Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines

by Michael Ritland

  Compare that response to your typical ball-obsessed dog, and I think you get the picture.

  If you manage to approach the dog and try to take the object away, the only way you’ll get it is if you come close to choking the dog into unconsciousness. Again, that’s not what you want out of your pet, but it is absolutely what we want out of a dog that can do the job with a SEAL Team. Of course, I’m talking about their raw “skills” at this point. Eventually, that dog will have to be trained to behave this way only on command, though—as I’ll deal with in more detail in the next chapter on training—there’s a fine line between taking that kind of prey drive out of a dog and managing that prey drive. 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 prey drive.

  I’ve taken clients who want a personal-protection dog to view candidates, and when they see that kind of behavior, they frequently say, “Is there something wrong with that dog?”

  I always say, “No. There’s a lot right about that dog.”

  The reason why that kind of nearly out-of-control pursuit is needed is because frequently these working dogs, once in the field, have to charge into an unknown environment and, just as frequently, one that presents a real danger to the dog. You don’t want a dog that is going to hesitate at all and give a single thought to its safety. You just want them to get in there and do the job. Apprehending a bad guy is just one task that these dogs are trained to do, and it is an important component of SEAL Team work. Some dogs have that great prey drive and pursuit, but they may be lacking in a second skill that is required of SEAL Team dogs but may not be required to work for other agencies.

  The second type of job is detection. Dogs are legendary for the sensitivity of their noses, and for good reason. 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 comes close to describing the priority placed on a dog’s olfactory ability. I term a dog’s ability and desire to find an object that isn’t visible their “hunt drive.” That means that whether an object is thrown into an area where the dog can’t see it or was hidden previously, I want to see that dog use its nose and not its eyes to locate that object. Just as the dog has to possess a hyper prey drive, the ideal canine candidate has to possess a hyper hunt drive.

  Instinctively, these dogs should immediately go into a serpentine-shaped search pattern or a figure eight. Their noses will either be lowered or up in the air scenting, using the wind and the scent molecules to locate the object. Just as when they chase and capture something they’ve seen thrown, their hunt drive will turn into aggressive possession once they have the object.

  As rare as it is to find a dog with the kind of prey drive that we seek, it is equally difficult to find a dog with the kind of nose that will help it succeed as a working dog with the SEAL Teams. Finding a dog with both those qualities is truly a one-in-a-thousand (or more) proposition. That’s where good breeding comes in, of course, and selecting for both those traits will invariably produce dogs that are stronger in one area over another. That’s okay, but the difference can’t be so great that the dogs are inferior in one of those areas. The SEAL Teams, unlike some other agencies, have to employ dual-purpose dogs—those that excel at apprehension and detection. By necessity, then, you might make some concessions that you may not make with a single-purpose dog.

  In baseball, scouts look for five-tool players: those who can hit for average, hit for power, and who possess a strong throwing arm, above-average foot speed, and a good glove. No player has ever been at the top of the charts in every one of those categories, but they are above the average. To keep the baseball analogy going a little bit longer, what we need are first-ballot Hall of Famers who are in the ninetieth percentile in all the skills we look for.

  One of the traits that allows a dog to be relentless in its prey and hunt drives is its ability to block out distractions. Whether that distraction takes the form of a squirrel, a helicopter, gunfire, or any other stimulus from their environment, it absolutely must remain task focused. In addition to that, it has to enter into a new environment for the first time and not be intimidated. In fact, it has to be the opposite of intimidated. Its upright carriage, its scorpion tail curling over its back, its pricked ears, and its chest thrust forward have to be a constant no matter the environmental distractions or the foreignness or its unfamiliarity with a locale.

  Again, I don’t want to diminish the respect that I have for dogs kept as pets. For example, there are many, many fine hunting dogs that grow accustomed to the sound of gunfire. There are many dogs that are “ball crazy” and indefatigable pursuers of objects and animals. 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 perform their activities willingly and with a single-minded purposefulness that few if any humans possess. In other words, they need to stroll in everywhere like they own the place, just like us frogmen.

