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 a pretty raging success in my book, and I was and remain pretty damn proud of being part of SEAL Team 3’s role in setting the tone for what was to come. We didn’t have long to celebrate. As soon as we got back to the Kuwait Naval Base (KNB), we packed up and headed to the Ali Al Salem Air Base. And in that couple of days, that’s when the ground war started. Once again, we were on the move to a different environment, working in places very far from the waters of the gulf, but we’d been prepared for those conditions as well.
Since that night, and given what I do today, I’ve often wondered how multi-purpose canines might have helped us. Certainly the mission was a resounding success, but we’d placed many troops in great peril, which we all understand is part of the deal, but how might dogs have made our jobs a bit easier?
Having gone through that experience, 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 wanted the dogs I trained to be able to meet those high standards of effort and execution that were exhibited that night. I was going to be sure that the dogs I trained were ready for anything, anywhere.
Again, because adaptability to an environment is so key to their success, I do a couple of other things to enhance both prey drive and the pups’ comfort with the unfamiliar. Even at a young age I start taking them all over the place, to the local hospital, playgrounds, to Home Depot—you name it. Since these dogs will get transported to various locations a lot during training and afterward, getting them used to being in a vehicle is essential. We go into parking lots and let a lot of people handle them and play with them and see them. We also want to expose them to people in different circumstances and environments—people in wheelchairs, on crutches, kids in shopping carts; we take the pups on escalators, elevators, through loud noises, into dark rooms, and onto slippery floors. As soon as I can get these dogs exposed to stuff like that, I do it.
I also do the rag work in all these different types of environments. I’ll basically set up a little puppy obstacle course, where they’ve got all different sorts of objects and obstacles to deal with—lengths of PVC pipe lying on the ground, little baby pools with plastic bottles in them, a suspension bridge that’s elevated and unstable, fence grading, or single-level and multileveled pallets. I want them to have to crawl up and over things, go underground at times, and be familiar and comfortable in all kinds of terrain. One of my favorite sights is seeing the dogs dive into that kiddy pool filled with empty plastic bottles in pursuit of a ball or a toy. Later, when the pups get bigger, I do this on a larger scale with an old bathtub filled with plastic balls. If you’ve ever taken your kids to an inside playground and seen them in that pit of balls, you can imagine what these dogs are like. Except, none of them, or a very rare few, will pause on the edge, thinking about it before diving in.
I really enjoy working with the pups at all stages, but I get a big kick out of building what is essentially a doggy Disneyland for them and watching them figure out all the rides. That doesn’t mean that my interaction with them is limited to me watching. At this stage, I’m very much into hands-on play with them. I do a lot of throwing with mini tennis balls and toys. I also still do a lot of rag work and tug-of-war, with tug balls attached to a string to keep them in pursuit of something as much as possible. I really want these dogs to develop their sense of possession—that there’s something out there that they have to get, and once they do, it belongs to them. Later on, we’ll work more intently on the letting-go part, but first, really feeding their desire to chase takes precedence over that.
To reinforce the idea that these other locations are pleasurable and offer some kind of reward, I will also feed them. Like any breed, the Malinois we use differ in their food drives; regardless, any reward experience they have that pairs the place with the meeting of a need offers positive reinforcement. But I’ll also start to feed them and start to get them using their noses early on, too. I’ll take a bowl of food and set it somewhere in the whelping room. Not right in the middle of it, but somewhere they have to search a bit to find. You’ll very quickly see them smell the food, and they’ll starting using their noses and they’ll go find it. After a few days of that, I put it in the training room, somewhere just beyond the whelping-room door. Now they come out into the training room. Same thing: it’s already preplaced somewhere, they get wind of it, they all use their noses, all follow and find that bowl of food.
Every couple of days I’ll up the ante, so to speak, and make it more challenging for them. We’ll go outside. Now training is in a field, and they’ve got twenty-five to thirty square meters to search. And I’ll set them up for success. I’ll put them down very near where I hide the food, because their attention span is incredibly short for approximately the first twelve months. So I’ll do that outside, and then I’ll put it in the deep weeds even farther away. Then I’ll hide it several acres away, and they’ll just start walking. Again, it’s important to understand that I don’t want to frustrate them too much, just enough for them to earn their taste of success. So, when I go outside to hide their meal, I’m always going to place it somewhere downwind. That way, when they first step outside, the odor cone—how the molecules travel from the source and out and away from it—presents that food to them pretty quickly. As soon as those pups catch a whiff of it, they go charging out after it.
I’ve worked at multiple things by doing it this way. First, I’ve taught them to use their noses and to be successful. They have gotten proven results, and several repetitions of being successful using their noses at an early age also helps teach them, frankly, to just use it and trust it.
