the day his final instructions. As she talks to him, the mortar and ammo simulators are already going off around the compound. Dodd and the handler and his dog are at the back end and have to enter the compound area by crawling through a long, dusty tunnel. “Ready?” she asks, and then sees the handler’s canine partner. The dog is busy doing a leg lift on a solo scrap of plant life. It’s a moment that makes you see the dog for what he is: Not a warrior. Just a dog like yours or mine. “Go ahead, boy!” he tells his dog enthusiastically when his dog has finished. The dog charges through. Dodd and the dog’s handler follow.
Gunny and I meet them at the edge of the compound. During the next two hours, we will see two more handlers go through the same raid exercise. Wearing full combat gear, rifles poised, they walk next to an outer compound wall, carefully watching around them for snipers and other dangers, and observing their dogs. They negotiate corners, sometimes well, sometimes badly. One handler walks around a corner in front of his dog, and if this were the real deal, he’d have set off several IEDs. But the course’s chief instructor, Marine Staff Sergeant Kenny Porras, stops him and reminds him that the dog has to go first. So the handler lets the dog go first, and the German shepherd immediately lies down, tail wagging, looking earnestly at what seems to be plain gravel and dirt, just like everything around it. It isn’t until Knight brushes away some dust and gravel that I see the IEDs (which don’t have fuses or detonators, so are safe) that lay underneath.
Once inside the compound, there are rooms to clear, stairs to negotiate. The mortar and ammo simulators go off nonstop nearby, and the heat in the plywood bowels of the compound gets more suffocating as the morning wears on. The dogs, though, are enthusiastic and don’t seem to mind any of it. They find explosives in ceilings, behind boxes; they locate caches, and with every find, tails wag and they know they’ve done well and here comes the Kong and the whoop and the praise, and a minute later the party is over and it’s off to search for more.
“There’s a lot of dogs I wouldn’t follow,” says Gunny. “But if they make it through this course, I’d be right behind them downrange.”
About 10 percent of teams that start the course don’t graduate.
Skittish, fearful, gun-shy dogs or dogs who are very distractible or unfit do not make good soldier dogs. And sometimes handlers themselves are out of shape, they make too many excuses, or, Gunny points out, they cry too much. Gunny Knight and his team of instructors try to work with dogs and handlers who need extra help. He doesn’t like cutting handlers.
“My biggest fear in life is failure. So I imagine how they feel when they fail. Even if it’s one hundred percent the dog’s fault, it’s not a joyous time. But I can’t let them get out there and have others following them, thinking they’re safe because they’re behind the dog.
“See this guy?” he says, nodding his chin toward a navy handler who is working with his dog to clear a dirt road of IEDs. “I’m brutally honest. If he was terrible I would tell him, ‘You’re terrible,’ and we’d do something about it. I don’t really care to hear that this kid got killed three months after he went to our course.”
If you ask him (and you don’t have to, because he will be sure to tell you in the course of any conversation, even about the weather), some handlers play war fighter, but don’t fight the war. They do the minimum required explosives exercises and physical training at their home bases and don’t work their dogs more than twenty minutes at one time. When they get to Knight’s course, they have a hard time.
We walk up the road to the compound, where a dog is sniffing for IEDs in front of his handler as the blast simulators make it hard to hear anything unless it’s shouted. It’s an intense scene. You could imagine this is the real deal in Afghanistan, except the dog team would have a lot more troops following. Then the dog sees a rock and walks over to it with great interest. Has he found an explosive? He sniffs. Inspects. Sniffs some more. Then he lifts his leg and splashes the rock, and moves on.
Dogs have to do their business. But some are too distractible. It’s merely annoying when Jake is marking something every two feet on a walk, but in the theater of war, it can be deadly. “If his dog’s like, ‘Whatever!’ and goes and pees and poops everywhere and doesn’t find anything, they’re gonna be like, ‘Go sit in a corner and color. We’ll take this guy instead.’ Then the other handler has an extra burden, and the team may be worked too much, which takes a toll on their accuracy as well. So the goal is for all dog teams going over to be strong and reliable.”
On another visit to Yuma in August, we’re watching a new group of handlers, again in full combat gear, despite the 110-degree temperatures. It’s a little earlier in the course, and these handlers are getting their first taste of looking for pressure plates and other IEDs in this terrain. The devices have no explosive traces, so the exercise is for the handlers only, not the dogs. They need to be able to see the telltale signs that someone has been there: A little pattern of gravel that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the terrain. A wire barely covered with dirt. A round piece of metal that looks like a large soda cap; is it different from the other bits of litter in the area?
Porras has instructed them to just look and not say anything about where faux IEDs might be until the end of the exercise. Oh, and don’t step on anything suspicious. The handlers all mill around a small gravelly lot, looking down, walking slowly, cautiously. A couple of minutes in, Gunny shouts out to a handler.
“How ya feeling?”
“Pretty good.”
“Are you feeling kind of light?”
“No.”
“Well you should be, because you just stepped on that pressure plate two times! If this were Afghanistan, you’d be missing a few limbs by now.” The handler laughs, slightly embarrassed. The gallows humor gets the point across. The handlers walk even more slowly and seriously, inspecting the ground for the most subtle signs.
After Porras briefs them on where the devices were hidden—a few were so stealth no one guessed—he has them walk their dogs in a big oval as ammo and mortar simulators blast noisily, and at unpredictable intervals, just ten feet away. They walk around a couple of times, and Gunny leans in and points to a German shepherd and a Belgian Malinois who are looking up at their handlers more than the others. “They’re going to have problems in a minute.” They look OK to me, but in a minute I see he has pegged them.
With every explosion, both dogs flinch low to the ground, as if someone were about to hit them. Or they tuck their tails and try to run. It’s painful to watch. The other dogs, for the most part, don’t even seem to notice the blasts. They trot with tails high or focus with tails relaxed. But these two are distressed. The handler of the Malinois tries to quickly comfort his dog after each blast.
Blast.
He pats his dog’s flanks.
Blast.
“It’s OK!” he tells his dog.
Gunny beckons the handler over and takes the dog’s leash. He walks the dog a few more feet away from the blast simulators, and the dog sits and looks at him. He strokes the dog’s head gently, bending down and looking calmly into his eyes, rubbing under his chin, then back over his ears. The dog looks up, already seeming a little more relaxed. Gunny walks him away from the blasts and then turns toward the sounds. As he does, he faces the dog, who sits and then jumps up and puts his paws on Gunny’s chest. Gunny strokes him some more and then gently uses his knee to coerce the dog back to sitting.
They do this a few more times, getting closer to the simulators, only he doesn’t let the dog jump up anymore. He just pets the dog when he sits, leaning close and looking into his eyes. There is something about his demeanor that says, “You’re going to be fine. Don’t pay these noises any attention. Trust me on this.” He hands the leash back to the handler, who has been crouched, watching. As the handler walks away, his dog tries to pull back to Gunny, and then he turns two more times toward him until he’s once again swallowed back up in the oval.
“You have to show the dog real confidence. When you’re confident, your dog sees and feels that, and he feels safe,” Gunny explains.
The dog still flinches, but maybe not quite so much. A work in progress.
Blast.
The handler pats his dog’s head again.
“Don’t reinforce it! Ignore it!” Gunny shouts.
He explains that with his well-meaning comforting, the handler is actually conditioning the dog to think that these noises are frightening. “His feelings are dumping down the leash right onto his dog, and the dog goes, ‘Yeah, I thought I was right about being scared.’”
Of course, the dog’s instincts are right. Hell yes, those blasts could mean some nasty business. And letting a dog think otherwise is just fooling this creature who will try his hardest to do whatever you ask of him. But the reality is that these dogs are deploying. In war, what good does it do for the dog to know those sounds could mean tremendous pain, or death?
So with ammo exposure, the idea is this: The dog needs to believe the sounds are not associated with danger. When the dog hears the blasts and gunfire enough times, and if the sounds have never been associated with anything bad, even sensitive dogs will usually come to shrug off the blasts. In Gunnyspeak (he frequently talks from a dog’s POV), the MWD thinks, “I’ve heard these sounds a thousand times and I’ve never been shot, so why should I care about one thousand and one? Hey, when I find things when these sounds are going off, I get my reward. This is kind of fun!”
