Navy SEAL Dogs (11 page)

I think it bears repeating that you can't make a dog get over reverting to his aggression mode by doing anything punitive to him. You run the risk of inciting him even more and increasing his aggressive response. Then you have to be even more punitive, and eventually you absolutely break the dog's spirit. What we try to do is make those frightening and unfamiliar experiences, like being around and in a helicopter for the first time, more pleasant through the use of rewards. In training, whether it's bite work or getting a dog used to a muzzle or anything else, I always carry some treats with me. By treats I mostly mean toys or food rewards. When I'm working, I carry both. I even take soft treats and mash them against the inside of a muzzle cage to get dogs who are unwilling to put their snouts in there to get them to associate the muzzle with something they like, something positive. At first, just letting them eat treats out of it is an effective way to get them used to the sight of the muzzle. When it comes time to place the muzzle over the dog's head and snout, it's a much easier thing to accomplish if he isn't already on high alert and anxiety at the sight of the thing.

No matter what you're trying to do with a dog to train him for the role he will play in combat or in your life, it's important that he believes some positive reward is coming his way. As trainers and handlers, our positive-reward system also provides us with a growing confidence that we won't be the ones a dog turns his considerable bite force on.

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How exactly do we refine a dog's innate skills to make him effective at apprehending individuals? Just as with detection work, we start a dog early and continually increase the complexity and duration of the exercises—moving the dog from play as a pup to more serious work as he becomes an adult. We push each dog to near his breaking point.

Beginning when a pup is four to five weeks old, we start to develop and encourage his prey instinct. We always take advantage of a dog's inherent desire to want to chase moving objects. So we'll take a terry cloth towel or a rag, something that's very easy for the pup to grip, and something we can tease him with easily. We'll begin the process of developing the dog's prey instinct so that it becomes a useful skill for things other than just playing tug-of-war.

As you've probably experienced if you've ever raised a pup, when you wave something in front of him he's going to chase after it and try to grab it. In our work, we do something similar, but with the intent to get a pup frustrated that we're the ones that have hold of the rag. We play a little tug with him, and then when he bites in deeper we give him counterpressure by pulling back slightly. Then we hold still. The dog will usually naturally pull and then counter and go a little deeper. When he does that, I'll let go and reward him by letting him have the towel or rag. It's as if I'm saying,
Okay, you chased it, caught it, killed it, now you get to carry your prey off and prance around with it. It's yours and you get to have it. Have fun.

From there, we advance to doing that work in all different types of environments. We do it in buildings, out in fields, in dark places, inside vehicles, or anywhere else that a pup may or may not be during his later training or when he's downrange. A pup is not just environmentally going places. He's chasing balls in those environments. He's doing rag and bite work in those environments.

Just as in every other step of dog training, over time, we take very small and slow baby steps forward. From rags we progress to a puppy sleeve, which is basically a jute pillow. Jute is a pretty coarse fabric, but it's very soft and very easy for a dog to grab onto. Then we apply the same principles we used with the rags and terry cloth towels.

Sometimes we'll take an empty 20-ounce plastic bottle, flatten it, tie it to a string, and tie the string to a pole. Then we'll “flirt pole” the dog with that and tease him with it. It's a tease because it's a much different material than the puppy sleeve and is very hard to hold on to. This exercise teaches a pup that if he wants it, he's going to have to bite down hard and hang on hard or he's going to lose it. With cloths and rags and the puppy sleeve, the dog can use a pretty gentle grip and still manage to hang on to the thing because he's got sharp little puppy teeth that dig in and hold on. That won't work with those plastic bottles.

Even at five or six weeks old, when a puppy is grabbing a rag, we pick him up off the ground, raising his back end higher than his mouth. We pat him hard on the rib cage. We place him on a slippery, elevated surface. All the while, we're still doing the bite work with him. Basically, we are just teaching him that no matter what position his body is in, no matter what environment he's in, he is going to be okay and he just needs to keep those jaws clamping down.

