Maria Goodavage - Soldier Dogs

The dogs being tested generally have little to no training in detection work. Detection at this evaluation stage is much simpler than actually seeking out explosives or drugs. It really comes to a dog’s desire to play with a ball and to search for a ball he can’t see. Testers show the dog the ball and then hide it (usually in one of those drawers mentioned earlier) and watch to see how much the dog wants to find it. The evaluators are looking for a dog who wants the ball so much that he’s clearly thinking about it even if he can’t see it, and he’s excited and will search tirelessly and intensively until he locates the ball. You can imagine the energy a dog like this has.

Once the dog has the ball, Doc and the team look at how jealously he guards the ball in order to keep it, and how enduring and vigorous his interest is in playing with the ball. In essence, the dog has to have a passionate desire to have a toy in his mouth and a very strong olfactory search drive in order to pass this part of the test.

“It’s actually an unnatural desire to play with an object. It’s a specially bred mutated form of hunting behavior, selected for by dog breeders over hundreds of years,” according to Doc Hilliard. “Every dog we’re looking for needs to have it.”

Jake—Barely passes the ball test. He loves the ball and will search for it tirelessly, but once he has the ball, he is happy to share it with whoever wants it. Doc says it’s not ideal, but that the possessiveness can be trained into him, at least to an extent. Our now-deceased springer spaniel, Nisha, was completely ball obsessed, and if you tried to take a ball from her, you had to be prepared to do battle.

But it’s hard to judge every dog’s passion for the ball. Sometimes a dog goes to the United States and passes through training, only to fail in advanced training school.

I watched an army dog and his handler, who would be deploying to Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as they tried to work on exercises at the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The dog was listless and didn’t seem to want to do the exercises. The ball didn’t mean much to him when he got it. He’d take it for a few seconds and drop it. Part of it may have been the heat (114 degrees Fahrenheit), but some of the problem was simply that he didn’t care enough about the ball to go through the rigors of this level of training. The man in charge of the course, Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight, said he could tell when he first saw the dog that the dog didn’t care enough about the reward.

“If I made you run three klicks in this heat and told you ‘OK, now do what I tell you and I’ll give you this nice cold water,’ you’d do just about anything for that water at that point. That’s how a strong dog feels about his toy. That’s the passion this dog lacks.” The dog did not end up deploying and is working with his handler on trying to improve his love for his “paycheck.” If that doesn’t work, he will no longer be a soldier dog.

The buy team also makes time to test an innate skill that’s vital to a good sniffer dog: how quickly a dog can learn to associate a ball with a weird odor. It’s the cornerstone of detection training, and once at dog school in the United States, dogs have only sixty days to master detect eight explosives scents, so the team does not want slow learners. How does a dog come to associate a ball with an odor?

Doc or someone on the team gets a dog searching for her ball inside the barn. Suddenly the dog hits this weird-smelling scent she’s probably never encountered before. Testers used to use substances like marijuana or potassium chlorate, but these days they don’t want to expose a dog to narcotics or drugs so early in the game. There’s a chance it could confuse a dog if, for example, she was exposed to marijuana during testing and went on to become an explosives detector. There’s a lot of weed in Afghanistan, and you don’t want an explosives dog alerting to it. This olfactory separation is even more important for narcotics dogs. If a drug dog alerts to that early memory of potassium chlorate, but handlers think she’s found a stash of drugs, it could be a very big problem.

The scent that the team uses for testing could be something as simple as vanilla or licorice, which Doc refers to as “arbitrary odors.” When the dog, who is looking for her ball, hits this new odor, all sorts of things happen. The dog thinks, “I’ve never smelled this before!” and shows a tiny change of behavior, perhaps stopping or wagging or tilting her head. At that moment, someone throws the ball so it lands right on the source of the odor, and the dog is cheered on for her “feat.”

This happens a few more times, placing the odor in various places in the room and having a ball “magically” land on it when the dog successfully sniffs the odor. Many dogs learn extremely rapidly to associate an odor and a ball. The odor becomes a totem for the ball. It’s a Pavlovian process that works wonders. Once they are at dog school, it becomes the way dogs once again begin associating scents with a reward—only the scents at school will be the real deal and not something you’d find in Granny’s pantry.

Dogs who will do patrol work have more testing ahead of them. This is something the breeders and their trainers have worked on extensively. The dogs need to show aggression in response to a decoy (a human posing as a “bad guy”) dressed without obvious bite equipment, and they must show great interest in biting and holding decoys who are wearing bite sleeves. The bites need to be strong and full, and the dog has to hold steady while biting, even if under threat. The type of bite is important. A shallow, weak, or shifting bite (in which the dog does something known as “typewriting”) is not desirable and could be cause for elimination.

The buy team’s goal is to buy sixty to one hundred dogs per visit to Europe; some dogs will go to the TSA’s detector dog program, the rest to the Department of Defense’s dog school at Lackland, for basic training. Once the dogs have been chosen, they tend not to stick around with the vendors for long.

Let’s say the team finishes at the barn site, where members selected several dogs. Often within hours, the dogs are packed up and driven via truck to Frankfurt, where they are taken out of shipping crates, walked, and their crates cleaned. There, they wait for the eleven- or twelve-hour flight to Houston, which they’ll make in the cargo hold of a commercial airliner. Once the dogs land, they’re put in an air-conditioned truck for a three-hour drive to Lackland. They’re met by handlers, veterinarians, and technicians at Lackland’s Medina base kennels. The dogs—who have been on the road for between two and six days, depending on transportation availability—are unloaded and given a cursory exam.

Veterinarians at Lackland occasionally find dogs arriving from overseas to be underweight and to harbor skin, ear, or other infections. It’s surprising, because the buy teams would have seen the dogs from two to six days earlier. The teams tend not to take dogs with these problems, because, as Doc Hilliard says, “we don’t subsidize neglect of dogs.” The problems are treatable, but if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on a dog, you would hope that the dog would have been given adequate kibble and care before arriving.

On a visit to the Medina clinic, one of the many dogs I saw being checked out was Lobo R705. He was a long-haired black shepherd, but you could hardly tell. He had received a buzz cut the previous week in order to get rid of the badly matted fur he arrived with from the vendor in Europe. Under the mats his entire chest had been bright red and inflamed from urine burns. He also had a raging ear infection. A veterinarian prescribed a regimen of antibiotic salves and ear meds. Upon recheck, Lobo’s skin had healed, as had his ears. A staffer congratulated him. “Good job, boy!”