Next up is the other fearful dog. This time it’s going to be a game. Gunny gets the dog’s Kong rope toy from the handler, takes over the leash, and runs away from the simulators with the dog. As a blast goes off, he gives the dog his reward. They go back and forth several times. He’s trying to distract the dog from the blasts, so he signals to someone on his crew whenever he wants an explosion. He gives the dog his rope toy and the blast goes off. At first the dog lets it go. But after several times, he’s hanging on to it more. He’s still not happy about the noise, but there has been some improvement by the time Gunny gives the dog back. He says it’s not an ideal way to train a dog. Working a dog a little farther from the noise and working him up to it slowly is better, as is not using a reward quite so frequently. But he couldn’t stand there and watch without trying a little first aid.
Back in June I met a navy team that did not end up passing the course. “I could tell right away the dog did not have the drive,” Gunny says. One morning, while the German shepherd (who shall remain nameless, because his handler understandably felt bad about not passing) was standing with his handler, Gunny went up to him in a semi-threatening manner, waving his hat at the dog as he quickly weaved toward him. The dog stood up slowly and gave a couple of noncommittal barks. Gunny tried to engage him again and got really close. If the dog wanted to, he could have lunged, and if Gunny had not been speedy, he could have ended up missing part of his face. He riled up the dog a little, and the dog made some effort to pull toward Gunny and barked with more attitude. But it wasn’t the kind of response Gunny was looking for.
During the raid and other war scenarios, the dog had put in the effort, but in the end, he didn’t have the drive to want his reward badly enough to perform as he needed to.
“The dog’s like, ‘None of this crap is worth it and all I want to do is sit in front of a sixty-five-year-old lady’s fireplace and relax,’” says Gunny. The team will continue to work on building up drive and confidence back at home base.
One thing Gunny can’t stand seeing is a team with a handler that’s not a strong leader. There are those who argue that the alpha dog/beta dog model is archaic and based on outdated information. But you won’t find many supporters of this argument in the military working dog world.
“Two betas don’t make a right,” says Gunny Knight. “Too often you’ve got a beta leader. Every successful team needs a strong alpha leader, and that has to be the handler, not the dog.
“You see all these people these days following everyone else. They don’t think. They don’t know how to lead. Even in the military. Too many people, they’re like sheep. People are becoming sheeple. It’s no way to be in life, and it’s no way to be a handler.
“I am not a sheeple.”
Gunny Knight does not need to tell me this. I realized he was not a sheeple from our first conversation. Arod had told me about the Yuma course, and I knew I had to see it in person. I went through the proper media channels. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from a public affairs officer telling me they were processing my request, that it might take a little time, but that they’d do their best.
A couple of days later I got a call from a man with a booming voice. He introduced himself as Gunnery Sergeant Kris Knight, course chief of the Yuma predeployment course. I was impressed at the relative speed of the public affairs department. But this call had nothing to do with the PA. Gunny had seen the e-mails going through about my request, and he said he realized it would be “a long time, if ever” before I would get to visit the course. He checked in with Captain Bowe, the officer in charge of the school, to see if the rules could be bent a little to get me in. Bowe’s offices are at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. “It’s hard to be in charge of it from sixteen hundred miles away, that’s why I need Gunny Knight,” he would later tell me.
“With Gunny Knight in charge, I have the most winning guy I can have in the marines for this job. To use a sports analogy, he’s my Tom Brady, Alex Rodriguez, and Michael Jordan all rolled into one. He’s what makes this course the winning game it is,” Bowe said.
He acknowledged that Knight doesn’t always follow every rule. “Sometimes there are black areas in life, sometimes white, sometimes gray. If Gunny ever needs to get into the gray area, he’ll dip in and get out as fast as possible. It’s always for a good reason.”
So Gunny dipped into the gray, and Bowe looked at my request and told Gunny to go ahead. I visited two separate times over the summer. During my August visit, a public affairs guy from YPG drove up to us, and Gunny quietly told me to take a little walk, that he would take care of things. The PA was not happy I was there, Gunny reported, but he didn’t have me escorted off the property.
Official approval remains in the works.
Kristopher Knight grew up in a small suburban unincorporated community called Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The camp for which the place is named had been a major army center during the Civil War. Lincoln is purported to have stayed in the house around the corner from Knight’s house.
When he was eleven months old, Gunny’s black mother and white father divorced. She took the kids and moved in with her parents. Gunny describes his dad as a “redneck guy, and an alcoholic. He could only teach me three things: hunting, shooting, and fishing.” There was a falling-out seven years ago, and he hasn’t spoken to his father since.
His grandfather, who held down two jobs, became a father figure to him very early on. “I grew up on the black side of the family and have my grandfather’s hardworking values at my core,” he says. “He was my role model.” When his mother was able to move out on her own, the young Knight—age six—refused to go with her. His grandfather told her, “It’s not negotiable. He stays.” That was that.
His mother remarried when Knight was eleven, and she told him that he had to go with the new family to live in New Jersey. He said he wanted to stay with his grandparents. His grandfather once again went to bat for him, and Knight stayed put.
At age fourteen, Knight learned how to drive and would take care of car maintenance and drive the little family Honda Civic around the area with his grandfather’s blessing. His grandparents had two rules: Be careful and behave. These came in handy, because Knight loved guns, and his grandfather liked to see a well-behaved boy rewarded with meaningful presents.
There were the usual BB guns, a Crosman pellet gun, a derringer .25 handgun, a Ted Williams .20-gauge shotgun, a Marlin .22 magnum rifle, a Winchester break-barrel .20-gauge shotgun, and a few others. His favorite, though, was a Remington Model 700 .22-250 rifle. He chose it for his eleventh birthday because it had a very large scope. “I had no idea what it was used for until after my grandfather purchased it for me. When I called my father to tell him about it, he informed me that it was the second fastest varmint rifle in the world. I used it for several years to hunt groundhogs. Initially the gun was way too heavy for me, so I used fence posts and the corners of barns to stabilize my shots.”
He used his small arsenal for hunting or target shooting. Camp Dennison was surrounded by woods and farm fields, so there was plenty of space for shooting and camping.
If you saw this scene from the outside, you might have been worried, looking into the tent of this well-armed youth. But Knight knew his limits. He kept his firearms in check, didn’t get in trouble, and worked hard at side jobs. In a summer job he held at a factory when he was eighteen, he discovered a way to increase the productivity of making valves. It involved cutting down on lag time and using his strength, and not a crane, to hold seventy-five-pound parts. He thought he’d be lauded for it, but other workers were not happy. “Hey, youngblood, you gotta slow down. You’re making us look bad,” they told him. “No, you gotta speed up,” he replied.
Even the boss wanted him to put on the brakes and use the approved methods. If nothing else, it was safer. But Knight said he wanted to do it his way because it was the most efficient method and better for the valves themselves, since they didn’t run the risk of getting scraped up by the cranes. In the end, the boss had him sign a waiver, and he proceeded.
It would become a common theme in the story of his life, this business of wanting to do what’s best and bucking the system if he had to. He went to college for awhile to become a forest ranger, dropped out the day his grandmother died in 1992, and became what he calls a wild child. He rode motorcycles like he was invincible, partied hard, and lived free. In October 1994, a lifelong friend told him he was thinking about joining the marines. They were at a party and very drunk. “He wouldn’t stop talking about it, so I said, ‘If you’ll shut up, and you’re serious about joining, I’ll join with you.’ He was serious and I kept my word.” His friend got out after four years, and Gunny’s been in since. Knight went the MP route right away. Eight months later, he was at Lackland, learning how to become a handler. Dogs have been his passion ever since.
In the years that followed his enlistment, he rose through the ranks, got a BS in education (he says he could be a captain now, but he would not be able to work with dogs, so he remained a noncommissioned officer; while most of his job these days involves paperwork to keep the program running, he tries to get out with classes whenever possible), had two combat deployments, became a trainer, and in March 2010, came to Yuma to be course chief.
While training with the Israeli Defense Forces in 2006 (“the air force would count that as a combat deployment; I count it as a vacation”) he met his future wife, Rinat. I met them for sushi one night in Yuma’s nicest shopping center. Rinat Knight is a pretty, funny, smart woman with long, dark, wavy hair, eleven years his junior. He had told me on several occasions, including our first phone conversation, “I am the luckiest man on earth, and a lot of that is because of my wife.” She is on one of his two screen savers at work.
