The dogs in Long Island City were heirs to an ancient and bloodthirsty line. Their ancestors, descended from the great mastiffs and sight hounds of Mesopotamia, were used as shock troops by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks. (Alexander the Great’s dog, Peritas, is said to have saved his life at Gaugamela by leaping in front of a Persian elephant and biting its lip.) They wrought havoc in the Roman Colosseum, ran with Attila’s hordes, and wore battle armor beside the knights of the Middle Ages. In 1495, when Columbus sailed to what is now the Dominican Republic, he brought Spanish mastiffs almost three feet high at the withers and greyhounds that could run down an enemy and disembowel him. At the battle of Vega Real, each hound killed a hundred natives in less than an hour, according to the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. “They carry these dogs with them as companions wherever they go,” he later wrote. “And kill the fettered Indians in multitudes like Hogs for their Food.”
It took a while to break them of the habit. The colonists used dogs against Indians and slaves—“They should be large, strong and fierce,” Benjamin Franklin recommended, “and will confound the enemy a good deal”—and the Confederates sent them after escaping Union prisoners at Andersonville. And though the U.S. Army opted for more modern weaponry abroad, attack dogs were still used at home, for crowd control. “Up until the 1970s, the police just wanted dogs that would bite everyone,” Jim Matarese, the treasurer of the United States Police Canine Association, told me. “They’d go to the pound and get dogs that were fear biters—just scared to death of people. Or someone would call in and say, ‘I’ve got a real aggressive dog. He’ll bite!’ Well, we saw what happened at the marches from Selma: those dogs just ate people up.”
In Europe, police dogs were a more refined lot, though not always to their benefit. The German shepherd, first registered as a breed in 1889 by a former cavalry captain, Max von Stephanitz, was selected for intelligence and steadiness as well as power. The Germans fielded thirty thousand dogs in the First World War, and used them for everything from transporting medicine and wounded soldiers to shuttling messages between trenches. When the war was over, the animals were mostly killed, discarded, or consumed by the starving populace. “Dog meat has been eaten in every major German crisis at least since the time of Frederick the Great, and is commonly referred to as ‘blockade mutton,’ ” Time noted, in 1940. “Dachshund is considered the most succulent.”
The survivors went on to second careers in law enforcement or as guide dogs for the blind, and their breeding and training grew ever more sophisticated. In Germany, registered shepherds have to pass rigorous physical and behavioral tests, and their puppies are trained by nationwide networks of volunteers. Schutzhund competitions, in which dogs are tested for their ability to track, obey orders, and protect their owners, are a national passion, and the largest ones fill stadiums. “They just have a different dog culture over there,” Steve White, a dog trainer and former canine officer in the Seattle area, told me. “If you look at North America, there are maybe five thousand German shepherd breeders. If you go to Germany, it’s probably got fifty-five thousand.”
It took the Lockerbie bombing, followed by the attacks at Columbine and Oklahoma City, to galvanize interest in police and military dogs in America. Auburn’s canine program began as an attempt to build a better bomb detector. “In the eighties, we thought, Let’s build a machine that can mimic the dog!” Robert Gillette, the director of the university’s animal-health and performance program, told me. “But you can’t mimic a dog. It’s just a superior mechanical working system. So in the nineties we began to think, Hmm, let’s put some of that research into the animals.” The Department of Defense has apparently come to the same conclusion. Since 2006, it has spent close to twenty billion dollars searching for explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The detection rate has hung stubbornly at around fifty percent,” Lieutenant General Michael Oates told the magazine National Defense two years ago. When the same patrols use dogs, he added, the success rate leaps to 80 percent: “Dogs are the best detectors.”
The American military now has some three thousand active-duty dogs in its ranks, but good animals are hard to find. The American Kennel Club requires no proof of health or intelligence to register an animal—just a pure bloodline—and breeders are often more concerned with looks than with ability. “We breed for the almighty dollar here,” one trainer told me. Programs like the ones at Auburn and at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, are trying to reverse that trend. But their graduates are still the exceptions. “Some of these dogs, they couldn’t find a pork chop if it was hanging around their neck,” a dog broker in Minnesota told me.