But they’ve also had to do some work. When we’re out in larger and larger areas, they have to stick with it and keep air scenting and walking along with me. We walk and we walk, and then, bam, all of a sudden we’re in odor and we’re going to source locating and finding. This is exactly what they’re going to be doing in detection work later on.
It may sound like I’m being pretty demanding on these pups at an early age, and I am. But I’m not punishing them in any way, and in a lot of respects, as serious as this business is, the dogs are also having fun. No, you wouldn’t train your kids this way, but these are dogs being trained to be working dogs. No dog has ever starved or been injured in any way during this early training phase. That said, I want them to learn to work for a reward from an early age. I know ahead of time what their role in life is going to be, the kinds of skills they are going to use to be successful. If you look at any person who is successful at a sport, the chances are that they began playing (note the emphasis here) at a very early age. The best athletes are generally the ones who picked up the game very early. Sure, you could become a pro golfer, tennis player, baseball player, or whatever if you started at the age of fifteen. But the odds are against you. The earlier you get a start, the better your chances of being at the top of your sport someday.
When doing detection work, a dog will take as many as ten short breaths a second to get those scents far into their nasal cavity. That early work in having them cover larger and larger amounts of territory is just a prelude to the kind of endurance and detection work they will do later on.
If I haven’t convinced you yet that these dogs are extraordinarily capable, imagine a human covering the distances these dogs do, kilometers at a time, while employing that kind of breathing pattern. We’d likely faint before we’d finish. While dogs, particularly herding dogs, have strong endurance capacities inherently, that natural trait also has to be carefully nurtured. Eventually, these dogs will travel great distances on walks, sometimes carrying weighted vests; other times they will do resistance training against Bungee-type elasticized cords while walking on treadmills, and othe
r work to heighten their athletic abilities.
Nature has given these dogs a leg up, maybe two; nurture—the training methods we use—helps them get all four legs up on the competition. The successful intertwining of both nature and nurture produces the best results. I use the expression “You can only polish a turd so much” when talking about this issue. The combination of a great genetic background and solid training produces the dogs that work with the SEAL Teams. There are no shortcuts in either nature or nurture. Both take hard work on the part of man and canine, though I believe that the dogs actually enjoy doing the training work. They get to exhibit the traits that their breeds were refined to produce, to give expression to both their innate and externally reinforced natures. What can be better than that?
Those genetics have to be maximized in order for a dog to reach its potential.
When I take a step back and consider what these dogs are doing in the environments they are doing them in, it truly blows my mind. And this is why those dogs can do the things they do: it’s because of people who are meticulous about breeding, who are meticulous about raising, who are meticulous about training. They absolutely bust their asses in every facet of everything that has to do with these dogs and leave nothing to chance.
I make my living and stake my reputation on training dogs. As a result, my livelihood depends on doing things the best way possible. Also, as a former SEAL Team member, I take very seriously the responsibility that these dogs and 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 that.
It helps to know that, as a vendor, my dogs are going to be rigorously tested; when the men who purchase the dogs from me for use with the SEAL Teams or any other agency come to test my dogs, they’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at my dogs to make sure that they are what they need. And if there is a single hole in one of these dogs, they’re going to find it. And 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, either. The SEAL operators deserve, as they say, “Nothing but the best for the best.”
5
In the previous chapter, I spent a lot of time talking about what we do with pups to begin the training process. As I said, and I hope it is abundantly clear, for the dogs and for me, this is more like fun than anything resembling work. One additional component of making it fun and working with these dogs, rather than dominating them, is that we also offer these dogs abundant praise when they do things right—find the ball in the tub of bottles, get to the food dish, or whatever. Praise is essential to getting these dogs, or any dog for that matter, to do the things we want them to do. It’s also important to note that the praise can come verbally or nonverbally and preferably both ways—with words and actions.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard parents say this more than a few times to their children (and it was said to me on a few occasions): “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” That is so true for dogs. The nonverbal component of the language we employ with dogs is far more important than the words we use. Dogs learn through repetition and simple association. If you wanted to, you could teach your dog to lie down by using the words “get up.” Dogs don’t understand the meaning of words; they simply associate the words we use, through repetition and reward, with an action or an object. For example, if your dog was used to you calling a stuffed animal with a squeaker inside a “toy,” and then you placed a plastic scale-model dump truck in front of him or her and told her to get the toy, chances are she wouldn’t retrieve that truck. The plastic item might fit within the classification we humans have made for toys, but the dog wouldn’t make that same association immediately. Over time, if you did enough repetitions with the dog and rewarded it for picking up that plastic truck, your dog would make the association between the sounds you make to form the word “toy” and that object. It would know that the stuffed animal and the truck belong to the same category of things. Unless that category is things I can put in my mouth—which for dogs encompasses a whole lot of their universe.