Those closest to Gunny in the dog world say he could be in the private sector earning a lot more money than he does in the military. He says he’s not going to stay in forever, and in fact, he might retire within a few years. But he has no desire to leave just yet. “I just love what I do. Every day is a Friday. Why would I risk trading my Fridays for a Monday for more money? It’s not worth it to me. That’s why I do it, and that’s why my staff does it.
“I want to make a difference before I leave. I want to make sure all these kids are getting the allotted time to properly prepare and come back home.”
Gunny’s other screen saver is a photo of him with military working dog Patrick L722. Gunny is running and holding out his arm, which is covered with a bite sleeve, and Patrick is up in the air, biting at it and looking like although he means business, he’s having the best time in the world. They are collided, suspended in time in this dynamic photo that greets Gunny every day.
He helped train the handler who would help train Patrick. The dog was fresh out of dog school in Texas when he arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to serve with the II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF). “He was a hyper mess when we received him, but he showed all the potential to be great,” Gunny says. Patrick’s handler and Gunny deployed to Afghanistan at the same time in May 2009. While there, Gunny continued to advance the team’s capabilities, including trying to make sure Patrick could work off leash.
Patrick made it home and, because his handler needed multiple wrist surgeries, was assigned a new handler. They deployed to Afghanistan in December 2010.
Patrick would not make it back alive this time. But everyone else on his final mission would, thanks to this dog and his ability to sniff out bombs without a leash.
Patrick was a bomb-detection dog designed to work on a six-foot leash. Gunny Knight, then chief dog trainer at II MEF, worked hard on Patrick’s off-leash skills. Patrick was one of the first PEDD dogs he trained this way. “The barrier had to be broken.”
The dog was a typical Malinois. “He was all heart; he put everything into what he did, and he loved you to death,” says one marine corporal, who had hoped to deploy with Patrick.
Nothing fazed this dog. During one firefight, Patrick lay beside his handler, Corporal Charles “Cody” Haliscak, in the tall grass as Haliscak and the rest of the squad engaged the Taliban. But Patrick wasn’t lying there cowering. He was lying there eating grass as the bullets screamed by.
On May 9, 2011, Patrick and Haliscak were on a mission in the southern Helmand Province. With them were a minesweeper engineer and an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician. The purpose was to check out a small IED—a toe-popper—that had gone off earlier that day. It didn’t harm anyone, but they needed a dog’s nose to clear the way back to the area. The dog went first, off leash, then the engineer with his metal-detecting device, followed closely by Haliscak and the EOD tech.
It’s common knowledge among people who have dealt with IEDs in the last few years that where there’s one, there are two. Where there are two, there are four. Knight says the situation has been dramatically worse in recent months. Before, you might find a small field with one IED. Now there could be ten in that same area. (The Yuma course has adjusted training methods to take this lethal factor into account.)
Haliscak had a feeling that something else was out there along their path, and he stopped his team. He told the two men he would let Patrick work this one. Patrick, tail high and wagging, walked up the path, searched one corner of the poppy field that lay ahead, crossed the path, and searched the other end of the poppy field. He shimmied around and made his way to where two paths met—exactly where the team was going to be walking. There, about fifteen feet away from the men, he responded to an explosive scent as Haliscak had never seen him respond before. Patrick’s usual style was to get excited, tail wagging hard, sniffing the area with great focus. Then he would sit or lie down in final response. This time, Patrick dispensed with the preliminaries and lay down immediately.
Haliscak figures his dog’s last thought was “Oh, toy!!!” (“That toy was everything to him,” he says.)
The explosion knocked Haliscak and the two other men off their feet. They had no idea what had happened. They thought they were going to get ambushed, so they prepared to fire. When there was no ambush, Haliscak looked for Patrick. He was nowhere to be seen. The handler started searching in a circle around where the blast had gone off. As a hunter, he is used to looking for downed animals. He peered through his rifle’s 4X scope. In the distance he saw that the grass in a field was bent over. Then he saw Patrick’s body, or what remained of it.
“At that point I lost it.” Haliscak, who had a high-grade concussion from the explosion, tried to run over to his dog, but the EOD tech stopped him. It was enough death for one day. The EOD tech and the engineer got close enough to see there was nothing to be done. They did their post-blast work on the IED and the other one from the morning. It was nearly nighttime when the two men put Patrick on a piece of canvas, covered him up, and carried him back to the patrol base. Haliscak had known the dog for three years, been his handler for one and a half years. “I lost my best friend. He was my hero. Without him and his great ability to work off leash, I’d be toast.”
Once they’d brought him back, Haliscak looked at his dog. All four of Patrick’s legs had been blown off. Only his head and rib cage were intact. “It’s truly terrible to see your best friend like this.”
Dual-purpose dogs are officially considered on-leash dogs. It’s thought that the patrol part of them is too dangerous to let go off leash, so they don’t receive off-leash detection training during boot camp, and often are not even at their home bases. Some handlers work on it on their own—particularly handlers with kennel masters who are wise to its benefits. But it’s still far from standard procedure.
Gunny Knight has been working these dual-purpose dogs off leash for a few years—since before it was even a remotely accepted technique. “I knew this was right. When I know I’m right, a thousand people can think I’m wrong, but I stand alone and know I’m right.
“I believe in a verbal leash. Your leash may be six feet and leather, but mine comes out of my mouth.”
Single-purpose bomb dogs, like EDDs, IDDs, TEDDs, and SSDs (see chapter 10 if you have not retained every letter of every acronym of every MWD job) are trained to work off leash. But these are usually sporting breeds, like Labrador retrievers, and they are not trained to attack. They can be trusted not to maul anyone in their path as they trot around sniffing out IEDs.
It’s estimated that with our current situation in Afghanistan, about 95 percent of a dual-purpose bomb dog’s job is sniffing out explosives—not going after bad guys. Having a bomb-sniffing dog with off-leash capabilities makes sense. The farther from the handler and other troops a dog is when alerting to an IED, the safer for everyone. Except the dog, of course. It’s called stand-off distance. Some might argue that this isn’t very kind or humane, that these dogs don’t realize the dangers and we’re sending them out as canaries in a coal mine—almost as sacrifices.
But with the dog out front, even on leash, he’s always the most endangered. The idea behind using soldier dogs is that they save lives by detecting explosives before someone can get killed by one. If a dog ends up dying while the men and women behind him live, he will be greatly mourned and remembered as a hero.
Nobody wants to see a dog die. “It just sucks. It’s a shitty situation,” says Master Chief Thompson. “It hurts a lot. Just about as much as it does to lose a handler.”
Gunny watches as Navy Master-at-Arms Second Class Joshua Raymond tries working his dog Rex P233 off leash for the first time while looking for roadside explosives. The dog doesn’t want to get more than ten feet away from Raymond. The handler explains that he’s not allowed to have his dog off leash at his home base.
“We can get another Rex,” Gunny tells him, “but we can’t get another you. Parents who lose their son or daughter out there, it stays with them for the rest of their life. Children who lose a parent, it’s tragic. But tough as it sounds, if your dog dies, sad as that is, you get to come back and take out Flea Biscuit Two and start all over again.”
Raymond and Rex walk down the hot dirt road, no shade in sight, just rocks and sand and dried dirt, with the occasional bit of plucky scrub poking through. Rex goes on in front about twelve feet, but then turns around and waits for his handler. The dog is accustomed to feeling the end of the leash well before now.
“Put your toy away, show your dog your hands,” shouts out Gunny as Raymond keeps walking. “Tell him ‘I don’t have it, but there’s a way of earning it,’ and you gotta send him back down there. Good boy, keep going, good boy, keep going! Don’t let him think for himself! Find that command, maybe it’s ‘forward,’ maybe it’s ‘go,’ use your body and step into him. The dog doesn’t know he’s allowed to be that far away. There you go!
“Now back up! Now the dog takes a picture and, hey! I can be away! He can go twenty-five feet and you can back up twenty-five feet, and now you have fifty feet between you.”
About twenty minutes into it, the dog looks like he’s getting kind of used to the idea of being off leash. He’s walking down the road and off to the sides with more confidence, not stopping so often to wait for his handler. “They all want to be free, with a little guidance, of course,” says Gunny. “No one wants to have something tugging on their neck all the time.”
