Secret Service Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  Before this, it wasn’t as challenging to find dogs with a few years of solid training. Several dogs the Secret Service acquired in the first years of ERT were three or more years old. They still get the occasional older dog, like Hurricane. But the age and level of previous training have generally decreased as the demand has increased. Most dogs the Service now buys are about two years old.

  There’s always the question of whether it’s better to have a dog with little to no training—a canine tabula rasa—since nothing has to be unlearned. But there is something to be said for a highly trained dog.

  The increased demand means the Secret Service’s intensive screening process is more important than ever. Every month or so, depending on the Service’s canine class schedule, a couple of instructors, who are also trainers, hop in the cab of the Ford F-350 pickup and make the long drive to Denver.

  The trailer they’re pulling is rarely empty. During their week of testing at VLK, instructors can weed out most of the dogs who won’t be good fits. But inevitably there will be one or two dogs who end up having to make the round-trip because of unforeseen medical or behavioral issues. Sometimes these are discovered right away. Other times, the problems can take months to discover—long after dogs and handlers have bonded.

  On this trip to Denver, Steve has brought back a couple of dogs, including one with the odd name of Butyak (pronounced but-yok). He had failed the Service’s extensive medical testing. It’s not that he wouldn’t be good for other departments that demand slightly less physicality from their dogs. It’s just that his hips might not hold up under the more rigorous needs of the Secret Service.

  Vohne Liche has a generous return policy for the Secret Service. Dogs can be returned up to a year after they’re selected. Not much fun for the dogs, but Licklider understands the Service’s need to be super selective.

  “They do return the dogs more frequently than others, but they’re protecting the president of the United States. We give them a lot of leeway.”

  Many of the dogs who make the round-trip to Indiana have had at least rudimentary training from the Secret Service and will be welcome additions to law-enforcement entities with even slightly less stringent standards.

  But the ride back to the kennels probably feels extra long to these dogs—even without a horse and carriage to delay the inevitable.

  —

  Steve has been looking for Rex for a few minutes, but Rex is not where he’s supposed to be. A roster gives the kennel number for the Malinois, and Steve double-checks it with the dry-erase chart that shows all the dogs and their kennel locations. The dog is not there, nor in any kennels near it.

  When it comes to dogs named Rex at Vohne Liche, it can be a little confusing. The misplaced Rex is technically Rex 62. That means he’s the sixty-second Rex the kennel has had so far in 2015, out of about one thousand dogs, and it’s only October.

  Other names aren’t quite so traditional. Also present at the kennel are Wacko, Barko, Broke, Messie, and Vagany. The latter means tough or rough in Hungarian. Even though most K-9 departments try to keep the name a dog comes with, some will change a name if they’re concerned about its implications. Blackie is usually switched out. Vagany only sometimes.

  The Secret Service dog who won the K-9 Olympics at Vohne Liche in August was one of the rare dogs whose name was changed after the Service got him. Luke’s champion ERT dog was originally named Beano. One wonders if he would have come so far if the instructors hadn’t switched his name to Nitro.

  Someone tells Steve that Rex 62 must be in one of the other kennel buildings and points toward a likely location. Steve walks down the long rows of steel-barred kennels searching for the one with Rex 62’s name on it. The majority of the dogs are Malinois, but there are a surprising number of German shepherds, and many combinations of the two breeds. The kennel building is clean and, to say the least, cacophonous.

  As he passes by, some dogs sit silently and stare, or lean their paws up on the bars and quietly reach out in what looks like a heartbreakingly stoic plea to go out and get some fresh air and hang with some people. They get good care here, but it’s not set up to be an intimate kennel with lots of attention given to each dog.

  Most dogs bark like mad as Steve walks by. Some spin relentlessly. A couple of the Malinois jump high, straight up, as if on invisible trampolines. One dog a few rows over bounces so high his head and torso rise above the kennel wall. Dogs have been known to fly over into other kennels, but if they have such acrobatic leanings, they’re usually given a kennel with a ceiling.

