Navy SEAL Dogs

by Mike Ritland

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  Dogs who are trained to be multipurpose working dogs will spend the majority of their time detecting odors while working in the field. Detection work is very complicated, and a large part of a dog’s specialized training time is spent on developing the skills to detect multiple odors.

  You might be wondering: How do you really train a dog to detect something, whether it’s a person, an explosive, or anything else? Exposure to the target scent and an association with it come into play again here, as does repetition. This is how dogs (and people) learn: through association and repetition. Dogs especially need routine; it’s how they live their lives. So, detection training is extremely time consuming because it requires a trainer to follow a lot of structured and precise steps. There are as many as two hundred steps to doing detection work well. As I work with a dog and we progress through those steps, if we encounter any snags along the way, we’ll fall back a few steps and then work forward again. Hopefully we move past the problem area and on to the next exacting part of the training process. A dog will have performed some of these detection exercises and tasks thousands of times before being deployed.

  However, it’s a different story when it comes to detecting explosives. In my experience, with explosives you don’t need thousands of repetitions to get dogs to recognize a specific chemical signature for something like TNT. It takes them only a handful of times to become familiar with the scent and be able to detect it. For a dog, TNT has a very distinct and memorable scent. To some degree, it’s no different from you being able to positively identify the odor of something like skunk without having had a lot of repeated exposure to it. How many times did you need to smell skunk before you knew what it was?

  Trainers use a lot of different methods when they work with a dog on initial exposure to and detection of explosives. The one I use I refer to simply as retrieving.

  The obvious point about explosive-odor detection is that you have to introduce the dogs to that chemical signature safely somehow. The thing you use to expose the dog to that odor is essentially irrelevant. You can use anything that will retain that small bit of explosive material. For example, you can drill holes in a piece of PVC pipe and enclose the chemical in that, or you can put it in a box or on a towel. I use rags, bits of terry cloth towel, and I’m extremely careful with how I use them—not because they could explode but because they can become easily contaminated. I wear extrathick gloves whenever I’m handling the samples to avoid my odor signature from getting mixed in with the explosive scent. I’ll place several pounds of explosives, which is considered a small amount, in a plastic box along with a quantity of towels. After about a month, the explosive odor will have worked its way into the fabric. At that point, I can then separate the towels and seal them individually in an airtight container. Needless to say, I label that container.

  Early in the exposure regimen to imprint an odor on a dog, I won’t be too concerned about the environment in which we do the work. That will come later. Once I have rags that are ready, I take a dog out, along with his handler, and we work on the simplest level. I throw the towel, and the dog retrieves it. His reward, when he brings the rag back to his handler, is that he gets to play tug for a little bit with the towel. We repeat this fifteen or so times, and by the end, the dog is familiar with that odor. I use a new towel each time to make certain that the dog is fixed on that odor and not on the combination of dirt, grass, spit, the handler’s odor, or anything else. It takes the dog all of about ten minutes to become imprinted on the odor, far less time than it takes me to do all the prep work.

  After the imprinting, we move on to what’s called point-to-point exercises. For this, I need a fenced-off area. A ball field works really well. I take a sample of an explosive chemical odor and put it on the backside and upwind side of the fence. I may place about half a pound of a selected target odor there. I then take the dog, or have the handler take his dog, and I give the search command, very often using the Dutch word “Szook.” Then I walk alongside that fence so that we are parallel to the chain link, downwind and in a straight line. Depending upon how hard the wind is blowing, we may start out walking toward the dynamite from only about 15 feet away. The wind blowing across that dynamite picks up the odor cone. It starts out narrow and concentrated at the source and then widens. Picture the beam of a flashlight.

  As we’re walking and entering that odor cone, I’m watching the dog to see any change in his behavior. When a dog hits on the odor, his head will snap in the odor’s direction, his tail will feather or twitch, and he will move in the direction of the source. He’ll get up to the fence but not actually be able to touch the explosive, lick it, or eat it. At that point, I issue either a sit or a down command for the dog, which will serve as the alert to let the handler know, “Here it is.” The dog does that, I hit the clicker, and then he gets his reward.

  We work through that scenario one odor at a time over and over until we move through all the possible detection scenarios for all the desired target odors we want to teach a dog to recognize. An advantage I have as a former SEAL is that I understand and have experience with the tactical side of explosives, with the way they’re used. I can create more realistic scenarios for the dogs to work in than someone who is a dog trainer first and an explosive-detection dog trainer second. I was trained as a SEAL, I was deployed as a SEAL, I’ve trained SEAL team members, and now I use all that to train MWDs to assist SEAL teams. Having been there and done all that means that I can be as precise as possible, giving these incredibly talented animals the benefit of all my experience.

  To get a dog to detect anything, not just explosives, you basically follow the same fundamental principles and steps: initial exposure to and imprinting of the scent, followed by point-to-point exercises, followed by placing the object in various environmental scenarios.

