by Mike Ritland
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 demonst
rate 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.
On the night I’m referring to, I was out with Barco and his handler and a few others. We came to a downhill section, and Barco suddenly took off like a shot. It was like watching a scene in an old Hollywood Western where a cowboy is being dragged across the ground by his horse. Barco’s handler, who shall remain nameless, went down the hill like a rag doll, bumping along and kicking up a cloud of dust, gravity and Barco determining his speed and direction. I went down the hill after them as quickly as I could, but not soon enough to prevent the handler from getting tangled upside down in a prickly manzanita bush. Barco’s forward progress was only arrested because his handler’s limbs were entwined in that manzanita. Each of Barco’s continued thrusts forward impaled his handler more deeply onto the sharp points and further knotted the lead. It required many minutes of patient undoing to free both man and beast.
Sometimes it isn’t a dog’s over-the-top eagerness that gets handlers in trouble. Sometimes the handlers “mishandle” a situation. Ball rewards are what keep these dogs motivated. Once, one of the handlers, a guy named Matt, and his dog Arras were on a night patrol, and Arras correctly indicated when he came into odor by sitting still and staring at it. To reward him for properly detecting and indicating, Matt thought it was a good idea to toss Arras a ball. Matt had actually forgotten that it was nighttime because he had on his night-vision goggles. Although dogs can see well at night, Arras didn’t catch sight of the ball immediately, so he didn’t make the catch. Instead, he heard the ball hit off some rock and bounce down the slope. Keep in mind, we were at the top of a 4,800-foot mountain. Arras took off, with Matt at the other end of the leash. Matt was swept off his feet and made it down the rocky slope considerably faster than he’d trudged up it moments before.
I think that in education and in parenting both, incidents like these are teachable moments. So, when you get your lightly-bloodied-and-battered handler back near you, you remind him that in certain situations, it’s best to get the dog right by your side and just hand him his reward. With dogs and humans, it’s all a learning process. Few of our handlers have any previous experience with a dog with the physical gifts and enormous drive that our future multipurpose K-9s have. All too frequently, they have to learn about this drive the hard way. It’s as if they’ve been playing a pretty competitive game of playground basketball all their lives and suddenly find themselves playing against an NBA squad—that’s just how impressive these dogs are physically.
6
WELL TRAINED
In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003, I participated in a bit of navy history. As a part of our general maritime training exercises—you can even go onto the SEALs Web site to see photos of these drills—we climbed up an oil/gas platform’s superstructure from a Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB) piloted by Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen. We did these training exercises often, but when we found out that an upcoming mission would actually involve this kind of work, the training took on a new sense of urgency and importance for each of us.
Six weeks prior to the onset of the ground warfare, we learned that we were being tasked with taking over two oil terminals in the Persian Gulf. This was going to be my first big mission. Because of the restrictions against Iraq put in place by the international community, these two oil terminals had taken on strategic importance. They were a bit dilapidated, but because of where they were, the Iraqis had used them increasingly to smuggle oil out of the country to sell it. Their supertankers would pull up and then sneak out again loaded with crude oil. The oil ran through two 48-inch pipelines placed along the floor of the Persian Gulf, and the two oil rigs were pumping millions of barrels of oil. The U.S. military’s concern was that, because the Iraqi regime suspected that the country would soon be invaded, they would blow up the pipelines to prevent their enemies from using the oil and also create a huge environmental disaster and distraction. They would blame us for the resulting explosions, fire, and oil spill and make us look like the bad guys.
We also had some intelligence information that the platforms were rigged with explosives and that the Iraqis were going to blow them up as soon as we got on board. At one point we heard that there were over a hundred Iraqi Republican Guards stationed on the rigs and that they were going to stand and die fighting us if we came and tried to take over the platforms.
So it was pretty harrowing, because we had thirty-two guys in a couple of small RHIBs that we were going to ride in on and assault this target. If the intelligence was correct, we were going to be pretty badly outnumbered in one of the best-case scenarios. In the worst-case scenario …
Even without knowing all of that, we would have taken our training seriously, but we took it up a few notches. We actually built an exact replica of those platforms, which were separated by several miles of open water. Then we practiced and practiced a coordinated assault on them both, along with a metering station and pipeline manifold many miles away from those two rigs. We had three big targets in all to neutralize at the same time. We figured that the Iraqis would have a communic
ations system in place that would allow them to notify each location to detonate any explosives placed at all three if there was any slipup in the timing on our end.
This mission was, at this point in time, the largest operation in the history of NSW. All of my team—SEAL Team Three—and all eight SEAL platoons were assigned to take down these targets simultaneously. To put it mildly, this mission was a huge logistical nightmare. If we pulled it off, it would be a spectacular success. If we didn’t, it would be a spectacular disaster.
The targets were enormous, each nearly a mile long with a docking station at one end and with smaller substations running the length of it—all places where Iraqi soldiers could be hiding out. We knew the place was manned, but we didn’t know the exact numbers. I can’t tell you how many times we rehearsed that operation, but people learn how to perform through repetition. Overrepetition doesn’t exist. We had multiple scenarios, some of which included using two helicopters to aid in the assault. Mentally going over and over the list of what-ifs, and what-to-dos in case those what-ifs occurred, became my waking and sleeping reality.
By the time we set out from a naval base in Kuwait in our heavily armed Mark V boats, I was superexcited and definitely ready—our training couldn’t have been any more thorough. Thanks to the superior firepower and cruising speed of the Mark V boats, we made the journey to the RHIB transfer point in two hours.
I was part of the team that stormed one of the oil platforms in the middle of the night. I was one of the main breachers, meaning I used a shotgun to open about thirty metal doors to begin clearing each area. Ultimately, we found twenty-three Iraqi soldiers on board, a mixed bag of Republican Guard and paramilitary, Fedayeen Saddam guys. We also captured a few Iraqi intelligence officers and a couple of their navy divers. Our strike took the Iraqis totally by surprise. They never got to use the explosives or the antiaircraft artillery piece that was positioned to take out approaching watercraft.