That’s not to say that he lacked the qualities of those good hunting dogs our neighbors and friends had. Just like them, Bud was able to detect different scents, and I was blown away by it. I would be out walking with him, and he’d do his usual nose-to-the-ground thing, occasionally rising up to sniff the air, and then all of a sudden he’d switch from going in one direction to moving in another. His entire demeanor would change, and he would run over to some area and start digging through layers of snow and ice to uncover some fast-food hamburger wrapper that had been buried there for who knows how long. That always fascinated me, the power of a dog’s olfactory ability, even when it wasn’t being used for the optimal purpose; at least from a human’s perspective, it wasn’t optimal.
I’d also see how a dog’s intelligence could be optimized or let loose. With Bud, I saw his house smarts all the time, especially as it pertained to my grandma, Bev. Whenever she came by the house, Bud would grab something—a sock, a kitchen towel, the TV remote—and bring it to her. Why? Because she always rewarded him with a treat. Bud knew who the easy marks were, and he exploited that to his advantage. Even as a kid I sensed that if you gave a dog some of what he wanted, you could get a lot of what you wanted from the dog.
Dogs’ companionship and loyalty and their purposefulness were entwined from the very beginning in my sense of their role in humans’ lives. That didn’t change, even when I was in the navy. I loved all those parts of their complex personalities. That’s not to say that Bud was always 100 percent useful. I can still recall my dad coming into the door gimping pretty badly. Like a lot of Iowa males, he’d wrestled quite a bit and had bad knees and hips as a result of too many double-leg takedowns. As the story went, he was out with Bud at a local golf course that winter day, and Bud had a big head of steam and came charging at my dad in his exuberance. Bud clipped my dad and sent him sprawling. My father lay there in the snow, flat on his back, in pretty serious pain for quite a while. I remember wondering where the hell he and Bud had gone off to. Anybody who’s ever had a big and energetic dog probably knows the drill, and my dad’s lack of agility played into that.
What I like about that story is that Bud knew that something wasn’t right, and he came and stood right by my dad, offering whatever consolation and comfort he could.
The point of all this is that I understand all sides of the human/dog equation. I love dogs as pets and companions. I admire them as workers and useful “tools,” but I also know that left untrained and unguided, they can sometimes be annoyances. I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t experienced the joys of seeing a dog in action doing what nature intended, or even just the look in a dog’s eyes when you scratch “that” spot for him or her. I appreciate all sides of the dog/human interaction enough that I’ve chosen to make training working dogs my career while still sharing my life with dogs as pets.
Even when I was still active duty in the navy with SEAL Team 3, I was heavily involved in the canine world. I owe my girlfriend at the time for setting me straight about a breed that has a notorious reputation in some circles. I have to admit that when she first told me that she had a female black brindle pit bull named Jada, my first reaction was, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Within ten minutes, Jada had won me over with her intelligence and personality. She was the first pit bull I’d ever met in “canine,” so to speak, and she really amazed me. Now, I’d been around working dogs and Bud and others until that point, but I’d never seen a dog that could change character so quickly. I was on post-deployment leave and was spending time with my girlfriend in Dallas, Texas. While she was at work, Jada and I got to spend time together. She was a friendly, playful girl whose intelligence was revealed in her wide inquisitive eyes. One morning, I saw the other side of Jada come out in full force.
We were walking along the sidewalk outside the apartment complex when a raccoon popped out from behind a row of garbage cans. It was a big sucker, about twenty-five to thirty pounds, and when it saw Jada, it reared up on its back legs and started hissing and emitting a demonic wail. Jada started to imitate the thing, except she crouched down low, and I could tell the two of them wanted to tangle with one another. I had Jada on a six-foot leash, and she was only about forty to forty-five pounds, but it took as much as I had to keep that dog from tearing away from me. Like an idiot, I figured if the two of them wanted to do what nature intended, then I wasn’t going to get in the way. I let go of the leash. Jada took off and pile-drove that poor raccoon. Within about eight seconds, it looked as if that raccoon had been turned inside out. I was dumbfounded by how Jada had just flipped a switch and gone from that sweet little girl into the most aggressive dog I’d ever seen to that point.
I thought I’d seen some hard, bad-ass dogs before back in Iowa, ones willing to sit in a duck blind for hours, plough through chest-deep snow, and other things, but this was a revelation. Jada came trotting back to me without a scratch on her. I had visions of those poor old hunting dogs getting their snouts battered by some grumpy tomcat that sat back on its haunches like a boxer, leaning onto the ropes with paws flying. Jada would have made mincemeat out of those cats.
I realize I run the risk of perpetuating the negativity associated with pit bulls (what I call bulldogs) by telling this story. I also don’t use the word “pit” in describing American Pit Bull Terriers, because I despise the negative connotation to it. These dogs were bred to be hunters, and they are extraordinary at it. I’ve seen one of my dogs go after an enormous Russian boar, get flipped twenty feet away by the boar’s horn, scramble back to its feet in an instant, and charge again. They have that kind of heart and courage.