What’s my point? Dogs are essentially nonverbal animals. They respond to sounds that we use as words, but they react more to intonation—volume and pitch—much more so than the words. Anyone who has had a dog will tell you that if they use an excited tone, the dog responds better and in kind. If you yell and sound angry, the dog will respond to the emotional tone of your voice and to a lesser degree the words themselves. “Bad” and “no” have no real meaning unto themselves to a dog; it’s the associated or corresponding actions and nonverbal components of the utterances that they really understand.
This may be a fine point of distinction, but it’s an important one in several contexts. I often tell people that the only language dogs know is body language. That’s a bit of a stretch because of what I’ve said about intonation above, but dogs primarily read posture and other nonverbal cues we give off. They are highly, highly sensitive to the “vibes” we and other animals, and in particular other dogs, give off. They also “speak” nonverbal/postural language among themselves.
You’ve probably encountered this situation. You’re walking with your dog on or off leash, and you encounter another dog. The sniffing process begins. Have you ever noticed how one dog will place his head near or above the other dog’s neck and shoulders? What does the other dog do? It 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, as if to say, You’re not going to mess with me. Sometimes the dog will make itself appear smaller: it will shrink itself, lower its hind legs, lie its ears back flat, and generally assume a very passive posture. It’s communicating with its body.
I frequently use this analogy when talking about our interactions with dogs. Many times people come by my place, where I have a few retired military working dogs. The people are often interested in adopting them and caring for them. I make sure they understand very clearly the specific characteristics of working dogs and how they may differ from pets. I’ve seen people bend down and want to enter the dog’s crate or kennel to greet the dog. I immediately stop them and tell them to imagine this scenario from a different perspective: You’re in a ten-by-ten prison cell. Someone comes into it to join you. They’re bigger than you are, they are making some sounds you don’t understand, and they want to wrap their arms around you like you’re old buddies or something. What are you going to do? How are you going to respond, especially if you’re a type-A person?
My other point here is that dogs understand body language and they understand the environment they are in. That whole fight-or-flight instinct comes into play in this scenario. They’ve got no place to go, you’ve backed them into a corner, so don’t be surprised if they come out fighting.
Another reason I talk about this is that I equate some of the old-school establish dominance/become the alpha male or pack leader training approaches to this kind of nonthinking approach to training. As I pointed out before, the key to 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. Since dogs learn by association, I want them to associate me with all good things in their lives: the food they eat, the water they drink, the things they play with, the exercise they receive, 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. I may take it away from them briefly, not to tease them, but to get them to be understand through repetition that Hey, this guy is the one who gives me what I want.
How does this associative learning work, and what are some of its limitations? For example, your dog observes you reaching into your
pocket to retrieve a treat. You then present that treat to the dog. He understands that something good comes from you reaching into your pocket. Through enough repetitions of that action, or of you holding a ball and him associating being able to play with it, those associations get hardwired into their brains. If you reach in your pocket and pull out a set of keys, or you hold an apple or an orange in your hand, your dog is going to make the same association as before—I’m getting a treat or I’m going to play. Only when you allow it to see and to sniff those other objects, and repeatedly not reward it after these same actions, will it figure out the difference.
Studies have been conducted to compare the relative intelligence of dogs to humans, and the estimates are that an adult dog has the smarts of a four-year-old human. I’d have to disagree a bit with that and put the range at a four-to-seven-year-old human. Even though I’ve said that dogs learn by repetition and association, they do have problem-solving skills. For example, I’ve had dogs that have watched me open the latch to a gate enough times that they’ve then figured out how to open it for themselves. As you’ll see in the stories of the dogs in action, they are capable of carrying out a series of complex and long-duration tasks independently.
Oddly, I see some advantages in the limitations of associative learning. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes the complexities of human interactions grow frustrating. Raising kids is an example of that. At the ages of four to seven—that span of years that encompasses the intellectual capabilities of dogs—you spend a whole lot of time reasoning with a child. You can engage in seemingly endless conversations about whether a behavior, an utterance, an impulse, or a thought is right or wrong. With dogs, you don’t. They are far more black and white in their view of the world, and the kind of operant conditioning and associative learning they do works very much to your advantage. A reward means I did something “good,” so I should keep doing that so I keep getting rewarded. Anyone with a child will tell you that children will test that equation six ways to Sunday—If I do this, will I still be good? If I do that, will I still get rewarded?
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 7