Next, when a dog is between three and six months old, every couple of training sessions we increase the intensity in some way. We might increase the hardness or thickness of the sleeve and the biting material, and then also increase the amount of pressure that we put on a dog, judging what he can take. It's a very, very slow process.

At around seven or eight months, a dog will have his complete set of adult teeth. At this point we'll start to put on the bite suits and start that work with a dog and also start to teach multiarea targeting. To do that, as a dog comes in, we don't stand the same distance away and offer the same body parts to him every time. To do that wouldn't be realistic for either a “street dog” or an SOF dog. Our dogs will be fighting people in a variety of environments. We teach the dogs to look for specific body parts or targets, but we also know that when deployed they may need to improvise. For example, if we focused solely on teaching a dog to bite someone's left bicep, the dog might one day be in the field and find himself trying to subdue an enemy who, for whatever reason, is only showing his right side to the dog. The dog still has to do his job and apprehend this guy. So he has to learn to take what he can get.

Getting a dog comfortable with knowing how to react to something unfamiliar or different is something we work on the entire time. We are always putting a dog in a weird or unusual situation. The guy in the bite suit may move at the last second. He may turn or crouch down or duck out of the way or raise a knee up and lean back or do anything that forces a dog to deal with it.

We'll also do things such as wrestle with a dog. Putting a little bit of pinching or grabbing or twisting pressure on a dog's legs will teach him to keep his legs out of reach. It's important for a dog to do this when he's engaged in fighting someone, so his opponent cannot grab hold of and break the dog's legs. Eventually we'll get to the point when, while he's engaged, a dog does have his legs tucked back behind him and out of the way. We also teach the dog that if someone does grab hold of him and starts to hurt him, he should move his grip to whatever hand, weapon, or other object is attacking him.

We'll also teach a dog that if the scenario presents itself, he should basically circle around back and grip a guy's triceps muscle. It's incredibly difficult to fight a dog when he's got you in the back of the arm. You can't really grab him.

Similar to working through offensive and defensive drives, a trainer needs to be incredibly experienced, very patient, and very knowledgeable in reading each individual dog and knowing how much pressure to put on each one and when to back off and how and when to ratchet up those levels of pressure. Especially in the first year of a dog's life, it is very, very easy to push too hard and go too fast and ruin a good dog by putting too much pressure on him too early.

Sometimes it's difficult because you'll get dogs that are just firecrackers. They're really, really advanced. They're mentally more mature than they should be for their age. Maybe they're physically a little bigger and more mature than you would expect. It's easy to see how you could get caught in pushing the dog a little too far. It's imperative that you don't, or you can have a lasting negative effect on that dog and ruin him.

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I have to admit that as serious as this work is for me, I take a lot of pleasure in creating and participating in these on-site exercises. Just thinking about driving along in an ATV at 35 to 40 miles per hour up a mountain pass where we do a lot of the training, with the dogs keeping up with us for 800 yards of elevation gain for about three-quarters of a mile, gives me an added appreciation for these dogs. They lope along in that classic herder stride, a combination of seemingly effortless athletic grace and fierce determination that gets my heart pumping every time with awe and pride.

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As I mentioned earlier, a dog can be seriously injured, or even killed, if he is turned loose to apprehend someone on a roof or if he is fighting someone who can grab and hurt his legs. This is also true if he is turned loose to apprehend someone who is near a window. During training, as a safety precaution, the dogs are kept on leashes during some of the exercises. Whether a dog is kept on a leash or not when he's in the field will depend on the actual situation he is in. His handler will have to make the decision about when to release the dog, and it generally has to do with when a dog shows a sign that he has picked up the scent trail of a human. So, during these training exercises for apprehension, one of the things I do is evaluate each handler's decisions. I want the handlers to be able to make swift and appropriate choices, obviously, and the only way to do that is to make them work through multiple scenarios with their dogs time and time again.

