Navy SEAL Dogs (7 page)

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When I train a dog all the above-mentioned elements are working together: association, repetition, rewards, and verbal and nonverbal language. I also use a clicker during training to mark behaviors. A clicker is just what it sounds like, an object you hold in your hand that makes a clicking sound when you press it. It's a simple kind of association tool that allows me to communicate to the dog that the behavior he's just exhibited was a proper and acceptable one. In the beginning, when I'm working with a dog, I'll hold a treat in my hand. I sit there looking at the dog and he looks at me. I click and then give him the treat. The dog starts to realize that the clicker sound is a good thing; it leads to a treat. If he does what I want, I click and he gets a treat. So, naturally, the dog starts to offer up behaviors, hoping that one of them will get me to click and then reward him. Like people, dogs learn to perform through repetition. After a while, I don't even have to give the dog a command. He knows what behavior I'm looking for. For example, I click and reward him if he goes into full down position when I want him to. If I want to teach him to bark on command, I wait until he barks, and then I click and reward.

As another example, if I want to get a dog to go into his crate, I place a crate in the middle of a clear room with no other distractions. If the dog takes a step toward that crate, I click and reward him. If he takes another step, I repeat the process, and we keep going that way. When we get to more complicated tasks I use the same process. With the crate, after we repeat that often enough, the dog will go in the room, see the crate, dash into it, lie down, and wait for his treat/reward. This is a win-win. The dog gets a treat and I get the desired outcome. This type of training is called positive reinforcement.

I could go about training dogs a whole other way. I could put a prong collar on a dog and have no treats, and I could get to the same place by punishing the dog for not doing what I wanted him to do. There are still some trainers who use the old spiked, electric-shock choke collar approach. The collar has a remote control the trainer uses to shock the dog. Some trainers also use spiked training collars—with the spikes
inside
the collars, next to dogs' necks—and a whip, a stick, or any other tool to mete out punishment to show the dogs who's boss. A dog gets punished when he doesn't do what he is asked to do. A dog will learn pretty quickly if you train him this way, but it will be at a great cost to the dog. You've now shifted the training away from being about positive reinforcement and turned it into negative reinforcement. You'll wind up with a dog that is doing what he's “supposed” to do because he doesn't want to be punished. This kind of training is, in a sense, an act of coercion—you force an animal to do what you want it to do, instead of letting it do what it naturally wants to do. With the training methods I use, you get a dog that is doing the right thing because he wants to, because he wants that reward. My training methods build trust; training through negative reinforcement destroys it.

Between 90 and 95 percent of the time, when training dogs—either pups or adolescents in early or advanced training stages—I use positive reinforcement. Just as the Navy SEALs are a team and watch out for one another in every way because of their mutual trust and respect, the same has to be true of how a MWD and his handler operate.

Training until we have the necessary results takes time. Once dogs enter into our advanced training, even though they're already titled, it may take one to two years before they are ready to be deployed. That's a lot of time and innumerable repetitions before they are truly ready to do the important work they need to do.

Besides my respect for and love of dogs, and the value we place on the human-canine bond, I spend so much time using positive reinforcement simply because I can't imagine how awful my day would be if I spent the vast majority of it punishing a dog. I can't imagine the toll that would take on me and the dog. Still, it's no wonder that I sometimes see people, both those in the MWD community as well as private pet owners, let their emotions get the better of them. One of the most frequent mistakes I see people make with their dogs is that when “correcting” them, they get the dogs to stop doing what they didn't want them to do and then continue to berate or punish the dog anyway. That's incredibly confusing for a dog. He's thinking, “You told me to stop, I stopped, and now you're still screaming at me or correcting me. Does that mean that you don't want me to do what I'm doing
now
?”

When people do this with pets, they end up with dogs that simply aren't clear about what's expected of them. That's not good. With working dogs, when excessive punishment is used, you end up with either a dog that is aggressive to its handler or a dog that is broken in spirit. We need dogs with intense spirits to take on the challenges of being outstanding detection and apprehension dogs. As I've pointed out before, the pool of suitable dogs is relatively small. To see a dog with the right characteristics ruined by poor training methods is both heartbreaking and an enormous waste of a valuable resource.

I cannot stress enough how the use of punishment can break the spirit of a dog. That's especially true of dogs that are just entering adulthood, the prime age for specialized training. It seems counterintuitive to me that we select and breed dogs to have a fierce and courageous demeanor and then try to take that spirit away from them, especially since they will need that kind of character to charge into the austere environments that we ask them to. With the dogs we train, we want and need each one to feel like he is “King of the World.” We want the dogs to have a nasty, hard, confident attitude since they may very well be taking on insurgents who want nothing more than to kill them and their human associates. The dogs have got to want to charge through anything to go bite a guy who is trying to take them down.

I don't care how strong a dog is genetically. If he's been trained in that dominated, coercive, negative way, he's going to be much less capable than he could be. He will have learned that a human being can dominate him. Would you want to go into a friendly game of softball, let alone battle, thinking that? If you go into anything thinking you can get beat, chances are that is exactly what will happen.

 

7

PREP SCHOOL FOR PUPPIES

While some of the dogs I train come from abroad and may already be three years old when I acquire them, I also breed dogs right here and train their puppies so that, when they are mature, they are ready to work with a variety of governmental agencies or for private clients. In case there's any doubt, before we go any further, let me make it abundantly clear that for me—and for the puppies themselves—the beginning of the whole training process is more like fun than anything resembling work. Let me also make it clear that it
is
work I take seriously, because the training a dog gets during his very youngest days helps him grow to become a successful, mature working dog.

