by Mike Ritland
Just to give you a sense of how strongly dogs respond to signals we send out, I have a close friend, Wayne, who can give off a fierce “don’t mess with me” vibe even when he’s lying on the ground, which is a very compromising position to be in with these dogs. When we release a dog to come after him, the dog will tear out initially and then come skidding to a stop six feet in front of Wayne, sensing that “this is one bad dude and I better be careful.” Wayne is a former Navy Search and Rescue Corpsman, and he’s taught me a lot about dogs and is one of the real friends I’ve got in this life. I’ve got plenty of buddies, but just a few friends, and Wayne is one of them. We frequently work together in training MWDs, and Wayne brings a wealth of experience and insight into the mix, along with his “don’t mess with me” attitude that the dogs sense. Wayne doesn’t shout. He doesn’t strike any offensive postures. He just exudes that attitude, and the dogs feel it and respond accordingly.
The way that we get dogs to match aggression for aggression is by shifting them between drives. When you’re doing apprehension or bite work, there are two main drives that a dog is working. He’s working in prey drive, or on the offensive, and he’s also working his defensive drive. In bite work, a dog starts out in prey drive, and that’s very instinctual.
The dog sees a guy in a bite suit, he gets the command, and bam! The dog goes after the guy. The dog is conditioned to fight with the guy. What usually happens in much of the bite-work training other dogs receive is that they aren’t truly put into defensive-drive mode. I equate that to a boxer who’s been taught how to box but has never been hit. So you’ve got to teach this dog how to get hit, how to react. You can teach anybody how to throw punches all night long, how to move around the ring and counterpunch, but if they’ve never actually been hit, the first time they are, they’re like, what was that? So you’ve got to teach that dog that, hey, not only is it okay, but you’re going to work through it.
It’s a very, very simple but not easy process. You’ve got to have a truckload of experience with seeing dogs being worked and then also working with them to really be able to identify each of the two drives and know how and when to shift a dog from one drive into the other and then back and forth again and again. Prey drive relieves a dog’s stress. A dog feels like this is the natural order of things. He’s thinking, “I’m being the aggressor. I’m taking my aggression to that thing/that person. I’m going to dominate it.”
When in prey drive, a dog detects something and his mouth is on it. He’s biting down, he’s scoring the touchdown. He’s going after it. He’s loving life. Then, all of a sudden, the decoy in the bite suit comes alive and starts bringing it to him. This turns the whole process around for the dog. Now the dog is thinking, “Now I’m going to fight. Now I’m going on defense. Now I’m getting a little bit worried about this guy. I’m fighting him a little harder, maybe a third round, whatever.” You’ve got to be able to recognize when a dog is on offense and when a dog is on defense. Put a dog too much on the defensive and for too long, and he will crack—and we can’t have that happen.
To keep the dog on the aggressive, we gradually increase those defensive thresholds by shifting the dog back and forth between prey drive and defensive drive, so he’s thinking, “I’m going after it. I’m preserving my life.” Over time, that threshold for defense goes up and up and up, enough to where now that dog is automatically coming at you like he wants to kill you. It doesn’t matter what you do to him, he is completely unfazed by it. It may start out with the dog in prey drive. You start to put a little bit of pressure on him so he switches into defense drive, and he starts to wig out a little bit. Bam! You switch things right back so the dog goes into prey drive and can relieve that stress. Now you put the dog back into defense drive. Now he lasts a few seconds longer. When he starts to show stress again, bam. Every time he starts to get to that boiling point, bam, you get him right back into prey drive. I back off, I reward him, I look away from him, I let him dominate me, and I take a bite to the back. Maybe I even fall to the ground and let him really dominate me.
It’s a feeling-out process that you have to be constantly evaluating as you go. A truly good decoy is absolutely priceless because he will make or break a dog. You can ruin a great dog with an incompetent decoy, or make an average dog fantastic by having a phenomenal decoy who can recognize when to shift drives and know how much pressure to put on, when to back off, when to relieve stress, and when to put it on.