Here’s the point of my relating those events in Dallas. Jada exhibited a trait that nearly all of the many bulldogs I worked with after that had in spades. She had animal or prey aggression to a very high degree. She did not ever exhibit human aggression. In other words, her ferocity was directed at prey and not people. That’s a crucial distinction, and I’ll return to that point in a bit.
I was so impressed by Jada that I eventually really got into the bulldog world, owning as many as fifteen at a time, breeding them, training them, and doing small-game hunting with them as catch dogs, going after everything from raccoons and hogs to coyotes. The working-line bulldogs that I was involved with had animal aggression to a degree that I’ve seldom seen since, but they never, with one exception, ever went after humans. The lone exception was a bitch that, for the first ten days after giving birth to puppies, wouldn’t let anyone near her pups. After those first ten days, she was fine with it. That’s the only time any of the bulldogs I worked with ever showed any aggression toward a human.
I want to make this point as clear as possible: animals can demonstrate aggression toward other animals or toward people; but just because a dog is aggressive toward animals doesn’t mean it has aggression toward people, and vice versa. I believe there is a great misconception in our society over this point. There’s no correlation between those two types of aggression. The dogs that we procure and train for the SEALs are all herding dogs—pointy-eared shepherds, usually Dutch shepherds or Belgian Malinois. These dogs are inherently human aggressive. That makes sense considering that they were bred to watch over flocks of animals. Through selective breeding, the herders that we “recruit” have had that human aggression tweaked to a very high degree out of necessity. Without the proper training and the control of a well-trained handler, these dogs would be a potential threat to folks.
I point this fact out as one way to illustrate how the military working dogs that accompany the Navy SEALs are not like the average pet in several ways. That human aggression component is probably the most obvious, but there are other ways in which these dogs are not your typical house pets, no matter how well-bred those dogs might be. These dogs are also highly motivated and extremely energetic. One way to put this into context is for you to think of the most ball-crazy dog you’ve ever seen. You know the type—the one who will pursue a ball faster, for greater amounts o
f time, and with a maniacal determination that has you shaking your head or getting rotator-cuff surgery after throwing or flinging a ball for too many hours a day to satisfy its craving.
The dogs that make it through the program and qualify to join the SEAL Teams on their missions are head and shoulders above anything you’ve seen. The analogy I often use to describe the difference is this: a lot of people want to be professional athletes. They start playing a game early in their childhood; a few become big-deal high school athletes, may make it into college; and a very, very small percentage realize that dream and play professionally. The analogy doesn’t end there. From that select group who make it into Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, or whatever other pro sport, an even more minute percentage become stars, Hall of Famers, legends. Every dog we work with has the same advantages and skills that those acclaimed athletes have. They are not genetic freaks, because of the carefully programmed and designed selection of traits and breeding pairs, but they are as physically gifted as a Michael Jordan or a Michael Phelps.
Phelps is a good example. I started swimming competitively at the age of five with the Waterloo Sharks swim club. By ninth grade, I was all of five feet, four inches tall and weighed 105 pounds. Michael Phelps, by comparison, is six feet, three inches tall and weighs approximately 180 pounds. Combine that with his six-feet, seven-inches arm span, he is a marvel of swimming efficiency. Some of that he worked on, some of that he was given. That’s how it is with our dogs. We start with the best genetic makeup we can and then hope to be able to best utilize those traits. Obviously, great athletes are great for reasons other than their physical gifts. They are frequently tenacious competitors, driven by some inner mechanism that wants to not just succeed but dominate. That doesn’t mean that they are arrogant or malicious: they just want to be better than you or anyone else.
The Belgian Malinois that I’ve worked with have to have that component. It’s not enough to be well-bred. They have to have some inner fire that you can control and unleash to the best advantage. The reason why we use Belgian Malinois is that they combine two essential qualities needed to be a multi-purpose dog that is of use to the Navy SEALs. They have a highly developed sense of smell, and they possess a strong willingness to be assertive and to bite. They have a lot of other great attributes. Their athleticism and endurance are extraordinary, and their fearsome appearance certainly helps in some regards, but since their primary tasks are to detect specific odors and to assist in capturing bad guys, their ability and willingness to do those two things make them ideal candidates. And I don’t just mean they have those two traits; they have them in spades—particularly the dogs who make the grade and get deployed in theater.
Here’s another way to think about this: some dogs are obsessed with squirrels. They’ll go after them hard, tree them, and then sit there and stare up into the limbs at them. They may bark and jump at the trunk for a while, but eventually they’ll give up. The kind of prey aggression that we look for will mean that that dog will persist far longer at the task of getting that squirrel than any other dog. They will be relentless about it to the point of annoyance, except that’s exactly what we’re looking for in them. We want dogs that exhibit traits that would drive most owners out of their minds. We want the over-the-top, extreme “prey drive.” They have to be bold, powerful, stubborn, type A, and dominant. In addition, and perhaps most important, they have to be absolutely crazy to retrieve things.
