Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

  Dogs grieve too. In 2011 animal experts said it was possible that an explosive detection dog with the British Army had died from a heart seizure just hours after his devoted companion, Lance Corporal Liam Tasker, was killed in a firefight with insurgents in Afghanistan. Theo, a springer spaniel-mix, was not quite two years old. ‘I think we underestimate the grieving process in dogs. Some dogs react very severely to their partner’s loss,’ a senior veterinarian said after Theo died.

  With such loyalty, it is no wonder dogs have been hailed as heroes, honoured with military funerals and awarded an array of medals for bravery and service. Monuments have been built and portraits painted to record dogs’ unyielding loyalty to man.

  And yet. Much of it has not ended well for the devoted dog conscripted to war.

  One of the most disturbing uses of man’s best friend was by the Soviets in the Second World War, in a savage effort to repel invading German tanks. The Russians trained dogs to find food hidden under tanks. In the days before the expected confrontations, the hounds were starved. As enemy tanks approached, soldiers strapped an explosives-filled coat on the backs of the innocent canines, freed them from their bonds and sent them in search of food. The dogs did as trained and crawled under the tanks, which triggered a raised detonator attached to the top of the coat. The bomb exploded, the dog was killed and casualties and fatalities were inflicted on the enemy. It is remarkably easy to feel sorry for them, these trusting hounds callously written off as expendable military equipment.

  Thankfully, the Russian barbarity was abandoned when soldiers discovered that, while obedient and smart, the dogs had some limitations—the most serious being an inability to tell the difference between enemy and Soviet tanks. Dogs might not be colour-blind in the full sense of the word but they were blind to national insignias. That wasn’t all; no matter how desperately starved they were, some dogs were gun shy. Instead of barrelling headfirst into battle, they shied away from it, an instinctive fear that reduced their reliability and effectiveness but saved them from blowing themselves up.

  Other nations and combatants also have been callous in their disregard for the kindliness and willingness of dogs to please and serve us humans, and it makes one wonder. If dogs can read human gestures and human behaviour better than any other species, including the marvellously intelligent chimpanzee, as American scientist Brian Hare recently argued, it seems an especially cruel oversight that they can’t read or foretell man’s duplicity. The tragedy of the anti-tank dogs shows the purity of canine loyalty.

  The easiest and perhaps surest way to understand a dog is to accept that it sees the world through its nose and that it is, quite literally, a nose-aholic. The canine nose is the dog’s lifeline and it uses it in every interaction it undertakes. Dog noses are different to our human ones, physically and functionally. As well as having pride of place on a dog’s face, the nose has front nostrils that extend into flexible side slits to assist the sniffing process, and its shape is specifically designed to breathe in and out at the same time. Impressive, yes?

  The nose has an internal membranous and bone structure built for smelling, armed with millions of receptor sites to process whatever smell, foul or otherwise, they have inhaled deeply and repeatedly. Compare. We humans have just six million receptor sites. The average dog has 220 million. A bloodhound, considered the crème de la canine of nose work, has about 30 million more. No wonder it has been dubbed ‘a nose with a dog attached’. As Alexandra Horowitz writes in her best-selling book, Inside of A Dog, ‘Dogs have more genes committed to coding olfactory cells, more cells, and more kinds (her emphasis) of cells, able to detect more kinds of smells.’

  And what smells!

  The non-profit Pine Street Foundation in California has taught five dogs to detect ovarian cancer in humans by smelling samples of their breath. The dogs are all pets of families who live near the research facility in San Anselmo, located 32 kilometres north of San Francisco. None of the volunteer hounds had any scent training before their proud owners signed them up to be scientific researchers. The canines were trained using operant conditioning, with a clicker and using food as rewards, and are now ready to go to work. By the end of 2011 the foundation will have completed recruiting ovarian cancer patients to then ‘closely examine the chemistry of exhaled breath,’ says the foundation’s research director Michael McCulloch.

  McCulloch hopes the study will lead to the discovery of a new non-invasive test for this insidious disease, known as the ‘silent killer’ because it is usually detected in its later, more aggressive stages when treatment is less effective.