While what I do from the time a pup is born until he is ready for his advanced education may differ in some respects from what the SEAL team dogs go through in their first few days, weeks, and months in Europe, for all practical purposes, those differences are minor. We have the same goals: to maximize the natural abilities of the dogs; to identify their strengths and weaknesses; and to expose them to as many different things as possible so that they can more easily adapt to the specific circumstances they will encounter in their “careers.”

The stages of training a SEAL dog or other working dog goes through are not unlike what the human members of the SEAL teams go through. Just like I did, every SEAL team member must first complete basic training and then one additional level of training before starting BUD/S training. The training puppies get, can be thought of as basic training.

It is interesting to note, however, that of those entering BUD/S training, 75 percent fail to complete the program. The failure rate is lower with SEAL dogs; approximately less than half don't make it through. I believe that part of the reason for this is that when I'm evaluating prospective team dogs, my standards are extremely high, and when I select dogs for breeding, I already know the kinds of work that their puppies will be asked to do once they've matured. So I can breed dogs with specific qualities they will pass on to their offspring that will help them learn what they need to.

Even before the puppies are born I try to optimize their chances of success by providing their mothers with the most stress-free environment possible while they are pregnant. Generally speaking, that means I move the mothers-to-be to a quieter part of the kennel, as far away as possible from the clamor of barking and other distractions. This also takes them out of any possible contact with aggressive or otherwise rambunctious dogs. At any one time, I may have as many as two dozen dogs around, including my own house pets. That many dogs can make a whole lot of noise. That's especially true because of the kind of kennel I've built for them. The kennel run has indoor/outdoor climate control and a septic system with heavy-duty drains. The kennel is all cinder block and coated with epoxy and is a cool and sturdy structure for the dogs to live in that allows them to be out of the weather. However, indoors the acoustics do not provide the most peaceful environment; the noise can be loud.

Several days after the puppies are born, their training begins. Every dog trainer has his or her own theories, and some of them are grounded in scientific research. A lot of them are not. They're either old wives' tales or just the experiences that a particular trainer has decided works best. The methods I use are based on lots of experience and research studies. I've had good results from using these training principles with puppies, and I've seen bad results when these methods aren't used.

Basically what it boils down to is this. Puppies are a kind of blank slate, but they absolutely retain some pack-animal instincts, which includes a tendency to be aggressive toward humans. However, as a species, dogs have been domesticated for centuries and are clearly adapted to living with people. Every dog has both these things hardwired into him. I believe that the amount of human interaction an individual dog gets from birth helps determine how that dog will be with people for its entire life. If they have very little human interaction in the first few months of their lives, they're going to be completely different than if they have a ton of human interaction. I give them a ton of human contact.

From when a puppy is three days old until he is twenty-one days old, we do something with him called “biosensor stressing.” It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Simply put, biosensor stressing is playing around with a puppy, but with a structured routine. When you pick the puppy up, you want to do a couple of things. One, you want to tickle his feet. Usually I'll take a Q-tip and stick it between a puppy's pads and his toes, making sure to stimulate each one of his paws. Along with that, I'll hold the puppy completely upright, with his head directly above his tail. I'll place him next to my face to let him smell me. I'll breathe on him, and I'll talk to him, too.

A puppy's sight, sense of smell, and hearing are not yet fully developed when he is born. That means, early on, neither my smell nor my physical presence is as fully recognizable to him as it will eventually be, but I want him to have that early sensory experience as soon as possible. That way, as the puppy is developing those senses more fully, he'll already have that early experience of what I smell like, what I sound like, and what I look like solidly in place. I want the dog to be comfortable with me. I also have multiple people do this so the puppy gets exposure to as many people as possible and therefore establishes a general comfort level with humans. I want a lot of different adults and children to be around puppies we're training. As you can probably figure out, it's not all that hard to get people to hold and play with puppies.

In the morning and at night I'll also usually take a cold, wet washcloth in my hand and set a puppy belly down on it for just a couple of seconds. Then I'll put him back in with the litter and take the next one out and do the same thing until I've done it with every one of them. Throughout the day I'll also constantly be picking up the puppies and just playing with them and holding them.

I also start to play CDs of random noises even though a puppy really doesn't hear much for the first three weeks of his life. Several different companies make these noise CDs that are typically used to expose police horses in training to a variety of different sounds. Essentially, these are “antispooking” noise CDs. They include train engines, whistles, firecrackers, thunder, machine guns, different farm animals, creaky doors, car and other engines, mufflers backfiring, sirens blaring, cars honking, and more. I play these CDs repeatedly to get the puppies accustomed to what is and will always be a very large part of their environment—sound.

Dogs have very sensitive hearing, and our selective breeding of them has enhanced that ability. Also, because of the structure of dogs' ears, they can hear sounds that are coming from a great distance. Pointed, erect ears are the most effective at capturing sound waves. Dogs can also hear sounds at higher frequencies than people can.

Anyone who has had a dog knows that certain sounds, such as the whine of a vacuum cleaner, can really irritate him. We play these CDs to such young puppies because, over the life of the dogs, we want them to have minimal, if any, reactions to unexpected sounds. We don't want to overstress the pups, but we do have to get them accustomed to hearing a variety of noises at various volumes. Later, when we do helicopter training with the K-9 candidates, that early exposure to sounds almost always pays off. All you can ever do in training is simulate how the real world of the dogs' working lives will be. There is, of course, no guarantee to how any given dog will respond in those real-world circumstances. Training is all about enhancing the likelihood of a good outcome down the road. According to a study conducted by the U.S. military, mildly stressing puppies helps their immune systems develop and helps them mature more quickly.