Raymond is clearly impressed with what his dog has been able to do. But it goes so much against the navy protocol he has been trained to follow that he can’t imagine being able to “get away with” using it.
Gunny explains that inside the wire (on an FOB), leashes are mandatory. “But I’m here to tell you for a fact that you are authorized to not only work your dog off leash here, but also when you go outside the wire in Afghanistan. If anything ever happens, call Master Chief Thompson. I guarantee he’ll offer his career to back you up. So will I.
“If you find something out there, no one’s going to be like ‘Hey, leash up!’ I guarantee, in fact, that you will get an extra scoop of mashed potatoes and a tent with AC for you and Rex.”
Because of the off-leash capabilities being taught here, Gunny and his staff go a step further than the usual deferred response training. When a dog responds to an IED, the people who teach this course don’t just want the dog to stay there staring at it until he gets paid. “In the real world, the handler’s not going to walk way over to where the dog is responding,” Porras says. “The dog has to be able to leave the odor and come back to you. It’s safer all the way around.”
It’s not that hard to teach, as it turns out. The dog gets his million-dollar reward only when he comes back to the handler—and not when he responds to the explosive. Getting strong on the recall command (“Come!”) can serve these dogs well for other reasons as well in Afghanistan. Feral and stray dogs are commonplace, and dogs have gone MIA chasing after them. As well, dirt roads can appear seemingly out of nowhere, with surprising traffic.
“You don’t want to let your dog be done in by these dangers,” Gunny Knight says. “There are enough of those as it is. A whole lotta shit can go wrong out there.”
Air Force Technical Sergeant Adam Miller walks with his German shepherd, Tina M111, down a dirt road toward a small village, rifle poised. On the right, a white mosque topped with blue and gold. A billboard asking for help for Afghan schoolchildren. To the left, a service station with one nonworking gas pump. A crashed, abandoned pickup truck. Up ahead, several mud-walled buildings, some small, a few two-story. A heap of concrete walls from what looks like a bombed-out building. Several stalls making up a tiny marketplace. In the background, intermittent gunfire.
Miller and his dog walk on—Miller wearing full kit, Tina in harness and leash, which attaches somewhere on Miller’s beltline so his hands can be free to use his rifle. It’s 11 A.M., 114 degrees. Suddenly more gunfire. “The dog’s down!” shouts someone on his team, and without hesitating, Miller reaches down to Tina, hoists her over his left shoulder, and with rifle still ready to take out anyone intent on harming him or his dog, moves a little faster now, toward shelter, anything that will protect them while he tries to save her.
Within two minutes, they make it to a cube-shaped mud-and-concrete building—more of a hut, really. They disappear inside.
This was not in the script. What just happened? I jog over to look in through a window opening, and there’s Miller crouched over his dog, working furiously to fix her. This was supposed to be a simulation. We’re at the Canine Village just a couple hundred meters away from the dog kennels where we started the day at YPG. But there on the ground, incongruously—sickeningly—is Tina’s severed leg. It seems to have been blown completely off her body, and there’s an IV flowing into it. How in God’s name did this happen?
And why would you put an IV in a severed leg, anyway? I try to look at Tina. She is lying down, and the earth beneath her is wet. Miller is wrapping bandages around her and talking to her. I can only see her front end, but her face does not look like the face of a dog whose leg is two feet away from her. Miller moves, and I see that all four limbs are firmly attached to Tina. Then in the corner of the room, I see someone looking on. She offers Miller advice about the wrap. In a moment, she suggests he do something with the IV on what’s called a Jerry leg around here.
(A Jerry leg is a realistic, large, furry, fake dog leg that handlers can use for practicing placing IVs, bandaging, splinting, and giving injections. Complete Jerry dogs are also used for training. They have an artificial pulse and expandable lungs for mouth-to-snout resuscitation. There are also dogs that can be intubated, but the program doesn’t currently have any of those.)
Predeployment training does not get much more realistic than this. Miller would later tell me that he was exhausted when he got Tina to the building, and his adrenaline was pumping almost as it would have in a real-life war emergency with Tina. “It’s the best canine training I’ve ever had. The hardest, too,” he says. “If this doesn’t prepare you for Afghanistan, nothing will.”
The woman who is helping Miller patch up his dog is Army Captain Emily Pieracci. She is a veterinarian, and one of her main jobs is to prepare handlers here in every aspect of emergency care possible, as well as in the prevention of problems to begin with. She also makes sure all dogs who come through here are ready for deployment—medically fit and not suffering from heat casualties.
Pieracci grew up with dogs. Her mother was a police dog handler for the Washington State Patrol. Pieracci graduated Washington State University’s veterinary school in 2009 and spent several months working in the private sector in the field of emergency medicine in order to pay back her student loans.
She joined the army in 2010. She has found her calling. “The army offered something different from regular civilian practice. I got to jump out of airplanes, shoot weapons, and get lost doing land navigation. I could be a vet and also do a lot of active stuff that didn’t involve veterinary medicine.” (The army also repaid her vet school loans, which in this economy was a huge blessing.)
Within her first month at Yuma, she knew this was the place for her. She loves working with the handlers and their dogs. “I could not imagine being anywhere else other than the military. To me, this job carries so much meaning. I have such a strong sense of purpose when I care for these dogs. Keeping them healthy saves our troops’ lives. It’s both powerful and humbling all at the same time.”
Pieracci enjoys the heat here, too. But it’s this very heat that can also do in the best dogs. Heat injuries among working dogs are not uncommon here or at Lackland or in Afghanistan. On warm days, handlers take their dogs’ temperatures (rectally, with digital thermometers; a dog’s normal body temperature is between about 101 and 102.5) every two hours, sometimes more. But temperature tolerance can vary greatly. It’s not necessarily how hot the dogs get, but how well they can compensate. One MWD went down out here at only 104. Some dogs hit 109 and do fine after they get cooled off quickly. It all depends on the individual dog. Just as important an indicator as temperature, or more so, is how a dog acts.
As Pieracci explains it, heat injury has three categories: heat stress, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. The signs progress very rapidly, and heat stress and heat exhaustion can be missed by handlers if they are not looking for these. Heat stroke is the most severe form. Signs include rectal temps above 108, unwillingness to work, lethargy, vomiting, diarrhea, uncontrolled panting, and seizures.
Reaching a level defined as heat stroke is different for every dog. But most military working dogs have very high drive, which works against those looking out for them; these dogs would rather work than not. That means handlers have to be extremely vigilant for early warning signs.
Dogs here always have patches shaved on their front legs. That’s for easier access to the cephalic vein if a dog goes down during training. It’s a precautionary measure Pieracci takes to save time in the field during an emergency, and she encourages handlers to shave this area every two weeks while deployed. She uses the vein to administer IV fluids, which help cool the dog quickly, support stable blood pressure, and help avoid shock. On deployment, if no medics or vets are around, the handler will have to do this. That’s why they insert all IVs during veterinary procedures. It helps keep them ready just in case they need to act quickly on their own.
Pieracci says that dogs who go through Yuma tend to fare better with heat injuries downrange than other MWDs. That’s mostly due to handler knowledge. Part of the reason the dogs train out here is to show handlers what their dogs look like when they’re getting hot: Does the dog seek shade? Does she quit working, or will she keep working no matter how hot it gets? Having the handlers see how their dogs react in Yuma helps them identify when their dog might be overheating in Afghanistan.
Coming to Yuma also makes handlers hyperaware of the need to check dog trailers every ten minutes to ensure the air-conditioning is working when dogs are inside. (It’s not very cold air, but just enough to make it somewhat comfortable—or at least tolerable.) “There’s a side of me no one wants to see if you kill your dog in one of these,” Gunny says as he knocks on an empty trailer.
In late September 2011, two marine IDDs were being transported to Yuma from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The contractors (the dogs were not with their handlers) responsible for the dogs’ care during transport stopped overnight in Phoenix and allegedly left the dogs in the travel trailer unattended. They found IDD Ace dead the next morning, and IDD Max was in critical condition.
According to Pieracci, Max was taken to a Phoenix emergency veterinary hospital, where he received three blood transfusions and massive amounts of fluid and medication. He was in kidney failure and bleeding internally from the heat stroke. He was severely dehydrated, and the vets were worried about his brain swelling from the high levels of sodium in his blood. He remained in critical condition for ten days, but he pulled through.
