Soldier Dogs (11 page)

The dog program still has a policy of accepting donations from average citizens or breeders. Every now and then, Doc and his people get a phone call from Ma and Pa wanting to donate their German shepherd to protect the U.S. But the odds the dog can pass the tests are astronomically low, he says. The genetics and intensive training
just aren’t there. The dog program won’t take a dog in if it can’t use him, so Ma and Pa—if they’ve come all the way to Lackland even after all the warnings about the testing—will likely end up driving home with their dog, who couldn’t meet program standards.

What about shelters? Aren’t they filled with dogs who are available for next to nothing and are highly trainable? The British military has been saving the lives of shelter dogs for years, training them and providing them for its armed forces, according to animal scientist John Bradshaw, who has done extensive work with England’s Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray, near Leicester. (It is roughly the equivalent of Lackland Air Force Base as far as dog procurement and training goes.)

The Defence Animal Centre also relies heavily on public donations of dogs. There’s even a Web site with FAQs for those who want to donate. The Centre is interested in German shepherds, Belgian shepherds, or “gun dog” breeds between the ages of one and three years of age. The intake procedure is relatively easy, and on the Web site there’s even space devoted to reassuring potential donors that their dogs will be in good hands:

The U.S. Department of Defense has recently begun making limited experiments obtaining dogs from shelters. But this has not proven successful. In the last year, consignment evaluators have been going to shelters in the San Antonio area and looking at hundreds of dogs. Only one has passed. His name is Lucky, and he’s a Labrador. The program is not encouraged by the high-labor, low-yield results, so don’t expect to see dogs flying out of shelters and into the armed forces in the U.S. anytime soon. Our standards, it seems, are different from those in the UK.

So if we have a desire to procure dogs closer to home but just can’t, are there any other options? Yes, and as it turns out, it’s the reason anyone who enters Hilliard’s building has to dip his or her feet in green disinfectant.

The Defense Department is making its very own Belgian Malinois puppies: Seventy-five were whelped here in 2010, 115 in 2009. The goal is to whelp two hundred puppies a year. About half the puppies won’t make the cut, so once the goal is reached, there will be one hundred fewer dogs to buy overseas.

Why the Malinois? Mostly because they tend to be more durable than German shepherds, who are known for their hip, elbow, and back problems. Plus, according to some trainers I’ve spoken with, it’s because the Malinois don’t let thinking get in their way. They say that a shepherd will often think about what you tell him
to do, or about his situation, but a Malinois just acts as he’s trained to. Many prefer this. I don’t know if Rin Tin Tin would applaud this rationale, but there’s no turning back now. The program has been in place since 1998, at first as an experimental one and now as a full-fledged program, run by Doc Hilliard himself.

We head downstairs from our meeting place to go see the puppies. To get access, we have to dip our soles at another disinfectant station. I’m not allowed to stop in at the whelping kennels to see the newest litter, because I spent the morning in the company of other dogs, and I could end up carrying disease to the vulnerable pups. But I do get to visit a batch of seven-week-old puppies from the pairing of a Netherlands stud named Robbie—who has sired some serious champion working dogs—and a bitch named Heska. Hilliard bought Heska overseas and bred her to Robbie while in the Netherlands. She came to Lackland to be monitored through her pregnancy and have her puppies on U.S. soil.

Her pups are fawn-colored, with downy fur and dark brown/black faces that look up from their exercise pen with a plaintive “Pick me up, please!” expression. Some still have a floppy ear or two, but for the most part, their ears have become upright. They’re from the A litter, so every pup’s name will start with the letter A. To distinguish puppy-program dogs from other MWDs, all dogs from the puppy program are given double letters to start their name. So this litter is made up of dogs with names like Aangus, Aatlas, and Aalice.

Aalice has caught my eye. She is still floppy-eared, and she appears extremely social, making eye contact and standing with paws propped on the enclosure to get my attention. But since I’ve been with other dogs earlier in the day, I can’t hold her. The pups are still not fully immunized, and it wouldn’t be safe.