  Pine Street has a strong track record. In 2006, researchers led by McCulloch taught another five dogs to sniff out the chemical changes in people who had recently been diagnosed with breast and lung cancer. The scientists worked out that canines can differentiate between cancerous and healthy cells because cancerous ones emit different metabolic waste products. The dogs accurately detected cancer cells at all four stages of the disease and across all age groups within 12,000 samples from 55 lung cancer patients, 31 breast cancer patients and 83 healthy controls.

  In 2010, McCulloch and Emily Moser from the New College of Florida went on a search mission to examine all peer-reviewed studies on cancer-detecting canines. They narrowed in on six studies in which dogs had been used to detect breast, ovarian, lung and prostate cancers and melanoma. Their conclusion after reviewing the work was optimistic. ‘Early successes with canine scent detection suggest chemical analysis of exhaled breath may be a valid method for cancer detection.’

  That man’s best friend really is the top dog in scientific research when it comes to scent and sniff should come as no great surprise. Pups are born blind and begin life relying on smell and touch. Ground scenting and air scenting—in fact, any scenting—comes naturally. In 1989 the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, reported the first known case in the United Kingdom of a dog owner whose hound alerted her to a melanoma by repeatedly licking the cancerous spot on her leg. That tongue-lashing saved her life. A few years before that, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a Shetland sheepdog in New York detected a virulent form of melanoma on its owner’s back. The discovery ultimately led scientists to test the diagnostic abilities of dogs in a project partly supported by the National Institutes of Health. ‘It may well be that, someday in the future, inspection by a dog may become a routine part of cancer screening,’ said Richard Simmons, a research associate who worked on the project.

  McCulloch believes the dog nose is ‘one of the most sophisticated odour detection devices on the planet’, so sophisticated that it can sniff out a few tiny molecules in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. McCulloch’s colleague and the medical director at Pine Street, Michael Broffman, puts it rather more charmingly, ‘We often refer to our dogs as the best and original PET-scan.’

  Knowing and accepting our limitations and as we learn more about the fine intelligence of man’s best friend, humans are increasingly calling on dogs to do a range of complicated and dexterous tasks. We faithfully put our lives directly in their paws. They guide the blind, hear for the deaf, help the physically disabled, find the lost, in body and soul, and even nurture stressed victims in criminal trials. They aid search and rescue missions when Mother Nature has unleashed her worst, or when the unthinkable happens, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

  A retired Canadian search and rescue police dog named Trakr located the twentieth and last survivor of the World Trade Center attacks buried beneath ten metres of concrete and twisted metal. Genelle Guzman-McMillan had been trapped for more than twenty-three hours when Trakr indicated to his handler, James Symington, that he’d detected a human being close by.

  ‘Trakr came to a sudden stop . . . [his] body became still and erect . . . Trakr’s ears perked up and his tail stiffened. There was no doubt about it at that point: Trakr sensed somebody close by was buried alive. That somebody was me,’ she writes in her autobiography, Angel in
the Rubble.

  Four hours later, Guzman-McMillan was cut free from her concrete tomb in the mountain of burning debris.

  Dogs also have been taught to detect pending seizures in epileptics and hypoglycaemic attacks in diabetics. They can smell fear, because fear smells. They can smell confidence and anger, too, for as Horowitz points out, pheromones are released when we are alarmed and charmed and our bodies go through physiological and metabolic changes. They magically teach prisoners and juvenile delinquents the meaning of compassion, care and responsibility. Therapy canines calm and comfort the sick. Doggie soothsayers foretell imminent earthquakes and thunderstorms.

  Right now in Australia scientists at Monash University in the southern state of Victoria are investigating whether dogs can detect the range of raw human emotions, with a focus on determining whether dogs prefer happy or sad people. ‘There is some anecdotal evidence that if you have had a bad day at the office when you get home your dog knows it and comes up and gives you a nuzzle,’ says Melbourne-based animal behaviourist, Kate Mornement.