“He was a real fighter. He was discharged just three days ago and is on his way to Lackland, where he will most likely be adopted out. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to deploy to a hot environment again after the severity of his case. He may have some long-term kidney and brain damage, and quite frankly, he’s been through enough,” says Pieracci. “He deployed in 2009 and 2010, and I know he served his country honorably. He deserves a nice comfy couch for as long as he’s got left, if you ask me.” She has never met Max, but she was on the phone with the Phoenix vets every two to four hours while he fought back from the brink of death. “I feel quite attached to him even though I’ve never met him. I would love to meet him before he retires, but I’m not sure that will happen.”
Those contractors may want to stay out of Gunny Knight’s way.
More parachutists drop in front of us as we round a bend later toward the kennels. “Hollywood, that’s what they are,” Gunny spits.
“I don’t know how many frickin’ millions of dollars they spend every year to let these guys jump out of planes. Dogs save so many lives out there, this course has saved untold numbers, and as of now, we have no funding after October 2012.”
Finally, perhaps, we’ve come to the reason he feels disdain for the jumpers.
It costs the DOD about $750,000 a year to run the IASK Course. Some 225 handlers go through the course annually. Despite the tremendous (if unquantifiable) success of the course, it’s on the chopping block because of the same major budget cuts causing pain everywhere in the military. The program is currently considered a Tier III course, which means it’s looked at as “extra” in times of budget crises.
But what is $750,000 when it comes to saving lives? If you have to put a life in terms of dollars, it costs the government $400,000 to $500,000 in death benefits for every soldier, sailor, airman, or marine killed in action. The Defense Department would have been shelling out more money for the lives Patrick saved that day than it costs to run the IASK Course for an entire year.
“It’s astronomical the number of lives that are being saved because of this Yuma program,” says Bowe. “And I will panhandle to get this if I have to.”
The idea is for the course—which began in late 2005 as an “urgent need” program—to become a formal, required course. This would guarantee funding for awhile. Bowe had exhausted two of three options by the time this book went to press. “The program absolutely must not, cannot go away,” Bowe says. “Too many people and dogs will die.”
I would not be surprised if dogs around here smell a little extra fear these days.
The mind of a soldier, the nose of a trained dog: a perfect partnership,” dog behaviorist and anthrozoologist John Bradshaw wrote me one day during a round of e-mails about a dog’s sense of smell. It was a refreshing change from the mound of complex scientific journal articles that had accumulated on my desk about the subject of a dog’s sense of smell, including one I was trying to get through at the moment: “The Fluid Dynamics of Canine Olfaction: Unique Nasal Airflow Patterns as an Explanation of Macrosmia.”
If dogs had noses like yours or mine, they would have an utterly different and diminished role in today’s military. The Department of Defense would still likely use some dogs for patrol purposes (although there are currently no “patrol only” dogs), but as it is now, those skills are rarely called upon. And say what you will about companionship or the value of a unit having another set of eyes, we are involved in a war where IEDs are the number one killer. If soldier dogs didn’t have such excellent noses, they would be a rare breed.
Dog owners are all too aware that there’s something different about the way dogs sense the world. For instance, there’s the old “Nice to meet you! Now I’ll sniff your crotch and learn more about you!” business that embarrasses many of us when we have company over. And it’s a dog’s sense of smell that’s at least partly responsible for why walks that would take ten minutes without a dog take at least twice as long (especially with a male dog) if you let the dog set the tempo. On walks, I find myself asking Jake things like “How could you possibly smell that tuft of grass for an entire minute? Can’t you see it’s just grass?”
In a way, dogs are wonderful travel companions because they do force you to slow down from the madcap pace many of us maintain on vacation. We try to fit in too many activities, too many sites, and then we return feeling more exhausted than when we left.
With a dog, though, you have to stop the car more frequently than you might normally, so the dog can have a bathroom break and stay comfortable. And you can’t just race around from one attraction to another when you’re hoofing it with a dog. A dog will, by his very nature, force you to slow down a bit. In other words, to use a cliché I have used too many times in my talks: Dogs help you stop and smell the roses.
I never really thought too much about the literal meaning of a dog smelling a rose until I came across this description by Alexandra Horowitz in her wonderful book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs, See, Smell, and Know:
Imagine if each detail of our visual world were matched by a corresponding smell. Each petal on a rose may be distinct, having been visited by insects leaving pollen footprints from faraway flowers. What is to us just a single stem actually holds a record of who held it, and when. A burst of chemicals marks where a leaf was torn. The flesh of the petals, plump with moisture compared to that of the leaf, holds a different odor besides. The fold of a leaf has a smell; so does a dew drop on a thorn. And time is in those details: while we can see one of the petals drying and browning, the dog can smell this process of decay and aging.
Since reading that passage, and learning a great deal about dogs’ sense of smell, I have been more understanding when Jake stops and spends a full minute inspecting a neighbor’s hedge. I am so awed by what a dog’s nose is capable of, in fact, that I try to add a little time to our walks so I don’t have to rush him from his rich world of fascinating odors. That hedge is imbued with odors representing many things, including all the dogs who have preceded Jake. “Dogs read about the world through their noses, and they write their messages, at least to other dogs, in their urine,” psychologist and prolific dog-book author Stanley Coren told me. Who am I to tear Jake away from his favorite news and gossip blog?
I’m now also slightly less discomfited when Jake and another dog greet each other by heading right for each other’s nether regions. Chances are the dogs are learning far more about each other than the other dog’s owner and I are learning about each other; we make idle chitchat and try very hard not to notice our dogs’ utter fascination with each other’s anal area and sexual organs; exactly what the dogs are learning about each other, and what they do with that information, has yet to be figured out by science. But it’s very likely far beyond “Nice weather we’re having, eh?” “Yup, how ’bout them Giants?” It’s probably more along the lines of “How old are you, and what’s your personality like, and what did you have for dinner, and are you gonna be nice or a jerk?”
The canine proclivity for sniffing out what we might consider the more intimate olfactory signals may have helped the Allies in World War II: Nazis stationed along the Maginot Line were using dogs as messengers. French soldiers attempted to shoot the dogs, but the dogs were quick and stealthy.
Enter a French femme fatale. She was a little thing, a messenger dog who had just gone into heat. She went on her mission, and when she returned to her post that evening, about a dozen German military dogs were close behind. It was a small victory played out in the battlefields. Toujours l’amour.
Figures abound about how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than ours. There are so many variables that it’s almost impossible to quantify. I’ve seen figures indicating that it’s from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 1,000,000 times better. Bradshaw explains that dogs can detect some, if not most, odors at concentrations of parts per trillion. The human nose, by contrast, is lucky to get into the parts-per-billion range and is often relegated to parts per million. That makes a dog’s nose between 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than ours. The range is obviously very wide, and the sensitivity depends on variables like the dog and the odor. Research continues.
Coren gives an example of what this extra sensitivity looks like. Let’s say you have a gram of a component of human sweat known as butyric acid. Humans are quite adept at smelling this, and if you let it evaporate in the space of a ten-story building, many of us would still be able to detect a faint scent upon entering the building. Not bad, for a human nose. But consider this: If you put the 135-square-mile city of Philadelphia under a three-hundred-foot-high enclosure, evaporated the gram of butyric acid, and let a dog in, the average dog would still be able to detect the odor.
If a dog can detect BO in such tiny amounts, imagine what it’s like for a dog to be immersed in a world of sweaty humans in a far smaller space. Coren was recently able to observe one of his dogs in just such a situation, when he was out picking up a friend at the gym. He brought along Ripley, his young Cavalier King Charles spaniel, whom he held in his arms. When they entered the gym, Ripley’s nose flew up in the air and he went stiff—a clear-cut case of olfactory overload.
This same dog would go on to nearly blind Coren in one eye the week before we spoke in October 2011. Coren had fallen asleep in his favorite chair. The nine-month-old Ripley, being both a lap dog and a face-licker, took advantage of the moment and, in the process of enthusiastically slathering Coren’s face, got one of his nails lodged in the inner margin of Coren’s left eye. The dog, unable to extract it, used his other paw to press against Coren to dislodge it. When I interviewed him, Coren’s eye had ruptured, the iris and the lens were gone. He’d had two surgeries, with two or three more to go “before they give up,” he said. He takes it in stride. He would have started to go blind in that eye from a progressive eye disorder within a couple of years anyway, so he says the dog just speeded up the process. I wondered if maybe the dog had some sense of his eye problem and was trying to help him, like dogs I have read about who try to chew away cancerous moles. Coren, perhaps not surprisingly, does not give Ripley any accolades as a diagnostician or surgeon.