  In order for a dog to function effectively in any of those environmental scenarios, such as the one I created in the compound, he has to be physically fit. So detection (and other) training includes taking a dog on runs and taking him swimming, then having the dog do these things with his handler. A dog also does resistance training. This can be done with weights, where the dog wears a harness and drags weights attached to it. Or it can be done with bungee cord leashes, which produce greater resistance the farther they are extended. The entire dog gets a workout and gets into top physical shape—from nose to tail.

  9

  APPREHENSION TRAINING: SINKING THEIR TEETH INTO IT

  Arras and his handler, Matt, were out on night patrol, making their way across a steep mountain with its jagged rocks. Suddenly a figure appeared and in quick succession shot off a couple of rounds of gunfire before running off. Matt gave Arras a command, and without hesitation the dog bolted into the darkness. Within minutes Arras located and subdued the shooter, tackling him to the ground.

  The shooter was actually a “decoy,” a trainer in a bite suit, and Arras and Matt were participating in a nighttime apprehension-training exercise with gunfire. Arras had performed the apprehension part well, and when Matt issued the “out” command he backed off and left the shooter. However, the dog was still very green in his training. So when he left one man in a bite suit on the ground and turned and faced Matt, he could not see his handler’s face. Matt’s face was obscured by the huge night operational device, or night-vision goggles, he had on so he could see in the dark. Arras was still feeling the aggression he had used to apprehend the shooter. So instead of Matt he thought he saw someone he didn’t know, someone who, like the man he had just apprehended, was also carrying a gun. Arras responded by taking off after Matt. He leapt up on him and bit him in the middle of the chest. He drove Matt to the ground, where he had him in a very vulnerable position. Thankfully, he realized through Matt’s scent and a few other triggers that this was not the enemy. This was Matt, the guy who took good care of him, and he released him immediately.

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  Apprehension work clearly incorporates detect
ion work—first, Arras had to find the shooter—but apprehension work is primarily about one thing, bite work. Arras had to find the decoy in order to bite him. Biting him was Arras’s reward. In detection training and work, dogs are known to get very excited when they hear the search word command “Szook,” but the search word command “Reviere,” which is used in apprehension training and work, makes dogs go positively nuts. It is as if every cell in their bodies and every bit of their canine ancestry are turned on. The dogs know they are going to detect and apprehend a person. They know that they are going to be able to do what is probably their favorite thing of all—bite someone.

  During apprehension training, we frequently use the mountains at night, because that combination produces about the most difficult environment the dogs and their handlers will encounter. As they both grow more confident and competent in their training, we up the ante. The dogs and handlers have to be prepared to deal with the possibility of enemy contact and engagement when deployed. That means they will encounter, and have to react to, weapons.

  By the time we introduce nighttime gunfire into a mountain exercise, a dog, like Arras, has already been exposed to the sound of weapons being fired. Essentially, these dogs have been hardwired through breeding and training to have an aggressive response to the sound of a weapon’s discharge. They associate the sound of gunfire with aggression. That’s both good and bad. A dog could be on a mission in which there is constant gunfire. In an instance like that, an immediate aggressive response to gunfire would not be sound. Consequently, part of our work is to get them to not respond to gunfire. We desensitize them to the sound and teach them to only go into apprehension mode on command. The only way to do that is to fire round after round near them, reward them when they don’t freak out, and restrain them when they do.

  In a fast-moving, dark, and chaotic scenario like the one Arras and Matt experienced, it’s easy to understand why Arras, at that point in his training, responded the way he did. His aggression level and desire to bite someone were on full boil, and it was hard for him, at this point, to turn it down to a simmer. It’s also easy to understand why we were all so grateful that he didn’t utilize his full capabilities as a biter on Matt. Anyone involved in the training of these dogs has to have, or will quickly develop, respect for the potential threat that these dogs pose.

  Many studies have been conducted over the years to determine the bite force of dogs and a variety of other animals. In 2005, as part of a National Geographic Television series, Dr. Brady Barr equipped a bite sleeve with a computerized measuring instrument to test the biting strength of people and several other species. His human test subjects reached 127 pounds of pressure, while domestic dogs averaged 320 pounds. This means that the average dog’s bite is close to being three times as strong as that of a person. Impressive as that sounds and is, think about this. Lions and white sharks can exert 600 pounds of biting pressure. Just to keep that in perspective, hyenas can exert 1,000 pounds of pressure when they bite. The champ, though, is the crocodile, which in Dr. Barr’s test reached 6,000 pounds of biting force. Clearly, it’s a good thing that most of us will never find ourselves in a situation with a lion, white shark, hyena, or crocodile. However, we are all pretty much in the vicinity of one dog or another at some point in our lives. As I said, you have to respect the potential force of a dog’s jaws.