  We have no qualms about giving canines the dirty and stinky work and it helps that they love it. Sniff for cadavers? No problem. Bed bugs, termites, dead game and fowl? Easy. If it really reeks, great. You might be turning your nose up but remember that dogs eat faeces, a habit known as coprophagia—disgusting to us but delightful to them. They also sniff other dogs’ urine and excrement and then, more often than not, sign the same spot with a splash of their own. Call it doggie graffiti. Think of how a dog introduces itself to another member of the species—straight to the rear end where its genitalia are located.

  Dogs are not prejudiced: they don’t limit themselves to their own species. Remember the last time a dog decided to invade your personal space with an inappropriate sniff of your groin that had you shifting from foot to foot with embarrassment? Dogs have no time for embarrassment, especially when it comes to smells. To the dog, that invasive sniff was the most straightforward way to gather information about you, though, thankfully, we’ll never know what it discovered because it won’t tell.

  Take your dog for walk and you will lose count of the times it sniffs repeatedly at something imperceptible to you. Dogs collect a veritable library of information about what’s gone on from invisible and visible stink spots—who’s been there, when they were there, what they did, what they ate for breakfast, if it was healthy, who they were with, on heat or not, dominant, submissive, aggressive, large, small.

  Horowitz calls these cumulative piles of aging yet invisible scents from a parade of passing pooches a ‘community centre bulletin board’, and this seems about right. Humans need obvious cues, and many of them, to determine such things; dogs just need their schnoz, one big sniff and some form of physical, even disgusting, nose contact.

  Hound expert Stanley Coren likened a dog on a sniffing mission to a human reading a newspaper. Pulling the dog away before it has finished sniffing means it has only ‘read the headlines’, not the whole story. As Coren says, it seems rather mean to deprive the dog of its daily gossip.

  The father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, coined the phrase, I think, therefore I am. The canine Cogito would be: I sniff, therefore I am.

  Chapter 9

  TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

  As is often the case in life, chance played its hand as much as circumstance. A fortuitous combination of both, mixed with the felicity of fate, had Sarbi assigned to explosive detection dog handler D. His facility with dogs had seen him promoted from handler to instructor and, more recently, rise up a rank. He was, in short, something of a dog whisperer, and was without an explosive detection dog for the first time in five years when Sarbi and Rafi arrived at the SME in June 2005. Vegas, his beloved golden Labrador retriever, had been retired to live out her life as her handler’s pet after a distinguished career serving her country alongside D at home and abroad, including a six-month stint in the Solomon Islands on Operation Anode.

  Rank has its privileges and the EDD Section’s chief trainer, Corporal Murray Young, chose to train Rafi. By default the dogless D took Sarbi.

  He immediately noted Sarbi’s retrieval drive was excellent. She didn’t game, that is, chase birds or prey, a habit that can mean the end of an EDD career before it has even begun. And she had the hallmarks of a good working dog: eager to please, a disposition to work closely with a master and a love of playtime, the latter of which turned out to be a strong point because, in reality, all work for the explosive detection dog is a form of playtime.

  The explosive detection dogs’ role is straightforward, though training them is not. The nineteen-week course revolves around a few fundamentals, starting with the dog’s innate retrieval drive, the tennis ball—the reward—and a custom-built harness, all of which leads to teaching the dogs how to detect the chemical compounds of explosives through the process of scent imprinting. The dogs are not trained with food as a reward because it is impractical for their handlers to carry extra food on patrol when their packs already weigh in excess of 40 kilograms, not including webbing, weapons and equipment.

  Sarbi and Rafi took to the basic training and obedience lessons with alacrity and sailed through the initial two-week assessment period designed to see how they coped in various situations and conditions: indoors and out, with various physical and audible distractions. They trained over a specially made obstacle course consisting of ramps, platforms, ladders, tunnels, A-shaped walls and simulated windows and doorways, to prepare them for the harsh terrain and exacting mission demands of real patrols. EDDs search tight and unfamiliar spaces, compounds, caves and bunkers, under and in trucks, tanks, in cargo containers, aircraft holds, on board airplanes and in helicopters. In fact, wherever it is suspected that dangerous materials and weapons are hidden, even under water. There are no off limits.