  The last quality that I look for is difficult to describe in delicate terms. A dog has to have a big set of nuts on him—metaphorically speaking. Most dogs, even among those selected from the elite breeders from around the world, don’t have the kind of dominance and true forward aggression that is needed. Dogs have been domesticated and bred for so long that the type of dog that is willing to stand up to and fight a human—a human that is not frightened by that dog and physically capable of disabling that dog—is a very, very rare animal. I call them the 1 percenters (this was before the term had a political connotation), but they are more 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 its fight-or-flight response. I want to see it go through that thought process: Am I going to take this guy on? I know that chances are that I’m going to get hurt if I do, so I could bail out. The ones that don’t bail out, the ones that choose to fight and not flee, are the ones I 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. When I put additional pressure on them, by approaching them, by keeping my body square to them with fierce direct eye contact, and by presenting a stick as a weapon (in some cases) and tapping them with it or by grabbing a handful of their skin and squeezing it, I want them to come after me. Of course, I’m wearing a “bite suit” for protection when I do this, and the dogs that use that bite suit for its intended purpose are good candidates for selection.

  It’s important to note that there is a crucial distinction between dogs that will go on the offensive and those that will continue to fight when placed on the defensive. A dog may demonstrate prey drive when going after a squirrel, but one that will exhibit that same prey drive when squaring off with a moose or other large animal are rare and desirable as working dogs.

  The men who qualify for the SEAL Teams possess many of those same basic traits as the dogs we train. A good nose is not one of them, of course, but that kind of courage and intestinal fortitude and willingness to pursue a goal are very much needed. Call it aggressiveness or whatever, humans in combat situations need that trait as well. Both canines and humans need to have those drives and traits, but the key, obviously, is not just to possess them in over-the-top quantities but to be able to harness them and use them in appropriate situations in appropriate ways.

  It is also important to understand that when I acquire a dog from a breeder of Malinois, I’m not getting a very young puppy who hasn’t been trained at all. The two-to-th
ree-year-old dogs have already gone through rigorous training; some even have become what is referred to as a “titled dog.” That means that they’ve been trained and have earned a certification in one of several different European dog sports. One of the more common types of those is Schutzhund, a dog sport popular in Germany. When this sport was first organized and the competitions formalized, a dog that had completed Schutzhund training and became certified in the sport was also essentially qualified to be a German police dog. That was the original intent of the program, but between politics and hurt feelings, the dogs that earn the “title” don’t necessarily have the competency to become actual working police dogs. The sport is so popular that other breeds of dogs now can enter into the competitions.

  Similar to what I’ve described previously, these competitions test to determine to what degree these dogs possess traits such as courage, intelligence, perseverance, and protective instinct. There are three levels of achievement, and the tests cover three aspects of the dog’s abilities—tracking, obedience, and protection. A dog must pass all three phases of the test in order to be titled. In addition to the Schutzhund, there are Belgian Ring, French Ring, Mondio Ring, and Dutch KNPV, as well as other organizations and titles with some minor and other major differences. The distinctions among those groups and titles aren’t as important as this basic point: the dogs we acquire must all have the necessary traits and instincts that are essential and required to do the type of demanding job we are going to ask them to do.

  Typically, these dogs will have some obedience, “bite work,” controlled bite work—where the dog has to “out” or release on command. It will have completed an article search/tracking exercise in which the dog has to go through numerous obstacles and then find a person or an object. While this all sounds good in theory, and it does have its benefits, a problem arises because each trainer has his or her own way of doing things. We may come back with five titled dogs, but because each trainer uses different methods and even words for commands (not just a different language), such as the English equivalent of saying “here,” “come,” or “get over here” to get a dog to come, we then have to do things our way. There are some exceptions to that, of course, and most of our dogs still know the language they were first taught in, and most often we continue to use that language.

  In a sense, this is like what the navy used to do with its prospective SEAL Team members. It would first put them through basic training and then require that they study to achieve some rate (job title) even before going into BUD/S training. For example, I had to go through four months of training as an intelligence specialist and then went to BUD/S. Recently the navy has changed its policy and made being a SEAL a rate in itself, meaning you can join the navy and go straight to BUD/S right out of boot camp. That level of preparedness is oftentimes minimal, but no one goes into a SEAL Team training pipeline or deployment as a human or canine without it. We all come from different backgrounds, have had different experiences, and that has an impact on how we learn and what we learn, just as it is with the dogs. We can’t create exact duplicates of humans or canines, and as a trainer of SEALs and their dogs, I can tell you that wouldn’t be desirable or possible. We have a template in mind, but we always have to make allowances for the individual personality and skills those warriors possess. How much allowance is made varies, but the most important consideration is that dogs and men live up to the high standards set for both of them.

  4

  No matter how well bred a dog is and how well done the initial training is, we are still left with a lot of work to do before a dog and his handler are ready to be deployed. That is also true of the individuals who volunteer to be dog handlers. I’ve spent a lot of time training both the handlers and the dogs, sometimes separately and sometimes together. Even though someone is a great SEAL Team member, that doesn’t mean that he will function well as a handler. Just because a dog has earned his title, that doesn’t mean that he’ll be a great SOF dog.