  Steve passes by a springer spaniel whose kennel card says “Teddy.”

  Teddy? Steve does a double take.

  He knows this dog. Teddy is one of many dogs from the first Friendly Dog class who ended up making the round-trip back to VLK. The rest of the returned dogs, including Ziggy, were snapped up by other K-9 units. But not Teddy. He has been here since his return more than a year ago.

  He turned out not to be the dog the Secret Service instructors had hoped he would be. He proved a bit slow for their needs. Springers aren’t as in demand as other dogs, but a company in Europe has been eyeing him to do explosives detection there.

  Meanwhile he stares sideways at visitors, like someone in a poker game who doesn’t trust the dealer.

  “Sorry, buddy, someone’s gonna take you one of these days,” Steve says to him and moves on in pursuit of Rex 62.

  He finally finds his Rex, toward the end of a row in the middle of the building. Steve is happy to find Rex 62, and Rex 62 is happy he has been found. When he sees Steve, he barks a few times and wags when Steve steps inside the kennel. Once Steve has leashed him up, Rex pushes past the door and leads Steve by all his barking brethren, pulling hard to get out of there.

  He’s the last of several dogs they’ll be testing in this round. Vohne Liche has selected twenty-four dogs for the Secret Service to screen this week for its next Explosive Detection Team class. The dog trailer fits ten dogs, so they do the testing in shifts.

  The area for today’s tests is just a few hundred yards away, but trailering them over is the most efficient way to go. After letting Rex 62 sniff the grass, lift his leg, and soak up some rays, they load him into the trailer and drive over to the edge of an alfalfa field, where they’ll begin to see who among these dogs has the right stuff.

  —

  Brian has been instrumental in developing testing for all the Secret Service canine jobs. He has been with the Secret Service since 1998 and training dogs professionally since 1988.

  “He lives it, breathes it,” says Bill.

  “There’s no one greater in the canine community,” says Stew of the trainer he has worked with since 2004.

  Brian grew up immersed in dogs. His grandfather had a large farm on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where the family hunted geese, and occasionally quail and ducks, with their dogs. Brian’s dad had given him a black Lab named Apollo as his first field trial dog when he was about ten years old. But the dog wasn’t cut out for the work and was too energetic for their little house, so they gave Apollo to Brian’s grandfather.

  Apollo thrived on the property, expending his energy running around in nature and never being much of a field trial dog. But Apollo and Brian’s grandfather had a way of communicating that would influence Brian for the rest of his life.

  “I remember going down and seeing him with Apollo. He would tell that dog to go grab an apple, and Apollo would run into the orchard and grab an apple. He would tell him to go get a peach, and he’d go get a peach. Same with a plum.

  “I was only ten or eleven years old at the time, and he and that dog just had something special that really clicked with me. It was like an epiphany. It wasn’t his training, it was the relationship and the communication that they had.

  “He was in his seventies, the greatest man I’ve ever known, and that dog made him so hap
py and he made the dog so happy. I saw how that bond worked to make them understand each other,” says Brian.

  Not long after, Brian got a black Lab named Spunker, who was another field trial dog. She was the real deal—an outstanding competitor in trials that tested the working abilities of gun dogs, and the best canine companion Brian could have imagined.

  One day when he was about seventeen, Brian was visiting his grandfather when Spunker ran into the road chasing an errant Frisbee. A car hit her and dragged her underneath for what seemed to Brian like an eternity. They raced her to a veterinary hospital, but besides patching her up a little there wasn’t much they could do.

  “We brought her back home and she had this huge hole in her body. She couldn’t use her back legs and I tried to take care of her for a week or so but I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to work out. I couldn’t let her suffer like that anymore.