In my mind, doing this kind of bite work is absolutely an art. You have to eventually develop a feel for how stressed an individual dog gets, recognize his body language and how he is communicating, and understand what he is thinking and feeling, before you can really train a dog well. You need to elevate a dog to a level where you’re teaching him how to fight, how to bring up that natural instinct that he has genetically deep down, an instinct that we’ve already identified through the training-selection process. Now we’re just teaching him to bring that genetic instinct up to a much higher level, so he is able to handle the rigors of training. Eventually we arrive at the dog being ten times the dog he was when we first got him.
Like other aspects of training MWDs, this is a time-consuming process. If you’re not careful, you can create a couple of problems. One is that if you don’t put the dog into defensive drive enough, he never really learns how to fight. This is certainly better than burning him out going the other way, which is putting him on the defensive too much. That way you’ve cracked and ruined the dog and broken his spirit, so that he relinquishes a lot of the backbone that he had. As a result, we always err on the side of prey drive and don’t take the dogs overboard on defense drive.
Unless you’ve seen these dogs in action, it’s difficult to convey the differences in their responses when in each of the two drives. It is a matter of degree of intensity as well as specific behaviors. In terms of intensity, think of your dog when you reward him with a treat—he takes it readily and willingly but is gentle and nonaggressive. When you give your dog a treat and other dogs are present, your dog’s sense of competition for resources is higher. He will take the treat, reaching for it more aggressively; in some cases, a dog will turn his head and his eyes seem to roll back in the same way that a great white shark does when attacking prey. Your dog won’t bite you in order to get the treat, but he is definitely amped up a notch or two. That’s how it is when an MWD shifts from one drive to the other. Because the intensity is already well beyond your treat-seeking dog’s drive, his amped-up behavior feels that much more aggressive/assertive/on the offensive.
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A dog that will only fight when in a kind of training corral isn’t any good to us or to anyone who wants a dog trained to do apprehension work. Neither is a dog that can be distracted by other things that may be happening around him. So another important component of apprehension training is to place a dog into a variety of environments at the appropriate time, just like we do with detection training. We travel far and wide with a dog and his handler and create a variety of scenarios so that each dog has the experience of tracking and apprehending bad guys in everything from mountainous terrain at night to urban settings both indoors and outdoors.
One new environment for the dogs is a helicopter. We work with them on a similar kind of exposure work to the aircraft. It starts with just having the dogs be around a helicopter and progresses to them getting into one and then to actually taking off and landing in one. After that we get the dogs to fly in a helicopter for greater and greater distances. We refer to the taking-off and landing exercises as elevators. We place one dog in each helicopter along with a complement of a flight crew and a team. The dog and handler are the last to board. We do the full load-up of the aircraft, and then the dog and handler get on. We take off and then land two to three minutes later, repeating this process six to eight times with each dog.
Everyone knows that a dog just starting out with this training can be a bit uneasy, and I’ve watched people on board press them
selves as far back against the sides of the chopper as they can when the handler and the dog board, hoping to stay out of an unsettled dog’s way and not attract his attention. Once, we had a relatively inexperienced flyer doing elevators. Everyone else in the cabin was a handler, so they knew what to look for, and they all watched the dog and immediately wallpapered themselves. They could see the dog defaulting to aggression mode, and he eyed each and every one of them, assessing who would be the choicest bite. The men kept pressing themselves against the wall, trying to make themselves as small a target as possible. I had to laugh a bit when I saw that. Five combat-trained and hardened military men—all heavily armed, mind you—trying to keep as far away as they could from this pacing menace. Obviously, part of our job is to get the dogs to calm down and not pose such a threat, but those exercises serve as a good reminder to all of us about just what kind of power these dogs really have over us and how we have to do everything we can to harness it and unleash it properly.
