Navy SEAL Dogs (10 page)

Similarly, you can also see amazing scenes of dogs flying up, all four paws off the ground, to go after trainers in bite suits. These dogs launch themselves from 20 feet away and then contact their targets. Again, it all looks great. It's just not very effective. As any football coach will tell you, don't leave your feet. Why?

As a former football player, I can tell you that it's hard to change direction in midair. As a dog trainer who's been in various apprehension/bite training scenarios, I know you can't change direction very easily when your feet are off the ground. It's also easier to move to the left or right (when you do have your feet on the floor) and avoid a charging dog, especially one that doesn't have four (or even two) feet on the floor. In addition, the amount of force and leverage you lose when you're airborne, as opposed to when your feet are solidly planted on the planet, is substantial. In the National Football League, for instance, a soaring tackle against the guy carrying the ball may make the highlights reel, but it's the tackle that happens when the defensive player is firmly planted on the ground that is not just more fundamentally sound but can also be a harder hit.

As far as the dogs are concerned, those leaps are also potentially dangerous to the dog's well-being. For example, if a dog is chasing after someone on a roof and the dog sails off the roof in pursuit, he could hit a wall or otherwise do some serious damage to himself.

As for serious damage, let me tell you that even with a bite suit on—and that's a specially padded suit designed to absorb a lot of the force of an animal's jaws—I have felt the power of a dog's body and jaws, and that is not something to take lightly. I have at times when wearing this protective gear experienced a level of pain as intense as anything I've endured in my entire life.

I have also, in fact, been on the receiving end of a dog's bites and blows without having any protective gear on. That is an incredibly humbling experience. Let me tell you, all studies and analysis aside, when a dog gets his maximum bite force on me, it is incredible. The pain is sharp and intense, my vision narrows, sounds seem to be silenced, and thoughts of how I can mess with this dog and get the better of him are replaced by a single thought—
I wish this dog would just get off of me.

*   *   *

I need to make this point clear. The apprehension work that we do with the dogs is to train them as a
nonlethal
force. In most cases, a live capture of a suspected, or clearly demonstrated insurgent, Taliban member, or whatever bad guy the dog goes after is much preferred over a “neutralized” one. A lot of valuable intelligence information has been and can be extracted from captured combatants. That is one of the reasons why I consider dogs to be such an effective weapon—they are trained to be a very highly skilled nonlethal force, trained to exert, yet restrain, their biting force.

Actually, all those numbers about bite force pale in comparison to something that's much more difficult to quantify—and that is the measure of a dog's heart and how much a dog is willing to endure in order to subdue a human being. How many of them are willing to use that biting force at the expense of their own discomfort? That's what the initial bite-work training in a contained area like the apprehension-training corral we set up is all about and focuses on. Think about it like this. We work on developing a dog's tenacity in close combat, similar to the way a boxer spars in the ring. We're also working to develop each dog's technique, but it's also about getting each dog to utilize his inherent aggression and push past a pain boundary. There may be some physical pain, but I'm mostly referring to mental stress. It's the mental stress a dog undergoes when he feels you fighting back, when he feels your own mental and emotional aggression working against his forces; it's when the two of you are really locked in combat and you are testing the dog's willingness to get the job done.

Working in a bite suit against a dog is as much an acting job as it is a physical performance. Similar to what the dogs have to endure, more than just your physical stamina is being tested. As I said earlier, dogs read body language, and they also read the energetic projections you give off. If you are working with a dog on his apprehension and bite skills, you have to be mentally strong and able to project the same kind of “I'm bigger and badder than you” attitude. Anyone can go through the motions of standing there in a padded suit while a dog grabs you; it takes a good bit of artistry to act the part (and believe me, it isn't completely acting) of someone who has deadly intent. Dogs are highly sensitive to those signals we humans send out, and when we're afraid they absolutely get it and take full advantage of it. It's how they respond when you match aggression for aggression that determines whether or not they will make the cut with us.

Just to give you a sense of how strongly dogs respond to signals we send out, I have a close friend, Wayne, who can give off a fierce “don't mess with me” vibe even when he's lying on the ground, which is a very compromising position to be in with these dogs. When we release a dog to come after him, the dog will tear out initially and then come skidding to a stop six feet in front of Wayne, sensing that “this is one bad dude and I better be careful.” Wayne is a former Navy Search and Rescue Corpsman, and he's taught me a lot about dogs and is one of the real friends I've got in this life. I've got plenty of buddies, but just a few friends, and Wayne is one of them. We frequently work together in training MWDs, and Wayne brings a wealth of experience and insight into the mix, along with his “don't mess with me” attitude that the dogs sense. Wayne doesn't shout. He doesn't strike any offensive postures. He just exudes that attitude, and the dogs feel it and respond accordingly.

The way that we get dogs to match aggression for aggression is by shifting them between drives. When you're doing apprehension or bite work, there are two main drives that a dog is working. He's working in prey drive, or on the offensive, and he's also working his defensive drive. In bite work, a dog starts out in prey drive, and that's very instinctual.

The dog sees a guy in a bite suit, he gets the command, and
bam
! The dog goes after the guy. The dog is conditioned to fight with the guy. What usually happens in much of the bite-work training other dogs receive is that they aren't truly put into defensive-drive mode. I equate that to a boxer who's been taught how to box but has never been hit. So you've got to teach this dog how to get hit, how to react. You can teach anybody how to throw punches all night long, how to move around the ring and counterpunch, but if they've never actually been hit, the first time they are, they're like, what was that? So you've got to teach that dog that, hey, not only is it okay, but you're going to work through it.