  Dogs have acute hearing and are sensitive to the noise and percussive impact of exploding rocket propelled grenades, roadside bombs, mortars, and machine-gun and small arms fire. Sudden, nerve-jangling explosions will spook them. The high pitch of chopper blades, the roar of aircraft engines and the racket of tanks and trucks can be their undoing. Therefore, they had to be conditioned to cope with the thunderous noise of war.

  A meticulous program to desensitise the EDDs to battlefield noise has been developed over the decades and is used around the world. D began by firing a starter pistol from about 100 metres away, to familiarise Sarbi with the sound while she was calm and settled. He moved in small increments closer until she could withstand the gunfire and percussive shock waves at close range, including when tethered by leash to his body armour. Most dogs are initially affected by weapons fire—in other words, gun shy—and their reaction can make or break their careers. ‘The initial testing is to determine that the dogs won’t run away or react badly or savagely,’ says D. ‘Dogs are generally fight or flight and if they can’t get away they might bite.’ He had never seen a dog bite anyone when exposed to gunfire or explosions, but he never discounted that dogs were dogs.

  But all this is mere entrée. The real work of scent imprinting came next, the moment the dogs had been waiting for. The aforementioned harness is the trigger for the dog to know it is about to go to work. ‘It’s a game for the dog, he thinks he is looking for a tennis ball. As soon as the search harness is put on the dog he knows he’s in for a game,’ said Corporal Fred Cox, a former chief trainer at the SME.

  D unpacked the explosive training kit and stashed the first explosive odour that Sarbi would be trained on in a metal cage. He held Sarbi while Corporal Young ran down to the explosive, where he placed a tennis ball next to the cage. Sarbi didn’t take her eyes off the tennis ball and watched in anticipation. When Young ran back past Sarbi’s handler without the ball, the dog instinctively knew what to do. She waited patiently for her cue, the magic words from her handler.

  Sarbi, seek on.

  The trainee hound sprinted down to the cage and picked up her ball not knowing that her handler was actually t
raining her to associate the smell of explosives with the tennis ball. Sarbi was smart, but for her this was a simple game of retrieving the ball. As the training progressed Young repeated the exercise, but over time, instead of putting the ball beside the cage, he hid it in his pocket and ran back empty handed. D released Sarbi with the routine command.

  Seek on.

  Sarbi ran down to the cage and couldn’t find the missing ball. But she recognised the explosive odour that she had been trained to associate with her ball. She stared at the cage that was emitting the newly familiar smell. Young threw the missing tennis ball in over Sarbi’s head. Fortunately, he had a well-trained arm and the ball landed precisely on the cage. The dog was ecstatic—her ball had appeared out of nowhere. The training was done in small steps, working towards the required response, and after a week Sarbi was able to follow a dummy run and sit within one metre of the cage containing the explosives and stare at it without moving. Sergeant D quickly identified her signature tell; it was obvious. She froze, raised her tail and went into a slow motion sit, staring intently at the object, just as Gemma said she had done as a puppy in Bowral.

  Good girl.

  D repeated the process until Sarbi automatically identified a range of explosives. In no short time she proved that her explosive detection skills were not to be sniffed at.

  ‘Some dogs learn slower than others, some never pick it up,’ he says. ‘Sarbi was pretty much excellent right from the get-go after her initial training. Once she learnt it, she was very good. She is an awesome searcher, very responsive. I don’t have to try to control her too much because she searches everything that needs to be searched. Quite obedient and very steady under all conditions. And she loved the tennis ball.’

  Her schnoz finesse and TTPs were tested daily on simulated patrols and in mock situations. Every morning D loaded Sarbi in the EDD Section’s purpose-built vehicle, dubbed the ‘ice-cream van’ because it looked like a refrigerated van and could carry up to eight dog teams, and headed out to search. He and Corporal Young spent hours with Sarbi and Rafi, hiding weapons and explosives until both dogs effortlessly identified any number of hazardous threats in any situation. D hid explosives from the explosive training kit for Rafi and Murray to discover, and vice versa. Both handlers and dogs were tested. They rarely failed. Sarbi had become a canine Sherlock Holmes. Ditto Rafi.