I think it bears repeating that you can’t make a dog get over reverting to his aggression mode by doing anything punitive to him. You run the risk of inciting him even more and increasing his aggressive response. Then you have to be even more punitive, and eventually you absolutely break the dog’s spirit. What we try to do is make those frightening and unfamiliar experiences, like being around and in a helicopter for the first time, more pleasant through the use of rewards. In training, whether it’s bite work or getting a dog used to a muzzle or anything else, I always carry some treats with me. By treats I mostly mean toys or food rewards. When I’m working, I carry both. I even take soft treats and mash them against the inside of a muzzle cage to get dogs who are unwilling to put their snouts in there to get them to associate the muzzle with something they like, something positive. At first, just letting them eat treats out of it is an effective way to get them used to the sight of the muzzle. When it comes time to place the muzzle over the dog’s head and snout, it’s a much easier thing to accomplish if he isn’t already on high alert and anxiety at the sight of the thing.
No matter what you’re trying to do with a dog to train him for the role he will play in combat or in your life, it’s important that he believes some positive reward is coming his way. As trainers and handlers, our positive-reward system also provides us with a growing confidence that we won’t be the ones a dog turns his considerable bite force on.
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How exactly do we refine a dog’s innate skills to make him effective at apprehending individuals? Just as with detection work, we start a dog early and continually increase the complexity and duration of the exercises—moving the dog from play as a pup to more serious work as he becomes an adult. We push each dog to near his breaking point.
Beginning when a pup is four to five weeks old, we start to develop and encourage his prey instinct. We always take advantage of a dog’s inherent desire to want to chase moving objects. So we’ll take a terry cloth towel or a rag, something that’s very easy for the pup to grip, and something we can tease him with easily. We’ll begin the process of developing the dog’s prey instinct so that it becomes a useful skill for things other than just playing tug-of-war.
As you’ve probably experienced if you’ve ever raised a pup, when you wave something in front of him he’s going to chase after it and try to grab it. In our work, we do something similar, but with the intent to get a pup frustrated that we’re the ones that have hold of the rag. We play a little tug with him, and then when he bites in deeper we give him counterpressure by pulling back slightly. Then we hold still. The dog will usually naturally pull and then counter and go a little deeper. When he does that, I’ll let go and reward him by letting him have the towel or rag. It’s as if I’m saying, Okay, you chased it, caught it, killed it, now you get to carry your prey off and prance around with it. It’s yours and you get to have it. Have fun.
From there, we advance to doing that work in all different types of environments. We do it in buildings, out in fields, in dark places, inside vehicles, or anywhere else that a pup may or may not be during his later training or when he’s downrange. A pup is not just environmentally going places. He’s chasing balls in those environments. He’s doing rag and bite work in those environments.
Just as in every other step of dog training, over time, we take very small and slow baby steps forward. From rags we progress to a puppy sleeve, which is basically a jute pillow. Jute is a pretty coarse fabric, but it’s very soft and very easy for a dog to grab onto. Then we apply the same principles we used with the rags and terry cloth towels.
Sometimes we’ll take an empty 20-ounce plastic bottle, flatten it, tie it to a string, and tie the string to a pole. Then we’ll “flirt pole” the dog with that and tease him with it. It’s a tease because it’s a much different material than the puppy sleeve and is very hard to hold on to. This exercise teaches a pup that if he wants it, he’s going to have to bite down hard and hang on hard or he’s going to lose it. With cloths and rags and the puppy sleeve, the dog can use a pretty gentle grip and still manage to hang on to the thing because he’s got sharp little puppy teeth that dig in and hold on. That won’t work with those plastic bottles.
Even at five or six weeks old, when a puppy is grabbing a rag, we pick him up off the ground, raising his back end higher than his mouth. We pat him hard on the rib cage. We place him on a slippery, elevated surface. All the while, we’re still doing the bite work with him. Basically, we are just teaching him that no matter what position his body is in, no matter what environment he’s in, he is going to be okay and he just needs to keep those jaws clamping down.