  That’s just the nature, and the nurture, of the situation. I say this because, obviously, when we’re talking animal and human nature, both of those influences come into play. In this chapter, I’m going to talk mostly about the nurture side of the equation. I also want to make it clear that while I travel overseas to source dogs for use with the SEAL Teams, I’m there as a buyer and not as an observer of the training methods those Dutch breeders employ. (While I’ve sourced dogs from other places, I generally get them from Dutch breeders.) I talk with them a bit about how they conduct those initial phases of instruction, but my primary goal when I travel there is to acquire dogs, generally ones that are about two years old or more, and not to acquire any additional information about how to train dogs to do detection and apprehension work.

  That’s not intended to be a slight against those owners/breeders. The fact that their dogs are the ones we end up with speaks volumes about what they’re capable of doing. Once we get those dogs to the United States and begin our more focused phases of training to prepare them for the work they have to do specifically with the SEAL Teams, we have a lot more than just a head start. We’ve got canines that are extremely capable and intelligent animals with a very good foundation for adding to their repertoire of skills. This analogy may fall somewhat short, but it’s as if we get these dogs with a high school education: they’ve graduated with honors, and we next put them through college and graduate school. As our program advances, the skills we focus on narrow to a point of high specialization, much like a human would in earning an advanced degree.

  Before I get into that sector of training, I want to spend some time talking about what those first couple of years might be like for those dogs we acquire. To do that, I’m drawing from my own experience working with dogs born and bred right here, many of which go on to work with a variety of governmental agencies in various capacities. While what I do from the time a pup is born until it is ready for its 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 in methodology are almost immaterial. We are attempting to do the same thing: maximize the natural abilities of the dogs, identify their areas of strength and weakness, and expose them to as many different environmental stimuli as possible so that they can more easily adapt to the specific circumstances they will encounter in their “careers.”

  Again, that comparison between the human members of the SEAL Teams and their canine co-workers applies. No one goes into the SEAL Teams without first completing basic training and then one additional level before starting BUD/S training. While there is a 75 percent attrition rate among those entering BUD/S, we don’t have that great a failure rate among the dogs. I haven’t kept statistics to track that rate among the dogs we acquire, but it is more like three or four in ten instead of seven and a half out of ten.

  Part of the reason for that is that the early weeding-out process among the dogs is more vigorous than it is among the sailors. As I stated earlier, I felt the first test I had to pass to qualify as a SEAL Team candidate wasn’t very hard at all. When I’m evaluating prospective team dogs, my standards are much higher. In addition, when we select sires and bitches for breeding, we already have in mind the kinds of work that these dogs will be asked to do. As a consequence, we breed for those qualities, and from the moment those dogs are born—to be more precise, in the first several days of their lives—I’m already beginning their training. Even before that, I’ve tried to optimize their chances of success by providing their mothers with the most stress-free environment possible during their gestation period. Generally, that means moving them to a different kennel area. I place them as far as possible from the clamor—mostly other dogs on the premises. This limits the possible stress produced by other dogs’ barking and limits their contact with overly aggressive or rambunctious trainees on the premises. At any one time, I may have as many as a dozen to two dozen dogs around, including my house pets, so you ca
n imagine the level of noise these dogs can produce. That’s especially true because of the kennel I’ve built for them.

  I’ve built a kennel run that has indoor/outdoor climate control. It’s all cinder block, epoxy coated, with a full-on septic system with heavy-duty drains and everything. While that provides a cool and sturdy structure for them to live in and allows them to be in or out of the weather, the indoor acoustics don’t provide the most peaceful environment. I’ve come to learn that unstressed bitches produce the highest-quality litters, so I make accommodations for the mothers even before they whelp.

  All dog trainers have their own theories, and some of them are scientific based. A lot of them are old wives’ tales or just the experiences that they have had that seem to work the best for them. I’ve done a lot of training and seen a lot of good and bad results. And I can tell you that the methods that I’m about to go over are the ones on which I’ve seen empirical data backed up with studies. I’ve also seen the good results from them, and I’ve seen bad results from not adhering to these principles.

  Basically what it boils down to is that the puppies are a kind of blank slate, but they absolutely retain some of their pack-animal instincts. That said, they are also domesticated to the point where they can go either way—resort to some of their human-aggression tendencies or adapt to life with people. If they have very little human interaction in the first couple of months of life, they’re going to be polar opposites than if they have had a ton of human interaction.