So Doc Hilliard picks her up instead, and she snuggles right into his arms, and then uses his arms as a place to prop her paw, and starts licking his neck and then up to his jaw and cheek. It’s hard for him to carry on the conversation while Aalice is slathering him with such adulation, so he passes her to a staffer who’s more than happy to take her off his hands.

Puppies in the puppy program leave Lackland pretty early in life. They’re with their mom for several weeks, and then they get placed in foster homes until they’re seven months old, when they return to Lackland and go through a sort of puppy preschool to see which ones may have what it takes to become a military working dog.

Ask anyone who has fostered a Malinois puppy, and they’ll tell you two things:

There’s a reason these pups are nicknamed “malligators.” They are all mouth and teeth. Arod has fostered three. “They ate our entire home,” he says. He and his family ended up adopting the last one, Ttrina, after she didn’t make the cut as a military working dog. Despite her propensity to malligator herself around the house, they took her in because they’d grown attached to her—teeth and all.

The puppy program is always looking for foster homes. To
qualify, volunteers have to live within three hours of San Antonio so they can drive back for monthly appointments. A fenced yard is ideal. Fosters have to disclose how many other pets they have and what kind. “If you have five cats, we need to know that,” says David Garcia, dog program foster consultant. “We’ll find you a low-drive dog that will be a better fit.”

Foster homes aren’t expected to do formal training. That’s what dog school is for. But they do help a puppy become comfortable with various environments and stimuli, such as busy streets, stairs, loud vacuums, and crowds. Fosters can also work on increasing a dog’s desire to find a toy or a training treat; this is good for future training, when finding objects is a dog’s core mission.

When I met with Garcia, he was in a slight panic. He needed to find twelve homes for the A litter (Aalice and her brothers and sisters) within two weeks. It wasn’t looking good. The program had just expanded the distance limits for foster homes in order to include Austin residents, but word hadn’t gotten out yet. Garcia was going to be calling some previous repeat fosters and was planning on attending a puppy expo as well.

“Once you see them and know them, they’re pretty hard to resist,” he says. He adds that it’s not
that
hard to puppy-proof a home. And he talks about how gratifying it can be to raise a puppy who will go on to save the lives of servicemen and -women. “It’s not every day you get to raise a future hero.”

Doc and his staff are investing heavily in making the puppy program a success. They’ve bought some frozen sperm from sought-after
studs and also brought back a male named Arnold, who they hope will father some great pups. When Hilliard and staff go to Europe on future trips, he says they’ll be looking for some “interesting” dogs for breeding.

They recently purchased a female Malinois puppy named Boudin, whose dad is Robbie (Aalice’s father) and mom is Kyra (pronounced Keera). The pairing of Robbie and Kyra has produced some very successful working dogs in Europe. Doc wants the Military Working Dog Program to have some of this bloodline, some of these champion genetics, so the puppy program bought Boudin and a full brother named Bruno. Both are registered pedigree dogs. (They will not be paired, for obvious reasons.)

As a rule, Doc doesn’t like to get registered pedigree Malinois, because he thinks they don’t deal with stress as well as non-pedigreed dogs and because they tend to be smaller and less robust, more susceptible to stress. But these dogs are different, he hopes. I spent a few hours one afternoon with eight-week-old Boudin at her brand-new foster home near Lackland, with her foster dad, Air Force Technical Sergeant Joe Null. Despite her crazy puppy energy and frequent and high-pitched barking, she looks like she has the makings of an excellent dog: She’s strong, has a committed bite when playing with a tug toy, and doesn’t give up when hunting for a Kong.

But there’s more to becoming a military working dog than getting bred or drafted. That’s the easy part. Making it through the rigors of dog school is another matter altogether. Some dogs might decide to be draft dodgers if they knew what was up next.

     16     

V
eterinarian Ronnie Nye, a retired army lieutenant colonel, has an easygoing, friendly manner that would put most human patients at ease if he were an MD. But Fred, a Netherlands-born German shorthaired pointer, looks like he would rather be somewhere else. His stub of a tail stays tucked down even as Nye strokes him and tells him with a confident, knowing smile that it’s going to be all right.