A handy way a dog’s olfactory sensitivity manifests itself is with something called odor layering. This enables a dog to separate a chosen scent from the “background noise” of all the other scents, much as humans could visually sort a bunch of miscellaneous items spread out on the ground. Dog handlers have variations of analogies for odor layering, and they’re all based on food. Probably the most common: We humans can smell the pizza. A dog can smell the dough, the sauce, the cheese, and all the spices and toppings. A dog might even be able to smell the components of each of those. Not just dough, but flour and yeast. Not just sauce, but tomatoes and basil and oregano. Some handlers and dog trainers use chocolate cake as an example, others use stew. But it all boils down to the fact that dogs have very sensitive noses that are capable of teasing apart scents as you and I could never dream of doing.
As Navy Lieutenant Commander John Gay was driving me to the submarine in Norfolk to see little Lars do his detection work, he told me that even his late boxer, Boris, was adept at odor layering in his heyday. (Boxers are generally not renowned sniffers.) Gay’s wife used to bake all kinds of muffins and cookies, and Boris would show no interest. But when she made a particular kind of cookie that Boris was allowed to eat, he waited eagerly by the oven door, even though she gave no indication the cookies were for him. Oh, and the dog could also smell flies. Flies.
We humans have, not surprisingly, found plenty of ways to put this exquisitely sensitive olfactory apparatus to work in detecting odors of importance to us. Some of them seem nothing but miraculous.
Dogs are proving very adept at sniffing out a variety of cancers, including lung, ovarian, skin, and colon malignancies. Specially trained dogs can predict seizures in those prone to them, or sense dangerous changes in blood sugar levels in diabetics. Dogs can detect pests, including bedbugs and termites. They’ve been used to sniff out cell phones in prisons, oil and gas pipeline leaks, flammable liquid traces in arson investigations, toxic molds, diseases in beehives, and contraband foodstuffs. They can tell when a cow is going into heat. They can even use their noses to find cash. Jake has shown no talent for this I’m afraid.
Former Marine Sergeant Brandon Liebert, whom you may remember from an earlier chapter (his dog, Monty, found six hundred rounds of antiaircraft ammunition), was stationed at Cherry Point, North Carolina, in 2005. One day he sent out a dog team to sweep the convention center in Morehead City prior to a Marine Corps Ball. The team went out on what was a formality. But a few hours later Liebert received a call to say that the dog had responded to something in one part of the convention site. Verification was required. Liebert was the only handler available, so he got Monty and rushed off to investigate.
“When we got to the area of where the other dog had responded, Monty began to circle the room multiple times and then finally stopped in the middle of the room. I asked the handler what his dog did, and the handler stated that his dog had responded on the tables behind me. We got out of the area and informed the local authorities.”
It would later turn out that there had been a Ducks Unlimited show the previous weekend and that there were a lot of guns and ammunition for sale. The vendors had placed the ammunition on tables, and so it was a residual odor the dogs had picked up on. The ball went on as planned.
Not all dogs have the same genius for sniffing. Dogs with longer snouts generally have more sensitive noses than dogs with stubby noses, like bulldogs. This is one of the reasons why you will probably never see a pug as a military working dog, unless the military decides it needs something rather amusing-looking to distract the enemy.
Let’s see why size matters. If you have more odor analyzers in your nose, you are going to be more sensitive to smell. We humans have about five million odor receptors in our noses. The area these take up if unfurled would be about the size of a postage stamp. Dogs with long noses have far more of these scent receptors. Dachshunds have 125 million. But German shepherds have 225 million of them. So do beagles, which is pretty amazing considering they’re half the size of shepherds. Bloodhounds have the most, with three hundred million. A bloodhound’s olfactory receptor area is about the size of a handkerchief. (You will not see bloodhounds in the military, though. Doc Hilliard explains that while they have great noses, and can be excellent trackers, most do not retrieve or play with Kongs or balls the way they need to for the training. I wonder if another reason could be that their droopy, drooly countenances don’t seem very “military.”)
Smell is the dominant sense in dogs—even in those with less prominent snouts. From the outer nose (known as a dog’s “leather”) to the brain, a dog’s olfactory system makes ours look like it needs to go back to the manufacturer. (But our eyes have all the grandeur of their noses, so it all works out.)
Here’s a quick look at what happens when a military working dog we’ll call Sam, a German shepherd, sniffs an odor of interest; let’s say ammonium nitrate. Sam is close to a scent, but not sure quite where it is yet. He sniffs more rapidly, so the air coming into his nose is more turbulent and more of it can be distributed onto his olfactory membranes. He can sniff up to twenty times for every exhalation if he’s really interested in a scent. He can even pull a neat trick of inhaling at the same time he exhales. And he can move his nostrils independently, which helps him figure out just where a scent is coming from. When Sam thinks that he may be quite near the source, he will sniff more deeply, actively drawing air over the source to confirm its location. At this point he may even be able to compare the concentration of odor between left and right nostrils, which will both confirm that the source is nearby and further help to pinpoint its location.
As he sniffs, scent molecules stick to the moisture on Sam’s nose. (The moisture is actually mucus, which helps snortle the molecules all the way through the olfaction process.) Scent molecules dissolve in the mucus, and the sniffing carries them into the nose, to two bony plates called turbinates. This is the home of those millions of scent-detecting cells discussed earlier.
Adding to Sam’s nasal prowess is a body part that doesn’t seem to exist in any functional form in humans: an extra olfactory chamber known as the vomeronasal organ, aka Jacobson’s organ. It’s located above the roof of a dog’s mouth, just behind the upper incisors. It has ducts that open to the nose and mouth so scent molecules can be processed. Most mammals and reptiles have a vomeronasal organ. It’s used primarily to detect pheromones (not terribly helpful for Sam on the job), but some scientists think it may have other functions we’re not yet aware of.
The brains of dogs and people and most vertebrates contain two structures called olfactory bulbs, which help us decode smells. The olfactory bulbs of dogs are about four times as big as those of people, despite the fact that dogs’ brains are far smaller than ours. Between this and his 225 million scent receptors, Sam is able to find the ammonium nitrate quickly. He sits, stares, and is called back by his handler, who gives him his cherished Kong and praises him up like mad.
All in a day’s work for a good nose.
Oh, and lest you think it’s all about sniffing and letting nature take it from there, a dog also has to do a great deal of legwork to locate an odor. Bradshaw explains that a dog’s first strategy is to run cross-wind to figure out whether or not he is directly downwind of the source. But wind spreads scent in unpredictable ways, so this may not be very informative. If the scent is continuous, the source must be very close by, so the wind direction is an unreliable clue, and visual cues may provide the best indication of the source. If the scent is discontinuous, its source is probably some distance away, so the dog will briefly switch to proceeding upwind; if the scent is quickly lost, he will switch back to running cross-wind to try to position himself more precisely in the odor “corridor.” Then, switching between upwind and cross-wind running will bring the dog, somewhat crabwise, to within close range of the source.
But what if the scent itself is moving?
In the silence of the vast desert, you can hear the chop-chop of the marine UH-1 helicopter (aka a Huey) approaching for miles. It comes near and veers suddenly, looping in quick semi-amusement-park fashion, circles overhead again, and descends. As it nears the ground, a fast-moving cloud of dust and tiny pebbles races toward Gunny Knight and me, dinging my camera lens and making it impossible to keep our eyes open for the next several seconds.
The air remains thick with dust when out of the helicopter, whose rotors are still churning, run a dog and handler, followed by another dog team. The handlers hunch forward slightly as they run, to better protect themselves from the churning sand and air. They race off into the distance, then stop. The dogs sniff the ground with great interest, but just then the helicopter lifts off, and we lose sight of everything again.