The upshot is that many, if not most, American police dogs now come from Europe. Those in the New York subway were mostly born in Hungary, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic—descendants of the powerful border-patrol dogs bred during the Cold War. Other police dogs come from brokers in Holland and Germany, and still respond to Dutch and German commands: Sitz! Bleib! Los! Apport! “Europeans have more dogs than they can use, so they sell the excess to us,” White told me. “We subsidize their hobbies.”
When I’d finally summoned the nerve to sprint across the parking lot and up the ramp, that morning in Long Island City, I stumbled in on six patrolmen strapping on their gear. They were all with the transit squad, which safeguards the subway: four recruits and two trainers. A dry-erase board hung on the wall, scrawled with notes. One side listed explosives that the dogs could detect, including C-4, TNT, ammonium nitrate, and several others. The other side listed fines for canine misbehavior: five dollars for urinating in the subway, twenty-five for biting someone (“must draw blood”).
Wayne Rothschild, one of the trainers, had just finished adding his weight to another list on the board—part of a contest to see who could lose the most pounds by the end of the week. (Canine police tend to be more active than others, but their dogs do most of the running.) The men in his squad averaged more than two hundred pounds, topping out at two hundred and thirty-six, for the sergeant, Randy Brenner.
“One pound?” a recruit was asked. “You’ve lost one pound?”
“I swallowed a lot of aggression.”
“And pizzas.”
Rothschild laughed. At one eighty-one, he was among the fittest men in the group. He and Brenner had first met in junior high and later played football together for the Hicksville Comets—Rothschild at quarterback and Brenner at center. Twenty years later, they still looked their parts: Rothschild square-jawed and decisive, with jet-black hair close-cropped on the sides; Brenner stolid, round, and reliable—the immovable object. Technically, Brenner was now Rothschild’s boss, but their relationship hadn’t changed much. “I was blocking for him then and I’m still blocking for him,” Brenner said.
Like many of the men in the squad, Rothschild and Brenner had been around police dogs most of their lives. Rothschild’s father, uncle, brothers, and cousins were in law enforcement, as were Brenner’s father and grandfather. After high school, Rothschild spent two years at a community college and another two working construction, before joining the force. Brenner took his police-academy entrance exam at sixteen. When the transit canine unit was formed, six years ago, they each put in for it unbeknownst to the other, and found themselves back on the same team. “I’d rather be a cop in canine than a sergeant somewhere else,” Brenner said. “It’s all I ever wanted.”
He and Rothschild led the recruits to the kennel behind the offices, to get their new partners. A week earlier, each recruit had been paired with an equally green police dog, a little over a year old. “We want the dog to make up for where the handler is weak and vice versa,” Brenner said. “But I’ll tell you, after a while the person’s personality becomes similar to the dog’s.” Matthew Poletto, a rangy recruit with the jutting cheekbones and cut biceps of a bodybuilder, had been matched with Ranger, a skinny, high-strung Belgian Malinois—“like a German shepherd on steroids,” as one handler put it. Hora
cio Maldonado, a small, soft-spoken Hispanic, had a sweet female Labrador named Ray. The others had big-boned, lordly shepherds with the contained power peculiar to the breed. The Labrador was a detection dog; the shepherds and the Malinois were patrol dogs—though some, like Rothschild’s German shepherd, Danz, did both.
For the next month and a half, the dogs and men would learn to work together, to read each other’s cues and idiosyncrasies, as if in an arranged marriage: police dogs and their handlers are usually partnered for life. “He’s a great dog. It’s just … sometimes I’d like to relax a little,” Poletto said, sounding like the honeymoon was already over. “You know, watch TV and not have him put the chew toy in my lap.”
