Navy SEAL Dogs (5 page)

Obviously, though, great athletes are great for more reasons than their physical abilities alone. They are tenacious competitors, driven by something inside them 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 I work with have to have that component. They have to have some inner fire that you can control and unleash to the best advantage.

That inner fire can be described as enthusiasm or tenacity. It's what a coach looking to recruit an athlete looks for, and it's what I look for in an SOF dog. In a dog I call it “drive.” It is the combination of their unwillingness to quit and their willingness to go after something like a ball unrelentingly that I look for when evaluating dogs. It may sound like the same thing, but the example that follows should shed some light on the differences between not quitting and really going after it.

For most pet owners, the drive I'm talking about can best be observed when you have in your possession a favorite toy that your dog likes to play with. For a lot of dogs, the toy of choice is a tennis ball. When I go to look at dogs, physically mature dogs in most cases, what I want to see is behaviors that would drive most pet owners nuts. The dog should express its desire in leaping, barking, turning, and spinning—not just for a little while but persistently, for a long period of time. The dog's desire must be over the top, and it literally exhibits that trait by jumping up to nearly my eye level to get to that ball. The dog is, as I said, relentless, and would very definitely cross the line between what we consider acceptable and unacceptable pet behavior. I want to see a dog that is willing and able to use its only real weapon—its mouth—to get that ball. Simply put, the dog must have so much desire and be so unwilling to give in and lose the battle for that ball that it will actually bite a human to get it.

If you've ever seen a dog that just shivers with excitement and pent-up desire to get a toy, then you have some idea of what I'm talking about. It's as if every fiber of that dog's being is twitching with its built-in, hardwired desire to get at the ball, which it sees as prey. For the dogs at the top of my list, the object of desire is nearly immaterial. I could be holding a piece of pipe, a length of rebar, a stick, it doesn't matter. The dog wants whatever it is and will do nearly anything to get it.

In addition to wanting it while it's in your possession, the dog will tear off after the object at high speed as soon as you throw it. The aggressive pursuit of that object, the speed at which the dog goes after it, is off the charts. To say that the dog goes after it is an understatement. Rather, the dog launches itself like a rocket.

When the dog reaches the object, it plants its forelegs so forcefully that its hind legs rise up off the ground, kicking dust and debris all over the place. The dog will then grab the object, wrap its front legs and paws around it, and assume a guarding position, not allowing anyone near its prize.

Compare that response to your typical ball-obsessed dog and I think you get the picture. Prey drive is the ability and desire to chase and catch anything that moves. What I'm looking for, as I've said, is over-the-top, extreme prey drive. The dogs have to be bold, powerful, stubborn, and dominant. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, they have to be absolutely crazy about retrieving things.

Now, if you approach the dog once it has successfully retrieved an object and try to take that object away, you will encounter fierce resistance. Of course, I'm talking about a dog's raw ability at this point. Eventually that dog will have to be trained to pursue an object with this kind of abandon only on command, and also learn to relinquish it when told to do so.

I've taken clients who want a personal protection dog to view candidates, and when they see that kind of raw behavior they frequently ask, “Is there something wrong with that dog?”

I always answer, “No. There's a lot right with that dog.”

That kind of nearly out-of-control pursuit is needed because frequently these working dogs, once in the field, have to charge into unknown environments, and just as frequently, ones that present a real danger to them. You don't want dogs that are going to hesitate at all. They absolutely must remain task focused and able to block out all distractions. The ones that we deploy have to be unflappable in all circumstances. They can't be spooked by dark rooms, slippery floors, open metal grating, helicopters, fast-roping, rappelling, parachuting, entering and exiting water, jumping onto unstable objects, or entering tight places like ducts and crawl spaces. Not only can't they be spooked, they have to go into those places and do those activities willingly and with confidence and purpose, as evidenced by their upright carriage, their scorpion tails curling over their backs, their pricked ears, and their chests thrust forward, no matter how foreign or unfamiliar a situation they are in. They need to stroll in everywhere like they own the place and do the job. In other words, they need to act just like their human counterparts.

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One of the main jobs that a Navy SEAL dog is trained to do is apprehension. Under combat conditions a dog is often required to find and apprehend a specific object and/or the enemy.

In terms of apprehending—that is, cornering or holding on to an enemy—which a dog often physically does by using its mouth and biting down as hard as is needed, a dog has to have an inbred ability to be aggressive toward humans. I want to make this point as clear as possible. Animals can demonstrate aggression toward other animals or toward people. 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.

Belgian Malinois dogs can be human aggressive. They have a strong willingness to be assertive and to bite. That makes sense considering that they were bred to watch over flocks of animals and protect them from rustlers. Through selective breeding, the herding dogs we “recruit” have had that human aggression tweaked to a very high degree out of necessity. It takes proper training and control by a well-trained handler to keep these dogs from posing a potential threat to ordinary folks.

The SEAL teams, unlike some other agencies, have to employ dual-purpose dogs. Not only must the dogs excel at apprehension, they also need to excel at detection. A lot of the work these dogs do is detection work—finding people, explosives, narcotics, and other things. In fact, they need to detect something in order to apprehend it, and they detect things mostly with their noses.

Dogs are legendary, and for good reason, for the sensitivity of their noses. Scientists estimate that, on average, a dog has 220 million scent receptors in its nose. The average person has 5 million.

I frequently say, when describing what I'm looking for in a dog, that I want a nose and the rest of the dog that comes with it doesn't really matter. That's not literally true, of course, but it does come close to describing the priority I place on a dog's olfactory ability. I term a dog's ability and desire to find an object that isn't visible “hunt drive.” That means that whether an object is thrown into an area where the dog can't see it or the object was hidden previously, I want to see that dog use its nose and not its eyes to locate it. An ideal canine candidate for the Navy SEALs has to possess a hyper prey drive
and
a hyper hunt drive.