Gunny and I catch up with these teams, and a few others, while they’re resting up after having tracked a “bad guy” varying distances at the Yuma Proving Ground. The dogs are combat tracker dogs. While explosives dogs find bombs, these dogs find the people who plant them. (In friendly operations, they can track down lost people.) The dogs here today are training for real-life combat missions, which often involve these rapid helicopter drops. The dogs need to get used to these so they’re ready when they deploy.
One of the dogs was so scared of the helicopter this day that he put the brakes on as he approached it and had to be nearly carried aboard. He spent the ride with his head tucked firmly into the crotch of his handler, who had to move her rifle to make room for him. (Once off the helicopter, though, he tracked his man beautifully, I’m told.) Most dogs stayed very close to their handlers, and hunkered down and strapped in, for the ride. One veteran dog took in the view from the helicopter’s edge while firmly grasped by his handler.
These dogs are trained to track human odor over distances. They pick up a scent where a handler “suggests” (near an IED, for instance, or the last place an insurgent stood) and follow it. Tracks can be miles long and hours—or even days—old. Recall James Earl Ray, who broke out of a Tennessee prison in 1977 and was pursued by sister bloodhounds named Sandy and Little Red. They started their manhunt days after his escape, but within a few hours they had found him a mere three miles away. (Now there are a couple of hound dogs who could do the job.)
Tracking dogs keep their heads down and follow the scent on the ground. The track is a combination of human scent and crushed vegetation or stirred-up dirt or sand. Disturbed environments, like crushed grass (the grass “bleeds,” in a sense), give off unique smells. But nothing as unique as the smell of the person being pursued.
You may think that if you shower well and wear deodorant, you smell like just about everyone else out there. But our individual scent fingerprints are unique. As Horowitz says, “To our dogs, we are our scent.”
Anyone who is thinking of outwitting a tracking dog one day should read what she has to say about our scents:
Humans stink. The human armpit is one of the most profound sources of odor produced by any animal; our breath is a confusing melody of smells; our genitals reek. The organ that covers our body—our skin—is itself covered in sweat and sebaceous glands, which are regularly churning out fluid and oils holding our particular brand of scent. When we touch objects, we leave a bit of ourselves on them; a slough of skin, with its clutch of bacteria steadily munching and excreting away. This is our smell, our signature odor.
Coren likens our shedding skin cells to the Peanuts character Pigpen, who always has a visible billow of dirt around him. It seems humans have the same billow, only it’s made up of skin cells, which when in this flake form are known as rafts or scurf. We shed fifty million skin cells each minute. That’s a lot of scurf. “They fall like microscopic snowflakes,” Coren says. Thankfully, we can’t see this winter wonderland ourselves. But these rafts or scurf, with their biological richness, including the bacteria that sheds with them, are very “visible” to dogs’ noses.
Where a dog begins on a track is naturally where the scent is weakest, because it’s been there longest. As the track progresses in the right direction, the scent should get stronger. The increasing strength of a track is something dogs rely on. “They start at the farthest point in the past and work their way up, we hope, to the present moment, where they find who they’re tracking,” says Marine Corporal Wesley Gerwin, course chief/instructor supervisor for the combat tracker course. “It’s sort of like a dog’s version of time travel.”
Dry heat and ultraviolet light can cause a track to disintegrate quickly. Moisture and lack of sun help preserve tracks. Even if someone tries to throw a dog off the scent by going through a stream or river, there’s still likely to be a track. In most cases, if the dog is not too far behind, the water will not erase the scent. In fact, breezes can waft a person’s scent to a moist riverbank, where it can remain for a long time. (If a river is flowing very quickly and is relatively shallow, though, the scent dissipates far more swiftly.)
There aren’t many combat tracking dogs in the military. The numbers are in the low dozens, but security concerns preclude a more precise count. CTD handlers have to have been military working dog handlers for a minimum of a year; they then spend six additional weeks in a CTD course—four weeks at Lackland, two weeks at Yuma. The dogs are trained as combat trackers from the start. They begin tracking at distances of a foot or two (a second or two old) and work their way up. The oldest recorded track since the CTD program started in its most recent incarnation a few years ago is seventy-two hours, in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. Gerwin says he’s heard talk of a track up to five days old, but it’s not official.
In addition to their stellar noses, combat tracking dogs, like all military dogs, rely on other senses to do their jobs. Phenomenal as their noses are, soldier dogs can’t go purely by scent. A combat tracker, for instance, will use his eyes and ears to pinpoint his target as he approaches it. Patrol dogs depend a great deal on hearing and eyesight as well, especially when it comes to detecting the subtle movements or sounds of a suspect.
Like their noses, dogs’ ears are significantly more sensitive than ours, especially at high frequencies. “Dogs would describe us as having high-frequency deafness,” writes Bradshaw in his book Dog Sense. In the Pacific Islands during World War II, soldier dogs could sometimes detect the thin wires on booby traps by the very high-pitched whine produced when air moved over them. Some dogs ended up being trained in just this sort of sound detection. (The sound was utterly inaudible to any humans nearby.)
Canine ears have a reputation of being able to hear sounds up to four times farther than ours can. The mobility of their ears plays a role in helping locate and focus on sounds. As anyone who has ever watched a dog listen to something of great interest will tell you, a dog’s ears almost seem to have minds of their own. It’s no wonder: Dogs have about eighteen muscles helping them swivel and tilt their ears in response to sound. It’s pretty endearing to watch. Jake is adept at this ear maneuver whenever he begs for food or sits in the backyard listening for the cat.
Dogs have poor color vision compared to ours, decent night vision, and generally see a wider picture than we do because of the placement of their eyes. But how a dog sees the world is highly dependent on what a dog looks like. Dogs with longer noses, like most military working dogs, tend to have more photoreceptors crowded together in a horizontal streak across the eye. This “visual streak,” as it’s called, makes for better panoramic vision, with a field of vision that extends up to about 240 degrees (as opposed to our full frontal 180). Dogs with this kind of vision can even have some awareness of what’s going on behind them. But don’t ask them to focus on anything closer than ten to fifteen inches in front of their noses. Their eyes aren’t set up for that kind of vision. Dogs with shorter noses likely do better with closer vision. Their vision cells are packed in more of a circular shape, making for a narrower field of vision and more visual acuity up front.
This may explain why retrievers retrieve and lapdogs, with their big forward-looking eyes and their small snouts, like to sit on your lap and look at you.
Scientists are continuing to investigate the eyes, ears, and noses of dogs. And beyond the realm of these senses, they’re reaching out to get to know more about dog psychology, including how dogs think, feel, solve problems, and why they behave the way they do. Canine cognition is a relatively new field that’s burgeoning with enthusiastic scientists eager to plumb dogs’ minds for things we’ve wondered about but never explored before.
The heart of the Duke Canine Cognition Center is the dog lab. Unlike many laboratories that use dogs as guinea pigs for research, there is no pain in this lab. There aren’t even cages. In fact, the lab looks like a small dance studio. The white floor is striped with an assortment of tape colors; red, green, yellow, and blue. The dogs who come here enter with their owners, stay within feet of their owners, leave with their owners, and inevitably get treats and lots of attention during the studies. It’s Center Director Brian Hare’s idea of “an awesome place to learn about dogs.”
It’s late morning, and Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology and cognitive neuroscience, warns me that he just had cake from Costco and a coffee. “I’m totally ADD, I warn you. I’m really excited about a lot of things,” he tells me, blue eyes glittering. For the next hour, Hare talks fast and nonstop about the dog lab as he careens about his office. There’s something about his energy, his look, and demeanor that keeps reminding me of Brendan Fraser’s George of the Jungle—only Hare’s rendition holds advanced degrees, has earned great respect in the world of academia, and has the tremendous responsibility that goes along with founding and running a major research facility at one of the nation’s top universities.
This lab is one of a few dog cognition labs that have opened at universities in the United States in the last several years, including one run by Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College. Until the late 1990s, little attention was paid to the topic of canine cognition. Primates were the primary animals being studied for cognition. But “now it’s like out-of-control exciting, trying to unlock the secrets of a dog’s mind. Now everybody is so super-excited by this research on dogs, from psychologists to anthropologists to the average American dog lover,” Hare says as he swipes his hands through his shock of thick, wavy hair.