RETRIEVER
We’re told of a bird dog named Bob, owned by a broker who lives in Fieldston. He’s an excellent retriever and is happy during the hunting season, but all the rest of the year he just sits around the yard, mooning and dreaming. One day lately, though, something stirred in him and he disappeared for half an hour. When he returned, he presented his master with a seven-pound roast of beef, rolled and tied and ready for the oven; not a tooth mark in it. The broker had it cooked. | 1935 |
Inside the kennel, the dogs were in an uproar. They lunged at their cages when they saw their owners, foam flying from their muzzles. They stayed here only when not on patrol or at home with their partners, but even this much confinement was hard to bear. “A lot of them are cage chewers,” the unit’s other trainer, Richard Geraci, told me. He showed me a photograph on his phone of a ventilation cover that his dog, Chief, had reduced to twisted scrap. “That’s quarter-inch steel,” he said. A German shepherd’s jaw can exert upward of seven hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. “They just chew it up, tear it up. Chief’s got broken teeth, but I’m surprised he doesn’t have more.”
And yet the moment the cages were opened the noises stopped. The dogs trotted silently to their partners’ side, then sat back on their haunches—ears erect, eyes focussed forward—and waited. “It’s like you’ve turned on a switch,” Brenner said.
Canine police tend to talk about their dogs as if they were mechanical devices. They describe them as tools or technology and say that they’re “building dogs” through proper training. They say that their animals need “maintenance” to be “fully operational,” and that a “dual-purpose dog”—one that has been taught to both chase down criminals and detect drugs or explosives—has “superior functionality.” At home, a police dog may be like a member of the family. But once in the field it’s just another piece of gear.
This is more than a manner of speaking. It’s a way of thinking about dogs that goes back to the psychologist B. F. Skinner and his work on behaviorism, in the 1940s. Skinner argued that it’s pointless to imagine what’s going on in an animal’s head. Better to treat its mind as a black box, closed and unknowable, with inputs that lead to predictable outputs. Skinner identified four ways to manipulate behavior, four buttons to push—positive reinforcement (“Good dog! Have a biscuit”), positive punishment (“Bad dog! Whack”), negative reinforcement (“Good dog! Now I’ll stop whacking you”), and negative punishment (“Bad dog! Give me back that biscuit”). Connect an action to an outcome and almost any behavior can be trained. Skinner called this “operant conditioning,” and considered it as effective for people as for their pets. “Give me a child,” he once said, “and I’ll shape him into anything.”
By treating animals as clever machines, behaviorists managed some impressive feats: rats navigated mazes, chickens played tic-tac-toe, pigeons played Ping-Pong. During the Second World War, Skinner went so far as to design a pigeon-guided missile. The birds sat in the nose cone, each one pecking at a target on a translucent plate. The setup worked surprisingly well, but the pigeons were never enlisted—no one in the military would take them seriously, Skinner complained. Behaviorism, as a means of animal training, had a long, slow fuse.
The revolution, when it came, began with creatures beyond the reach of regular compulsion. An orca or a dolphin can’t be tugged on a leash or stung with a whip. It can’t hear what you’re shouting most of the time. To make it do what you want, you have to break down the behavior into discrete components—swim over here, pick up that hoop, leap through the air—then offer a reward for each step. At marine parks and aquariums, in the 1960s, an orca that did something right would hear a whistle blast and get a fish. After a while, each behavior would be associated with a different hand signal, and become so rewarding, in and of itself, that the orca wouldn’t always need to get a fish. One of the pioneers in this field, Karen Pryor, once taught a goldfish to swim through a tiny hoop just for the flicker of a flashlight. “It’s easy,” she told me. “You just have to have a healthy goldfish. And it has to be hungry.”
As operant conditioning has spread from aquariums to zoos, what once would have been circus acts have come to seem like ordinary good behavior. Thirty years ago, if a lion needed a flu shot, it had to be tranquillized. These days, it will walk up to its trainer and proffer its paw. “I could give you examples all day,” Ken Ramirez, the vice-president of animal training at the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago, told me. “We have sharks that will swim from tank to tank, and a beluga whale that will present its belly for an ultrasound. Our sea otters hold their eyes open to get drops, and I’ve had a diabetic baboon submit to regular insulin injections.” Not long ago, when a camel broke its jaw at the nearby Brookfield Zoo, it walked up to a table and laid its head on a lead plate for an X-ray. “It makes managing animals so much easier,” Ramirez said. “They do things as part of a game that you’ve taught them.”