  The University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, conducted a study that actually analyzed dogs’ jaws and jaw muscles. The study concluded that a Malinois can bite with around 160 pounds of force with the teeth at the front of its jaw and with a gripping 550 pounds of force with its molars at the rear of its jaw. That the back of the mouth has the ability to exert a greater force makes sense, if you think about it. The back of the mouth is closer to the “lever,” or hinge, of the jaw, where the upper and lower halves of the jaw meet. In fact, if you ever observed your dog when you play tug with him, you probably noticed pretty quickly that the dog understands something about the physics of bite force, because he works pretty hard to get whatever he has between his teeth into the back of his mouth in order to hold on to it more securely. If you’ve ever attempted to pull a tennis ball out of your dog’s mouth, you know that it’s easier if the ball is at the front of your dog’s mouth and not the back. Check this out next time you’re playing with a dog.

  It’s also pretty obvious that a dog will first bite with the front of his mouth; after all, that’s the widest opening and has the easiest access to things. You can go on the Internet and see videos of protection dogs and other working dogs doing bite work, and you’ll see some pretty spectacular flashing of jaws and snarling and men in bite suits getting these dogs to grab and hold on with those front-of-jaw bites. It all looks great, but as you know now, those bites won’t exert as much force as when the back of the jaw clamps down. Those canine teeth are sharp, and they will puncture skin, but when it comes to bone-crushing power, and the ability to really hold on to and subdue an adversary, a dog will have to get his back teeth on someone.

  Similarly, you can also see amazing scenes of dogs flying up, all four paws off the ground, to go after trainers in bite suits. These dogs launch themselves from 20 feet away and then contact their targets. Again, it all looks great. It’s just not very effective. As any football coach will tell you, don’t leave your feet. Why?

  As a former football player, I can tell you that it’s hard to change direction in midair. As a dog trainer who’s been in various apprehension/bite training scenarios, I know you can’t change direction very easily when your feet are off the ground. It’s also easier to move to the left or right (when you do have your feet on the floor) and avoid a charging dog, especially one that doesn’t have four (or even two) feet on the floor. In addition, the amount of force and leverage you lose when you’re airborne, as opposed to when your feet are solidly planted on the planet, is substantial. In the National Football League, for instance, a soaring tackle against the guy carrying the ball may make the highlights reel, but it’s the tackle that happens when the defensive player is firmly planted on the ground that is not just more fundamentally sound but can also be a harder hit.

  As far as the dogs are concerned, those leaps are also potentially dangerous to the dog’s well-being. For example, if a dog is chasing after someone on a roof and the dog sails off the roof in pursuit, he could hit a wall or otherwise do some serious damage to himself.

  As for serious damage, let me tell you that even with a bite suit on—and that’s a specially padded suit designed to absorb a lot of the force of an animal’s jaws—I have felt the power of a dog’s body and jaws, and that is not something to take lightly. I have at times when wearing this protective gear experienced a level of pain as intense as anything I’ve endured in my entire life.

  I have also, in fact, been on the receiving end of a dog’s bites and blows without having any protective gear on. That is an incredibly humbling experience. Let me tell you, all studies and analysis aside, when a dog gets his maximum bite force on me, it is incredible. The pain is sharp and intense, my vision narrows, sounds seem to be silenced, and thoughts of how I can mess with this dog and get the better of him are replaced by a single thought—I wish this dog would just get off of me.

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  I need to make this point clear. The apprehension work that we do with the dogs is to train them as a nonlethal force. In most cases, a live capture of a suspected, or clearly demonstrated insurgent, Taliban member, or whatever bad guy the dog goes after is much preferred over a “neutralized” one. A lot of valuable intelligence information has been and can be extracted from captured combatants. That is one of the reasons why I consider dogs to be such an effective weapon—they are trained to be a very highly skilled nonlethal force, trained to exert, yet restrain, their biting force.

  Actually, all those numbers about bite force pale in comparison to something that’s much more difficult to quantify—and that is the measure of a dog’s heart and how much a dog is willing to endure i
n order to subdue a human being. How many of them are willing to use that biting force at the expense of their own discomfort? That’s what the initial bite-work training in a contained area like the apprehension-training corral we set up is all about and focuses on. Think about it like this. We work on developing a dog’s tenacity in close combat, similar to the way a boxer spars in the ring. We’re also working to develop each dog’s technique, but it’s also about getting each dog to utilize his inherent aggression and push past a pain boundary. There may be some physical pain, but I’m mostly referring to mental stress. It’s the mental stress a dog undergoes when he feels you fighting back, when he feels your own mental and emotional aggression working against his forces; it’s when the two of you are really locked in combat and you are testing the dog’s willingness to get the job done.

  Working in a bite suit against a dog is as much an acting job as it is a physical performance. Similar to what the dogs have to endure, more than just your physical stamina is being tested. As I said earlier, dogs read body language, and they also read the energetic projections you give off. If you are working with a dog on his apprehension and bite skills, you have to be mentally strong and able to project the same kind of “I’m bigger and badder than you” attitude. Anyone can go through the motions of standing there in a padded suit while a dog grabs you; it takes a good bit of artistry to act the part (and believe me, it isn’t completely acting) of someone who has deadly intent. Dogs are highly sensitive to those signals we humans send out, and when we’re afraid they absolutely get it and take full advantage of it. It’s how they respond when you match aggression for aggression that determines whether or not they will make the cut with us.