Hare and his staff had just written a grant to the Department of Defense when I visited. He admits he’s never worked with military dogs before, but he has many ideas about how his center can help advance the understanding of dogs in a way he thinks would benefit the military dog program. He’d like to develop a cognitive test for dogs who have been involved in stressful situations, like deployments. He also wants to be able to put together a system so handlers can check their dogs for stress in the field by methods other than simply looking at behavior. This involves testing cortisol levels in conjunction with core body temperatures, as taken by a thermal imaging temperature gun.
In addition, he’d eventually like to be able to use the results of an ongoing study on something called “laterality bias” to help improve accuracy of detector dogs. “Dogs tend to go to the right. A lot tend to stay to the right of what they’re searching,” Hare explains. “It’s something you should know about your dog before you send him to find explosives, if he favors one side over the other. Don’t you think that’s important information?”
I’m not sure what the Department of Defense thinks of Hare’s ideas, but even if he doesn’t get the grant the first time, the DOD should be prepared for more grant proposals in the future. “We want to help save money and dogs and save lives, and we’ll keep trying,” Hare says.
He and his graduate students are running several studies concurrently. This helps explain the colorful stripes and circles and geometric figures all over the floor of the lab. In certain studies, dogs and people need to be at certain fixed places. Marking up the floor eliminates a variable. The green tape is for the predictions study, the yellow tape is for the inhibitory control study, the worn-out blue tape is for a completed attention study, and the red tape is for the trust study.
The red tape is where we find Alice and Duane Putnam, who have driven for two hours to get here from Warren County, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. (Staffers here tell me that they get calls from dog lovers all over the world who want to bring their dogs to the lab to be part of the research. The lab tries to limit participants to no more than a three-hour drive, so the dog won’t be discombobulated by travel.) The Putnams are here with their dog, Tri, who looks like he’s part Rottweiler, part German shepherd, and a bit of something else. They believe he is the reincarnation of two of their previous dogs, thus the name. (Two plus himself equals three. Tri sounds better than Three.)
The Putnams are fascinated with their dog. They say he’s too smart for his own good. When no one is looking, he opens peanut butter jars and Vaseline jars by screwing off their lids. Then he eats the contents.
Today Tri the Vaseline thief is taking part in the study about trust. He has been here before because his “dog parents,” as they call them at the cognition center, like the idea that they’re contributing to the better understanding of dogs. Besides, it gets them off their ten acres in the rural corner of the state.
Researcher Jingzhi Tan, aka “Hippo,” has devised a study that investigates how trust is established and whether dogs differentiate between owners, a very friendly new acquaintance, and a complete stranger. His goal is actually to find out how humans become friendly and trusting, and he says a good way to study this is through dogs. Many of the studies at the center could end up with significant findings about people as well as dogs.
When I start observing (via a video monitor, so I don’t interfere with the goings-on), Tri is being lovingly petted by a new acquaintance—someone who works at the center. She is on the floor with him, making friends like this for about twenty minutes. The Putnams are thrilled Tri is letting a stranger handle him without balking. He’s usually not quite as social with people he doesn’t know.
Following the petting session, this new friend and a complete stranger will enter the room and take turns sitting next to bowls with food—one bowl will be near the person, one will be near an empty chair. If the dog thinks a person is risky, the idea is that he’d try to avoid that person, and would pick the food that’s farther away. Mary, an intern who helps coordinate dog visits here, is the stranger today. But Tri doesn’t seem to mind going near her. He is fine with his new friend, too. In other variations of this study, the new friend and stranger take turns pointing to food bowls and researchers see if the dog trusts one more than the other.
The study, and others like it, could eventually have implications for military dogs and how they come to trust their handlers, but that would be years down the road. What counts now in this room is that Tri, dog number 54 for this study, is done and that he has trusted more people than the Putnams would have thought. They proudly stroke his head and tell him, “You did good!”
Alice Putnam exhorts him: “Kissy Mama!” He doesn’t. “He’s not much of a kisser,” she explains. She says she knows her dog well.
But how well does her dog know her? Chances are, much better than she would suspect.
Alexandra Horowitz likens dogs to anthropologists: They study us. They observe us. They smell changes in our very chemistry. They learn to predict us. “They know us in ways our human partners sometimes do not,” she says.
I’ve heard a similar refrain dozens of times from handlers, particularly those who have deployed and spent almost every hour for months with their dogs: Their dogs know them better than their spouses or parents do.
Nearly every handler I interviewed, for instance, said that his dog can tell when he’s having a bad day. Most civilian dog lovers would say the same thing. But how can it be that a dog—who doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t know about problems with your bills or your boss or your in-laws—can somehow sense when things are amiss in your life?
It’s a phenomenon many military working dog handlers and instructors refer to as “dumping down the leash.” How you’re feeling and acting is observed by a dog, who will react to this information in different ways. A tense handler is likely to make a dog more tense. Likewise, if a handler is confident and not fearful, even after a loud explosion nearby, the idea is that a dog who is not already gun-shy will figure there’s nothing to worry about, with an instinctual logic along the lines of “My handler’s OK with it, and he’s the leader here, so it must be OK.”
Dogs are very sensitive to body language, so the least little tense movement—a change of gait, a slight hunching of shoulders—can be observed and interpreted as something being amiss. When we’re upset, our voices can go up slightly in frequency as well. Dogs get these nuances in ways most people don’t.
Masking strong feelings by acting like things are OK may not always work, either: It’s quite likely that dogs can smell fear, anxiety, even sadness, says Horowitz. The flight-or-fight hormone, adrenaline, is undetectable by our noses, but dogs can apparently smell it. In addition, fear or anxiety is often accompanied by increased heart rate and blood flow, which sends telltale body chemicals more quickly to the skin surface.
It makes for a trifecta of revelations to a dog: a bouquet of visual, auditory, and olfactory cues that makes dogs incredibly tuned in to how we’re feeling.
It’s comforting to think dogs have empathy and want to see the people they care about feel better when things are not quite right. This sort of action adds to their reputation as man’s best friend. But most scientists who study dog behavior say it’s more likely that dogs who seem to be acting in comforting, helpful ways simply want to restore order to their pack.
John Bradshaw explained it to me this way: “People are more important to dogs than anything else, and they rely on us to provide them with a stable and predictable social environment. If they sense that anything unusual is going on, that people are behaving in ways they don’t usually behave, they will do anything they can to restore the situation.
“Initially they’ll do things that have worked in similar situations in the past. They’re not trying to comfort anyone else, they’re trying to comfort themselves, but often one leads to the other. The dog picks up a toy and uses it to get someone’s attention, usually the person who’s behaving oddly (as far as the dog is concerned), but not necessarily. The dog is just craving attention—but if it does this in a “cute” way, then the effect may well be to calm that person down. That is in itself rewarding for the dog, so the next time a similar situation presents itself, the dog wheels out the same strategy. It doesn’t know why its behavior has the desired effect, it just knows that it works.”
It makes sense. And I’ve heard this from a few different dog experts. But I prefer my own interpretation of Jake’s actions when I’m having a rare bad day. He follows me around significantly more, making an extra effort to visit me at my writing desk. He usually leaves me alone here: This is my turf, distraction-free as possible, which is handy on tight deadlines. But on a tough day, Jake will inevitably scratch on my door for admittance. Happy to see a friendly face, I let him in and pet him for awhile. That alone makes me feel better. Then he usually curls up under my desk, falling asleep at my feet.
It may not be scientific, but it feels pretty good to think Jake has empathy. Sometimes he even seems to pick up on my likes and dislikes, favoring the people I enjoy but getting downright testy with one rude man we see sometimes at the park. Whenever we encounter him, this man snarls at me: “Better clean up after your dog, lady.” Apparently he does this to all people with dogs. I don’t take it personally, but it’s annoying.
The first couple of times this happened, I assured him of my poop-scooping vigilance, but now I just try to avoid him when I see him. But sometimes our paths will cross. When they do, Jake does something he doesn’t do with 99.9 percent of the people we meet on our walks. He barks. Just a few good deep bellows, followed by a long stare as if to say, “Leave us alone or else.” I don’t bother telling him to stop. He’ll join up with me within moments, and I quietly cheer him on with a “Good boy!” He may not be wearing one, but my feelings have clearly dumped down the leash.
Of course, Gunny Knight could have told you all about dogs’ senses long ago without any studies. “I don’t need all that scientific stuff. The best lab is right out here with the dogs, and especially over on deployment. That’s where dogs and handlers really get to know each other.”