by Mike Ritland
We also discovered a treasure trove of weaponry and ammo. In total, it took six hours to take the whole thing down, including handling and conducting initial interrogation of the Iraqi prisoners. Thanks to our element of surprise, we executed the takeover without a single casualty on our side.
The same was true at the second platform. At the metering station the resistance was even stronger and a few Iraqi soldiers were killed, but again, not a single American casualty, wound, or injury. That’s pretty much a raging success in my book, and I was, and remain, extremely proud to have been part of SEAL Team Three’s role in setting the tone for what was to come.
Since that night, and given what I do today, I’ve often wondered how Navy SEAL multipurpose canines might have helped us on that mission. Certainly the mission was a resounding success, but we’d placed our troops in great peril. We all understand that dangerous missions are the name of the game, but I can’t help wondering how dogs might have made our jobs a bit easier that night.
When I made the transition to training SEALs and later to training dogs to assist them, that mission played a large role in my motivation and in my understanding of the importance of the work I was doing. I knew firsthand just how important proper training is and how crucial and serious preparation is. I wanted the dogs I trained to be able to meet the high standards of effort and execution that were exhibited that night in 2003. I knew they would have to. Because of that first mission I went on as a SEAL, I was determined that the dogs I trained were going to be like the men they served alongside—ready for anything, anywhere, anytime.
Today I make my living and stake my reputation on training dogs. Also, as a former SEAL team member, I take very seriously the responsibilities that the dogs and their handlers shoulder. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew that I didn’t do everything in my power to make certain that the dogs I provide live up to the standards expected of SEAL team dogs. Lives depend on it.
It helps that I know that the dogs I’ve trained are going to be rigorously tested. When the SEALs come to test my dogs, they’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them to make sure that the dogs are what they need. If there is a single flaw in one of these dogs, they’re going to find it. So you have to set these dogs up for success or they’re not going to be the best. I never heard my parents say, “That’s good enough.” I wasn’t raised that way, and the SEALs didn’t train me to think that way. The SEAL operators deserve, as they say, “nothing but the best for the best.”
The great genetic background of the Belgian Malinois isn’t enough on its own. The dogs all need to go through rigorous training in order to become qualified to work with SEAL teams. It takes hard work with no shortcuts on the part of both handler and canine, though I believe that the dogs actually enjoy the training work. They get to exhibit the traits that their breed was refined to produce and to give expression to their true nature. What can be better than that?
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The key to training and working with a dog is to establish a bond of trust between you and him. I do that with puppies from the very beginning, and you can also do that with dogs you acquire at later stages in their lives. Dogs learn by association, and I want them to associate me with all the good things in their lives: the food they eat, the water they drink, the things they play with, the exercise they do, and on and on. One simple thing I do to establish that bond and their association with me as a source of positive things is to feed them and give them water myself. I may take it away from them briefly, not to tease them but to get them to understand through repetition “Hey, this guy is the one who gives me what I want.”
Repetition is a key part of how dogs learn through association. For example, if you reach into your pocket and pull out a treat that you then present to the dog, he begins to understand that something good comes out of you reaching into your pocket. Through enough repetitions of that action, the association gets hardwired in the dog’s brain. This is true to the point that if, after the dog learns to associate your hand going into your pocket with a treat, you pull out a set of keys instead, he will still initially make the same association as before—“I’m getting a treat.” Only after you allow the dog to see and sniff the keys (or other objects) and repeatedly not reward him after you pull keys or other things out of your pockets will he figure out the difference.
In addition to building trust, we also offer dogs abundant praise when they do things right, be it when they find the ball buried in a tub of bottles or they get to the food dish or whatever. Praise is essential to getting these dogs—or any dog, for that matter—to do what you want. Praise can come in the form of words or a treat or anything that the dog sees as positive. For a dog, a reward of any kind means “I did something good, so I should keep doing that so I keep getting rewarded.”
Have you ever heard the expression “It’s not what you say but how you say it?” Well, that’s true with dogs because, of course, they don’t understand the meaning of words; they simply associate the words we use with them, through repetition and reward, with an action or an object. If you wanted to, for instance, you could teach your dog to lie down by using the words “get up.” Dogs respond to the sounds we use more than the words themselves. They react even more to your tone. Anyone who has ever had a dog can tell you that if you use an excited, encouraging tone with the dog, he will respond in kind. If you yell at the dog and sound angry, the dog will respond to the tone of your voice even if you are screaming “You’re a good boy.” The words “bad” and “no” have no real meaning by themselves to a dog—it’s all in how you say them. So praise as a reward is not about the words you use but definitely how you say the words.
Dogs read body language much better than they respond to verbal language. This may be because they have a whole nonverbal, postural language they use with each other. Have you ever seen two dogs walking on the street encounter each other? The sniffing and posturing process begins at once. One dog will place his head near or above the other dog’s neck and shoulders. The other dog stands up taller and holds itself rigid; its ears either lie flat or more likely stand up. That dog is sending a clear message by making itself appear larger. It is telling the other dog, “You’re not going to mess with me.” Sometimes one dog will make itself appear smaller; it will lower its hind legs, lay its ears flat, and generally assume a very passive posture.
Dogs apply what they know about canine body language to their physical interactions with people. Here’s an example of what I mean. I have a few retired MWDs living at my place. People who are interested in adopting them come by, and many times these people often bend down to try to enter the crate or kennel to greet the dog. I immediately stop them and tell them to try to imagine this scenario from a different perspective. I tell them to imagine that they are in a 10′ × 10′ prison cell. Someone comes into the cell. He’s bigger and making some sounds that you don’t understand. Then he wants to wrap his arms around you like you’re old buddies. What are you going to do? How are you going to respond? I try to make sure people understand very clearly the specific characteristics of working dogs and how they may differ from pets. Being cornered this way in their own space by a stranger can trigger the fight-versus-flight response in these dogs. It’s no surprise if they choose to come out fighting.
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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.