Dogs were made for this sort of thing. No other animal so loves a game or so diligently aims to please. No other has been shaped so specifically to our needs. Selective breeding has turned Canis lupus familiaris into the most physically varied animal on earth. Its genome is the Microsoft Windows of biological programming: layer upon layer of complex function and code, often accreted at cross-purposes. It can produce Great Danes big enough to kill wild boars and Chihuahuas small enough to go down rat holes, beagles that track pythons and collies that catch Frisbees. “When you get to a detection dog that wants to find ammonium nitrate just so that it can play with a rubber ball, that is a very, very complex end point,” Auburn’s Robert Gillette told me.
The patrol dogs in the transit squad could bark on command (Speak!) and urinate at their handler’s discretion (Empty!). They could climb ladders, crawl through drainage pipes, and leap through the open window of a moving car. They were smart, disciplined, extremely capable animals. But the blood of the old war hounds still ran in them, and their most effective ability was intimidation.
“One canine team can do the work of ten or fifteen guys in a gang situation,” Lieutenant John Pappas, the head of the squad, told me. “It’s ‘Fuck you! I’m not going anywhere.’ But when you throw in some jaws and paws—holy shit! It changes the landscape.” In 2010, one station on the Lexington Avenue line was hit by twenty felonies in a matter of months. Once a canine unit was sent in, the number dropped to zero. “It’s like pulling up in an Ml Abrams battle tank,” Pappas said.
“They never pushed me. If I wanted to retrieve, shake hands, or roll over, it was entirely up to me.”
The commuters at Union Square seemed a peaceable crowd one Wednesday morning. Yet the dogs made even the innocent nervous. When the squad filed into a subway car, I could see backs stiffen all around, eyes focussed on the floor. Each dog and its handler took position at a set of doors, overseen by Rothschild and Brenner. Between stations, the dogs watched the riders. When the doors opened, they pivoted around to study the crowd on the platform. The German shepherds soon settled into the routine, but the Malinois kept twisting about on its leash, registering each face like a laser scanner.
“Malinois just really love bite work,” a canine cop from Middletown, New York, had told me. “They have this giant prey drive. Some people call them Maligators.” After a while, one of the rider
s—a tall, spindly man in a yarn prayer cap—began to get uncomfortable. He scooted down the seat, hunching his shoulders, and glared back at the Malinois. “If you tense up, if you’re feeling threatened, the dog picks that up and perceives a threat,” Brenner told me. Or as my friends used to say when I was a kid, at the worst possible moments, “They can smell your fear.”
Times Square is the busiest station in the city, and the main concourse was at its most cacophonous. A band of black bluegrass musicians, called the Ebony Hillbillies, was sprawled in lawn chairs playing an old fiddle tune called “Martha Campbell.” The bass and banjo lines skittered from run to run while the washboard chattered underneath, mimicking the commuters around us. “New York is just different,” Brenner said, looking around with satisfaction. “Our version of a crowd is different from anywhere else in the world. And these dogs are tuning in to everything. They’re trained for handler protection, and they don’t know when that threat is going to be upon them.”
The squad had been there only a few minutes when one of the German shepherds—a huge black male named Thunder—began to bark at something nearby. I could see a man in a hoodie crouched beside a pillar. An officer was shouting at him to show his hands, but he wouldn’t do it. One second, the two were frozen in a standoff, Thunder straining at the leash. Then the suspect lunged, the cop let go, and the dog leaped through the air. “Get this dog off of me!” the man screamed, as Thunder’s jaw clamped around his arm. The handler called Thunder back, but then the suspect broke away and the dog was on him again within a few steps, jerking him to the ground.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 6