It's a very, very simple but not easy process. You've got to have a truckload of experience with seeing dogs being worked and then also working with them to really be able to identify each of the two drives and know how and when to shift a dog from one drive into the other and then back and forth again and again. Prey drive relieves a dog's stress. A dog feels like this is the natural order of things. He's thinking, “I'm being the aggressor. I'm taking my aggression to that thing/that person. I'm going to dominate it.”

When in prey drive, a dog detects something and his mouth is on it. He's biting down, he's scoring the touchdown. He's going after it. He's loving life. Then, all of a sudden, the decoy in the bite suit comes alive and starts bringing it to him. This turns the whole process around for the dog. Now the dog is thinking, “Now I'm going to fight. Now I'm going on defense. Now I'm getting a little bit worried about this guy. I'm fighting him a little harder, maybe a third round, whatever.” You've got to be able to recognize when a dog is on offense and when a dog is on defense. Put a dog too much on the defensive and for too long, and he will crack—and we can't have that happen.

To keep the dog on the aggressive, we gradually increase those defensive thresholds by shifting the dog back and forth between prey drive and defensive drive, so he's thinking, “I'm going after it. I'm preserving my life.” Over time, that threshold for defense goes up and up and up, enough to where now that dog is automatically coming at you like he wants to kill you. It doesn't matter what you do to him, he is completely unfazed by it. It may start out with the dog in prey drive. You start to put a little bit of pressure on him so he switches into defense drive, and he starts to wig out a little bit.
Bam!
You switch things right back so the dog goes into prey drive and can relieve that stress. Now you put the dog back into defense drive. Now he lasts a few seconds longer. When he starts to show stress again,
bam.
Every time he starts to get to that boiling point,
bam,
you get him right back into prey drive. I back off, I reward him, I look away from him, I let him dominate me, and I take a bite to the back. Maybe I even fall to the ground and let him really dominate me.

It's a feeling-out process that you have to be constantly evaluating as you go. A truly good decoy is absolutely priceless because he will make or break a dog. You can ruin a great dog with an incompetent decoy, or make an average dog fantastic by having a phenomenal decoy who can recognize when to shift drives and know how much pressure to put on, when to back off, when to relieve stress, and when to put it on.

In my mind, doing this kind of bite work is absolutely an art. You have to eventually develop a feel for how stressed an individual dog gets, recognize his body language and how he is communicating, and understand what he is thinking and feeling, before you can really train a dog well. You need to elevate a dog to a level where you're teaching him how to fight, how to bring up that natural instinct that he has genetically deep down, an instinct that we've already identified through the training-selection process. Now we're just teaching him to bring that genetic instinct up to a much higher level, so he is able to handle the rigors of training. Eventually we arrive at the dog being ten times the dog he was when we first got him.

Like other aspects of training MWDs, this is a time-consuming process. If you're not careful, you can create a couple of problems. One is that if you don't put the dog into defensive drive enough, he never really learns how to fight. This is certainly better than burning him out going the other way, which is putting him on the defensive too much. That way you've cracked and ruined the dog and broken his spirit, so that he relinquishes a lot of the backbone that he had. As a result, we always err on the side of prey drive and don't take the dogs overboard on defense drive.

Unless you've seen these dogs in action, it's difficult to convey the differences in their responses when in each of the two drives. It is a matter of degree of intensity as well as specific behaviors. In terms of intensity, think of your dog when you reward him with a treat—he takes it readily and willingly but is gentle and nonaggressive. When you give your dog a treat and other dogs are present, your dog's sense of competition for resources is higher. He will take the treat, reaching for it more aggressively; in some cases, a dog will turn his head and his eyes seem to roll back in the same way that a great white shark does when attacking prey. Your dog won't bite you in order to get the treat, but he is definitely amped up a notch or two. That's how it is when an MWD shifts from one drive to the other. Because the intensity is already well beyond your treat-seeking dog's drive, his amped-up behavior feels that much more aggressive/assertive/on the offensive.

*   *   *

A dog that will only fight when in a kind of training corral isn't any good to us or to anyone who wants a dog trained to do apprehension work. Neither is a dog that can be distracted by other things that may be happening around him. So another important component of apprehension training is to place a dog into a variety of environments at the appropriate time, just like we do with detection training. We travel far and wide with a dog and his handler and create a variety of scenarios so that each dog has the experience of tracking and apprehending bad guys in everything from mountainous terrain at night to urban settings both indoors and outdoors.

One new environment for the dogs is a helicopter. We work with them on a similar kind of exposure work to the aircraft. It starts with just having the dogs be around a helicopter and progresses to them getting into one and then to actually taking off and landing in one. After that we get the dogs to fly in a helicopter for greater and greater distances. We refer to the taking-off and landing exercises as elevators. We place one dog in each helicopter along with a complement of a flight crew and a team. The dog and handler are the last to board. We do the full load-up of the aircraft, and then the dog and handler get on. We take off and then land two to three minutes later, repeating this process six to eight times with each dog.

Everyone knows that a dog just starting out with this training can be a bit uneasy, and I've watched people on board press themselves as far back against the sides of the chopper as they can when the handler and the dog board, hoping to stay out of an unsettled dog's way and not attract his attention. Once, we had a relatively inexperienced flyer doing elevators. Everyone else in the cabin was a handler, so they knew what to look for, and they all watched the dog and immediately wallpapered themselves. They could see the dog defaulting to aggression mode, and he eyed each and every one of them, assessing who would be the choicest bite. The men kept pressing themselves against the wall, trying to make themselves as small a target as possible. I had to laugh a bit when I saw that. Five combat-trained and hardened military men—all heavily armed, mind you—trying to keep as far away as they could from this pacing menace. Obviously, part of our job is to get the dogs to calm down and not pose such a threat, but those exercises serve as a good reminder to all of us about just what kind of power these dogs really have over us and how we have to do everything we can to harness it and unleash it properly.