When using their hunt drive, instinctively, these dogs will immediately go into a serpentine search pattern or a figure eight. Their noses will either be lowered or up in the air, “reading” scent molecules to locate their object. Just as when they chase and capture something they've seen someone throw, their hunt drive will turn into aggressive possession once they have the object.

Hounds (bloodhounds in particular) are extraordinary trackers, but they lack the prey drive or human aggressiveness that is needed. The same is true with retrievers. Labradors are great at sniffing out drugs, explosives, and munitions. They just don't have the human-aggression component that is necessary to meet the SEAL teams' needs. Belgian Malinois possess both traits necessary to be multipurpose Navy SEAL dogs. I don't just mean they have those two traits—they have them in spades, particularly the dogs that make the grade and get deployed in theater. The breed has a lot of other great attributes: Their athleticism and endurance are extraordinary, and their fearsome appearance certainly helps in some regards, too. However, since a Navy SEAL dog's primary tasks are to detect specific odors and to assist in capturing bad guys, the Malinois' ability and willingness to do those two things make them ideal candidates.

Still, finding an individual dog with both those qualities in the right intensity and balance is truly a one-in-a-thousand (or more) proposition. By necessity, you might make some concessions with a dual-purpose dog that you might not make with a single-purpose dog.

Look at it this way. In baseball, scouts look for five-tool players: those who can hit for average, can hit for power, possess a strong throwing arm, have above-average foot speed, and field a good glove. No player has ever been at the top of the charts in every one of those categories, but the ones the scouts pick are, overall, above the average. What we need in terms of Navy SEAL dogs are first-ballot Hall of Famers who are in the 90th percentile in all the skills and qualities we look for.

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There is one last quality that I look for. A dog has to have a high level of forward aggression. This is more than just being human aggressive. It means the dog is willing to stand up and fight a person and not let that person overpower it. Most dogs, even those selected from elite breeders from around the world, don't have this quality to the degree that is needed. Dogs have been domesticated and bred for so long that this type of dog is a very, very rare animal, like one in ten thousand.

To test for that rarest of qualities, I have to put the dog in an uncomfortable spot and put pressure on him. Essentially, what I'm testing for is his flight-versus-fight response. I want to see him go through that thought process.
Am I going to take this guy on? I know that chances are I'm going to get hurt if I do, so I could bail out.
The dogs that don't bail out, the ones that choose to fight and not flee, are the ones we want.

In evaluating dogs for purchase and further training, I do have an advantage when it comes to testing for this kind of aggressive behavior. They've never seen me before, so I immediately have their attention as a potential threat. I put additional pressure on them by approaching them and keeping my body square to them and making fierce direct eye contact. In some cases I'll present a stick as a weapon and tap them with it, or grab a handful of their skin and squeeze it. I want them to come after me. Of course, I'm wearing a “bite suit” for protection when I do this. Dogs that sink their teeth into that suit are good candidates for selection.

It's important to note that there is a crucial distinction between dogs who will go on the offensive and those who will continue to fight when placed on the defensive. A dog may demonstrate prey drive when going after a squirrel, but ones that will exhibit that same prey drive when squaring off with a moose or other large animal are rare and desirable as working dogs.

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Sometimes, a dog's willingness to go anywhere and do anything can end up being a kind of detriment. That's especially true for a dog that is “fresh out of the box” and at the beginning of its training with us and exposed to new activities and new environments. Belgium isn't exactly a high-desert mountainous region, like the battlefields of Afghanistan often are, so that's one type of environment we need to expose new dogs to. It turns out that the area in San Diego County near the West Coast SEAL teams is a lot like that region. It also includes a plentiful amount of manzanita bushes, which are native to North America and which, therefore, the dogs are also not familiar with.

Manzanita means “little apple” in Spanish, but manzanita bushes don't have apples. Instead they are loaded with thorns that get hold of you and don't let go. Most of us who've endured the agony of working our way through, around, under, and away from a manzanita's thorny grasp think of it as more of a man-eater than an apple.

As a SEAL, you get exposed to manzanita during night patrols, and it is about the thickest, coarsest, sharpest vegetation that you'll ever encounter. When training the dogs doing mountain patrols at night, you sometimes find yourself wishing that these dogs didn't have that all speed-ahead spirit. One dog in particular, Barco, was one of our larger canines, weighing in at 80 pounds. He was a freight train with a brain. Sometimes, however, that locomotive engine in him overpowered the driver.

We were on a night training exercise, and Barco was on a 30-foot retractable leash, a heavy-duty flexi-lead. Short leads are effective in some scenarios, but when training a dog to do detection work in the mountains, they just aren't practical or realistic to use. If you've ever walked your dog and had the frustration of him or her going around a tree and wrapping the lead around it, you've experienced something like what we've endured during these training exercises. Imagine, though, if instead of your mild-mannered dog on a short leash winding around an oak tree with its relatively smooth bark, you've got an 80-pound high-energy beast intent on going around a thorny manzanita bush to get to an odor so that he can get a reward. Add in that your outing isn't along a level sidewalk in a subdivision or city but is in the rocky, uneven mountains. Plus, remember that it's nighttime and there are no streetlights. It is pitch-black—and a classic recipe for disaster.

I've been out with a group of six to eight dogs and their handlers on training exercises that are supposed to be done in stealth, but every few seconds you'd hear another handler swear when one dog after another got tangled up in a man-eating bush. Barco had a real talent for forging ahead, wrapping back around a manzanita bush, doubling back, coming back around, straining against his lead, and wrapping it tighter and tighter around the bush.