  “I wouldn’t let anybody go with me. I wanted to have her put down by myself. I carried her into the van and drove to the vet with her in my lap. It was just a me-and-her thing. Like with my grandfather when he and Apollo looked at each other and understood each other, she and I had that. She knew she was getting put down. She knew something. I could just feel it, that there was a kind of giving up. That it was OK. She let me know that.”

  Brian can’t continue with the story. It’s still too much. He has been through many deaths of subsequent canine companions as well as dogs he and his handlers have worked with, but this one still rips him wide open. He understands what handlers go through when they lose their first working dog. And he understands that it can take a long, long time to get over.

  After a stint in the Army as an infantry medic, he saw his first Rottweiler. “I thought it was the most amazing beast I’d ever laid eyes on,” he says. He ended up adopting one from a pound. He decided to train the dog at a Rottweiler kennel in Northern California, not far from where he was working in a psychiatric hospital. At the kennel, many dogs were doing Schutzhund, a dog sport that tests dogs for the traits needed for police or military work.

  “I was done. I quit work, drove up there four days a week to train. It was the greatest thing in the world to me,” he says.

  He ended up working full time in the world of dog training, which a decade later led to teaching some classes at the Secret Service. When a job for a Secret Service canine trainer/instructor opened, he immediately applied.

  “When I got the job, I was euphoric,” he says. “To be out here and see how professional everybody was, and how good the quality of the dogs was, even coming in on the bottom of the totem pole was exciting.”

  Many of the traits tested in Schutzhund are the ones he and the dog staff seek out on buy trips. Among them: courage, intelligence, perseverance, trainability, and drive.

  Secret Service dogs have to have an additional trait: sociability. “A strong social police dog” is the term Brian uses. That piece can be the most difficult to find with high-intensity, high-drive dogs.

  For ERT, for instance, the Service wants a dog who won’t back down until the fight with a bad guy is over or his handler calls him off. That same dog needs to be able to quickly get on with his day and not be a crazy, fuming mess afterward. In other words, the dog needs the coveted “off” switch. ERT dogs also can’t be dog aggressive, since they can work close together as a team.

  Courage is one of the most important characteristics the Secret Service tests for. It’s not just the ERT dogs who need it. They all do. Even the Friendly Dogs. What is it exactly?

  “The Friendly Dogs have to walk on a piece of concrete in hundred-degree heat for hours a day searching thousands of people. That’s not easy,” says Brian. “That takes a drive and a desire to perform and takes a level of courage as well.”

  For EDT dogs, courage manifests in other ways.

  “They have to frequently get on a military transport, land in a different country, often with a completely different climate and a very different way of living,” says Brian. “That can rattle a lot of dogs. They have to be strong enough in character that when they land, they can behave as though nothing has changed. And that’s not normal.”

  The Secret Service uses a variety of tests for courage. The testing depends on the dog’s future role. They’re all tested in the dark, because night duty is a fact of life. ERT dogs will have to work in a completely dark room by themselves as part of testing. In training, anything that minimizes a dog’s senses can steal from their confidence. “That’s where courage kicks in,” explains Brian.

  “That’s like telling an officer, ‘You’re going to go into the building and we’re going to put something on you to blind your eyes. Are you comfortable going in there and fighting?’ That’s a tough thing to ask of dogs.”

  A dog who’s scared of the dark might bump into something and refuse to go forward. An ERT canine candidate might find the suspect but choose not to bite him, or be startled that he found him. These are issues the Service can work on up to a point, but if courage is not inherent in a dog’s makeup—or as Brian likes to say, “if Mom and Dad didn’t put in the courage and drive”—it’s probably not going to work.

  At home, Brian has an animated assortment of dogs, goats, and chickens. It’s the one place he doesn’t worry about animals having drive or courage. His dogs are well trained, though, and his goats listen to him pretty well. Bill jokes that even his chickens come when called.

  Brian doesn’t usually admit it at first, but if someone talks to him long enough, he may also mention that he has three cats. But these are not normal cats. One afternoon while he’s standing around the training yard watching handlers and talking with Bill, the subject comes up.