Since most of the work these dogs do is detection work—finding people, explosives, narcotics, and other things—they also have to have a good nose. That’s why, despite my admiration for what bulldogs can do, they typically aren’t a good fit for the primary missions that military working dogs are assigned. Herding dogs are superior trackers in comparison to bulldogs. Hounds (bloodhounds in particular) are extraordinary trackers but lack the prey or human aggressiveness that the Belgian Malinois possess. The same is true with retrievers. Labradors make great drug-sniffing, explosive- and munitions-detection dogs, and so on; they just don’t have the same human aggression component that is necessary to meet the SEAL Teams’ needs.
Having a good nose isn’t even enough for a herding dog. They have to have the desire to chase. From the very beginning, when I work with pups even before they are whelped, I look for that tenacious desire and also feed into it. Whether you take a piece of PVC pipe, pieces of copper tubing, chunks of wood, a tennis ball, a rolled-up towel, rags, or whatever, when you wave it in a potential working dog’s face, it better go after it and not be distracted or lose interest after a little while.
Again, the point is this: all dogs have to one degree or another the traits we look for. Very few dogs have the combination of traits I’ve mentioned (plus things like great cardiovascular capability, a strong bite, and the adaptability to deal with a large number of environments and stimuli and not be too fearful or too curious) all in one package and to the degree the work they do demands.
Another way I’ve explained this to people is to say that the Navy SEAL dogs have to be like the human members of the teams. The drop-out rate among those who want to qualify as a Navy SEAL is very high. The drop-out rate among the dogs we select and train is even higher than that.
I have read stories of dogs that were abandoned and placed in shelters and that eventually became military working dogs. That’s the exception to the rule. Just like there are more than a few “mutts” who transformed themselves and earned the coveted trident insignia as a SEAL Team member, so can some dogs. The reason why we travel all over the world to select dogs to bring to the United States for additional training is because the time and money that our government and the military have to invest in these dogs is considerable. We want to start with the best platform that we can, and the long-standing, carefully monitored bloodlines of the European dogs is one kind of shortcut that we generally use. It would take generations and countless dollars to begin a selective breeding program using those bloodlines here in the United States. This is a matter of expediency and necessity. We’d rather sacrifice the MADE IN THE USA label than potentially lose American lives or waste taxpayer dollars. We all want the best for our troops, and at this point, the best means importing these dogs from overseas.
The Belgian Malinois gets its name from both the country (Belgium) and the city (Malines) where they were first bred. Their origins go back beyond 1891, but the first dog registered in Belgium and the neighboring country of France as a Chien de Berger Belge was born that year. Many of the dogs of this breed are fawn colored (beige) with a black mask. That’s not true of all four varieties, which are distinguished by their coat, ranging from short to long in length, smooth to rough in texture, and from fawn to black in color. I’ve worked with all four members of the breed type, and all are desirable as military working dogs.
A dedicated early group of breeders and trainers refined the breed so that it is prized for its abilities as a working dog as well as one that excels in various kinds of field-trial competitions. According to the American Kennel Club, Belgian Malinois were first registered in the United States in 1911, but the numbers of them in the United States were so low that, before 1959, in AKC competitions they were lumped into the “miscellaneous” category. To give you some idea of how rare they were in the United States, and to a certain extent still are, only 107 dogs were registered in the ten years after 1959. Today, they remain one of the smallest breeds, numerically, in the AKC.1 They have always been well regarded for their intelligence, trainability, and their willingness to work as herders, in pulling, and in tracking. Because they are relatively rare here and have a long history of breeding, training, and competing in Europe, we most often import dogs from there. They enjoy a nearly fanatical following in the United States, and while there are some very good breeders and trainers domestically, we want the best of the best, and that means utilizing those long ancestral lines and the rich tradition found in dogs from Belgium and Holland and els
ewhere. They served their countries in two worldwide conflicts, and they continue to honor their breed’s history in how they perform in support of U.S. troops today.
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I can easily back up my claim that the comparison between the types of dogs needed and used in the Special Operations Forces community and the types of people needed and used are much the same. Obviously, the comparison does break down in some areas, but the degree to which the canine and human components are alike is highly significant. Having been involved in all sides of this, as a SEAL Team member, as a SEAL Team trainer, as a breeder of dogs, and as a trainer of dogs that I’ve purchased for use in the SOF field, I think I’m qualified to make that assessment. Other trainers may quibble with some of my methodologies and opinions, but I believe the results speak for themselves. My clients/customers are very satisfied with the dogs I’ve provided them for a variety of uses, and that’s especially true of the dogs that have been placed with the SEAL Teams.
One of the areas in which the comparison between the dogs and the humans in the SEAL Team members breaks down immediately and definitively is in breeding. As humans, we don’t have a formal and scientific kind of breeding program that produces SEAL Team members. I know from my own experience that the men I worked and served with as a member of SEAL Team 3 were an incredibly diverse bunch of guys. We did have some things in common: many of us were raised in either suburban or rural environments, liked doing things that are often referred to as “outdoor enthusiast” activities—hunting, fishing, climbing, hiking, and so on. Almost all of us played some sort of organized sports. Guys with backgrounds like that are in the majority, but they’re not exclusively of that “type.”
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 3