For one particular exercise, we'd traveled to another compound-type training area. The buildings in this compound were constructed out of cinder block and had small windows where some blocks had been knocked out of the walls. The discarded blocks lay on the ground inside the structures. For this exercise, I told the handlers to keep the dogs on leash until the moment they thought best. What I was hoping would happen was that a handler would release his dog prematurely and I could turn that into a teachable moment for everyone. I'd been standing on a few of those blocks, with my body half inside the room and half hanging out the window and onto the grassy area below. My plan was that as soon as a dog came into the room, I'd jump out the window. Then I would turn around to catch the dog that was sure to follow me out the window.

The point, of course, would be to make it clear to that handler that he'd made a poor choice. Not only had the “bad guy” (me) evaded capture, the MWD had been hurt in that fall from the window. In the exercise, the window was only 30 or so inches off the ground, so no harm would come to the dog. Of course, in real situations windows can be much higher off the ground, and dogs can't jump and bounce back the way cats can. They hit the ground and they hit hard.

Even after all these years of working with these dogs, even I sometimes underestimate just how fast they can go and get their target. On the first go-round, I had barely scrambled out of the window fully intact before the dog was literally nipping at my heels. He didn't come in and follow me through the window as I had predicted. Instead, he came tearing after me, because he had caught wind of me and scurried out the side door. He got in a few choice chews on me. Still, I was glad that I was able to illustrate for the handler, without putting a dog's well-being at risk, what might have happened if he
had
followed me out the window. I chose my profession and the risks and bite marks that go along with it, not to mention the responsibility to provide dogs that have received sound training and are in good health.

Just like humans, dogs occasionally develop nagging injuries during the course of their training from overuse of muscles. Sometimes we'll leave them behind to rest up and heal, but more often they just lag behind for a day or two to recuperate. Sometimes, though, a dog will miss an entire training cycle. When he's ready, he'll join another “class” already in the pipeline.

I'm eager to make sure that the dogs are safe and in the best possible shape to help keep our soldiers, sailors, and marines safe. I love the work I do, and I know how important it is to take the time to get things done right. We work hard and have some fun as well, but I absolutely refuse to cut corners. Very early on in my days as a dog trainer, after preparing one of my first dogs to go in theater, I received an e-mail in which one of the first handlers I trained sent me a detailed story about an operation he and his dog had been on. His words confirmed what I believed. We were on the right track; the dogs we trained and provided were making a difference. I'm proud to share his words here.

The moon sat just above the ridge of the mountain as we descended into a cutback that would lead us down into a valley. The boys adjusted their gear; the hike down into the valley was crisscrossed with barren loose rock and dense thorny brush along nothing more than a goat path. There had been a lot of activity in the area lately, the ground giving away constant sign of foot traffic that had kicked loose the rock underfoot. The terrain glowed with a greenish tint as we looked through our night-vision goggles studying the lay of the land before us, everyone alert for the slightest hint of danger. Reno was out front, his muscled lean body moving with little effort, his eyes alert, ears perked at every sound, his breath as he exhaled created a small vortex of hot humid air as it interacted with the cold dry air that surrounded him. I had been Reno's partner now for a little over a year. The bond between my dog and me was something that ran deep and was hard to truly explain. Quite simply put, I loved him and trusted my very life to him.

We were moving toward a target that was positioned on the other side of a small river that ran along the bottom of the valley floor. The area, according to our intel, was alive with enemy activity. Recent reports had a bomb maker in the area that we had been hunting for months. He had been involved in several IED incidents that had claimed American lives; if we had anything to do with it, after tonight he would no longer be able to hurt another one of our brothers or sisters. The guys had packed light. The elevation change was thousands of feet, spread out over a dozen miles, and we had to get in and out in this cycle of darkness. Covering a dozen miles under normal circumstances is relatively easy; doing it in the dark with a massive elevation change and carrying 50 pounds of gear along with the always present chance of contact can be downright exhausting. Reno moved with purpose, his incredible senses scanning the area around him, looking for the possibility of his second-favorite thing in the world, a ball. Reno had no idea that he was out front leading the way to warn us of the danger of an IED. He simply knew that if he found explosive odor a ball would magically appear out of thin air and he would get to carry it around like a trophy for a while.