  “I’m not really a cat guy,” Brian says. “I have Bengal cats.”

  Bill turns toward him. “Do you even know what a Bengal cat is? It’s what a guy who has cats calls them when he wants them to sound cool.”

  Brian tells him the story of how he came to be a cat owner.

  “I never had a cat in my life and then a few years ago I walk into PetSmart and there’s a lady petting this cat. There were bangs in her face and the cat hauls off and bites her in the face and I said, ‘That’s the cat for me!’ I never would have gotten the cat unless it looked like a patrol dog. I saw it apprehend the woman and that was it!”

  “When you have to say cats with an s, that’s when you know you’re a cat guy,” Bill deadpans.

  “Not with Bengal cats.”

  —

  A pad of lined, white paper on the tailgate of the Ford pickup truck serves as a makeshift report card for the dogs being tested by the Secret Service at VLK. The top pages whip in the strong wind that’s rushing across the green field of ten-inch-tall alfalfa. If a Malinois named Herta, who hails from Holland, could read the evaluation of her afternoon’s performance, she might wish the wind would rip away the page.

  Afraid of kennel/trailer

  Soft mouth—would not bite toy/ball taken out by hand

  Possession (6)

  Exchange (8)

  Prey (6)

  Hunt (5)

  Visual out of kennel / slow to hunt / eventually found odor/ball

  She’s going to need a much better showing in the next day’s stakeout, which tests for courage and drive and reactions to stress. Steve and Secret Service dog training assistant Shawn G. are pretty sure that while she’s a good dog, she’s not cut out for the Secret Service.

  “Her head is small for her body,” observes Steve, as Herta gambols through the alfalfa, looking halfheartedly for a tennis ball. “Not that that means anything.”

  On the fluttering report card pages, another dog’s comments state that his pursuit of a tug is “nonexistent,” but that he is “very social.” Social is good. Not having the drive to find a toy will probably not make him a presidential protector.

  Boyan, from Slovakia,
rates much better.

  Ball possession (9)

  Good on exchange (7)

  Good chase on ball (8)

  Great pace to problem

  Immediate active search/found ball

  Next up is Zigis, a Malinois from Hungary. He’s wagging, jumping, and whirling around Steve as they run together to the edge of the field, attached to each other by a ninety-foot nylon lead. He throws the tennis ball and Zigis bounds for it, springing through the alfalfa. Steve lets the lead slip from his hand so he won’t impede Zigis’s search. In a few seconds, Zigis, ball in mouth, is circling Steve, wagging and loping with the excitement of his find.

  Steve leans over and pats him playfully, cheering his find in the kind of high, enthusiastic voice these dogs love.

  “Ohhhh yeah! What’d you find, buddy? You’re a gooooood boy!”

  Zigis revels in the praise, head high, mouth clutching the ball. Steve tries to get the ball from his mouth, and the dog resists but eventually gives it up. Steve throws the ball again.

  After going through the same routine, Steve lobs the ball into the field a third time, but instead of letting Zigis run after it, he grabs the lead and jogs him back to the trailer. Zigis stares at the field in the area where the ball landed and looks up at Steve as if he can’t believe this guy is going to leave a perfectly good ball in the middle of the field. Steve has him jump into his kennel in the trailer and shuts the door.

  A few minutes later, Steve opens Zigis’s kennel door, snaps on the lead, and lets him out. The dog pulls toward the spot in the alfalfa field where he clearly remembers the ball landed after Steve abandoned it there.

  Zigis staccatos some barks, wags his tail vigorously, and bounces from side to side, bursting to find the ball. Steve lets him go. Zigis runs to within a couple of feet of the ball, as if guided by GPS. He sniffs the air, turns around, and boom. The ball is his again.

  Steve cheers him on, and when he calls Zigis back, Zigis will not give up the ball. He has found his prey and isn’t going to let this guy who doesn’t know the value of a tennis ball throw it into the field and walk away from it again.