Next, when a dog is between three and six months old, every couple of training sessions we increase the intensity in some way. We might increase the hardness or thickness of the sleeve and the biting material, and then also increase the amount of pressure that we put on a dog, judging what he can take. It’s a very, very slow process.
At around seven or eight months, a dog will have his complete set of adult teeth. At this point we’ll start to put on the bite suits and start that work with a dog and also start to teach multiarea targeting. To do that, as a dog comes in, we don’t stand the same distance away and offer the same body parts to him every time. To do that wouldn’t be realistic for either a “street dog” or an SOF dog. Our dogs will be fighting people in a variety of environments. We teach the dogs to look for specific body parts or targets, but we also know that when deployed they may need to improvise. For example, if we focused solely on teaching a dog to bite someone’s left bicep, the dog might one day be in the field and find himself trying to subdue an enemy who, for whatever reason, is only showing his right side to the dog. The dog still has to do his job and apprehend this guy. So he has to learn to take what he can get.
Getting a dog comfortable with knowing how to react to something unfamiliar or different is something we work on the entire time. We are always putting a dog in a weird or unusual situation. The guy in the bite suit may move at the last second. He may turn or crouch down or duck out of the way or raise a knee up and lean back or do anything that forces a dog to deal with it.
We’ll also do things such as wrestle with a dog. Putting a little bit of pinching or grabbing or twisting pressure on a dog’s legs will teach him to keep his legs out of reach. It’s important for a dog to do this when he’s engaged in fighting someone, so his opponent cannot grab hold of and break the dog’s legs. Eventually we’ll get to the point when, while he’s engaged, a dog does have his legs tucked back behind him and out of the way. We also teach the dog that if someone does grab hold of him and starts to hurt him, he should move his grip to whatever hand, weapon, or other object is attacking him.
We’ll also teach a dog that if the scenario presents itself, he should basically circle around back and grip a guy’s triceps muscle. It’s incredibly difficult to fight a dog when he’s got you in the back of the arm. You can’t really grab him.
Similar to working through offensi
ve and defensive drives, a trainer needs to be incredibly experienced, very patient, and very knowledgeable in reading each individual dog and knowing how much pressure to put on each one and when to back off and how and when to ratchet up those levels of pressure. Especially in the first year of a dog’s life, it is very, very easy to push too hard and go too fast and ruin a good dog by putting too much pressure on him too early.
Sometimes it’s difficult because you’ll get dogs that are just firecrackers. They’re really, really advanced. They’re mentally more mature than they should be for their age. Maybe they’re physically a little bigger and more mature than you would expect. It’s easy to see how you could get caught in pushing the dog a little too far. It’s imperative that you don’t, or you can have a lasting negative effect on that dog and ruin him.
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I have to admit that as serious as this work is for me, I take a lot of pleasure in creating and participating in these on-site exercises. Just thinking about driving along in an ATV at 35 to 40 miles per hour up a mountain pass where we do a lot of the training, with the dogs keeping up with us for 800 yards of elevation gain for about three-quarters of a mile, gives me an added appreciation for these dogs. They lope along in that classic herder stride, a combination of seemingly effortless athletic grace and fierce determination that gets my heart pumping every time with awe and pride.
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As I mentioned earlier, a dog can be seriously injured, or even killed, if he is turned loose to apprehend someone on a roof or if he is fighting someone who can grab and hurt his legs. This is also true if he is turned loose to apprehend someone who is near a window. During training, as a safety precaution, the dogs are kept on leashes during some of the exercises. Whether a dog is kept on a leash or not when he’s in the field will depend on the actual situation he is in. His handler will have to make the decision about when to release the dog, and it generally has to do with when a dog shows a sign that he has picked up the scent trail of a human. So, during these training exercises for apprehension, one of the things I do is evaluate each handler’s decisions. I want the handlers to be able to make swift and appropriate choices, obviously, and the only way to do that is to make them work through multiple scenarios with their dogs time and time again.