After the imprinting, we move on to what’s called point-to-point exercises. For this, I need a fenced-off area; ball fields work really well. I take a sample of that odor and put it on the back side and upwind side of the fence; I may place half a pound of a selected target odor there. I then take the dog, or have the handler take his dog, and I give the search command. Then I walk alongside that fence so that we are parallel to the chain link, downwind and in a straight line. Depending upon how hard the wind is blowing, we may start out walking toward the dynamite from only about fifteen feet away. The wind blowing across that dynamite creates the odor cone. It starts out narrow at the source and then widens; picture a flashlight beam’s spread.
As we’re walking and entering that odor cone, I’m watching the dog to see any change in behavior. When he hits on the odor, his head will snap in the direction of the odor, his tail will feather or twitch, and his body will move in the direction of the source. He’ll get up to the fence but not actually be able to touch the explosive, lick it, eat it, or whatever. At that point, I train the dogs to either sit or lie down as the means for the dog to alert the handler, “Here it is.” The dog does either of those two actions, I hit the clicker, and then the dog gets his reward.
We work through that scenario one odor at a time, over and over, until we move through all the possible detection scenarios for all the desired target odors we want to teach them to recognize. Another advantage I have as a former SEAL is that I understand and have experience with the tactical side of explosives. I can create more realistic scenarios for the dogs to work in than someone who is a dog trainer first and an explosive-detection dog trainer second. I was trained as a SEAL, I was deployed as a SEAL, I’ve trained SEAL Team members, and now I use all that to train military working dogs to assist SEAL Teams. Having been there and done all that means that I can be as precise as possible, giving these incredibly talented animals the benefit of my experience.
To get a dog to detect anything, basically you’d follow those same fundamental principles of initial exposure/imprinting, point-to-point, and then various environmental scenarios. In order for dogs to endure those environmental scenarios, they have to be in top physical shape. They go on runs and swims, and run/swim/runs with their handlers. They’ll do resistance training with either weights, dragging weights attached to a harness, or with Bungee-cord leashes, which, the farther they are extended, the greater the resistance produced.
Apprehension work incorporates a bit of detection work; the dogs search for human odor, but it is primarily about one thing—bite work. When a handler wants his dog to go out and do detection work, the most frequently used command is “sook,” what our Dutch breeders told us means” search,” “seek,” or “find” an object. The dogs get very excited when they hear that. They go positively nuts when the handler tells them “reviere,” which instructs the dog to find a human. That command also lets them know that they are going to be able to do what is probably their favorite thing of all—bite someone.
That is as harsh as it sounds, and until you’ve seen these dogs do their bite-work exercises, I don’t think you can really understand the relish these dogs bring to this task. I pointed out early on that these dogs are bred to be alpha males, top-of-the-heap, aggressive types, and nothing brings that out in them like the opportunity to sink their teeth into something or someone.
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Someone recently told me the story of their Labrador retriever mix chasing and catching a deer fawn. The dog, who weighs about seventy pounds, is probably more active than most pets, very fit, but hardly an aggressive dog. The owner suspects that on a 10-point scale, the adult male is a 4 or a 5—neutral, in the sense that it never shows aggression toward humans or other dogs but doesn’t cower or retreat completely when approached by other canines. The owner wasn’t surprised to see the dog chase the three adult deer and the single fawn. However, when it caught the fawn, dragged it down from the rear, and then grabbed it by the neck and hoisted it off the ground, he was surprised. The fawn was about the same size as the dog, but the power of the dog’s neck and jaw muscles that enabled it to lift and shake the fawn wasn’t something the owner expected to see. He ordered the dog to stop, and it did, and the fawn, its heart racing and its legs wobbly but with no visible wounds, ambled off into the woods to join the adults.
I share this story because it highlights the fact that dogs and their prey drive, which to this point we’ve mostly talked about in terms of chasing balls, is an impressive sight. The speed with which dogs chase their prey, the strength they possess, and the instinctive move to shake their prey to snap its neck is present to a certain degree in nearly all dogs. The Labrador retriever mix in question here had killed a few voles and a lone squirrel prior to that incident and had chased its fair share of deer, fox, and, unadvisedly, a couple of elk prior to that fawn. It had some of the drive and tenacity of the Malinois we use, but certainly not to the same degree. The only reason it was able to catch the fawn was that its prey tried to hide behind a pile of fallen trees. The only reason the fawn survived was that the dog’s jaws were not powerful enough to puncture its skin, couldn’t whip it with enough force to break its neck, and it was willing to release its prey easily on command.
In a similar scenario with one of our military working dogs, the outcome for the fawn would have been very different. Most likely the fawn wouldn’t have had the chance to go into the kind of defensive hiding position, and that initial grab/bite/shake would have likely been lethal. When a dog that is a 10+ on that prey drive/aggression scale goes into action, he generally gets what he’s after and concludes the matter swiftly. That’s not to say that these dogs don’t need to work on their ability to attack and subdue human targets; they very definitely need to have their fighting skills refined.
I need to make this point clear from the start. The apprehension work that we do with a dog is to train it as a nonlethal force. Just because these dogs would have killed the fawn in that scenario above is not to say that they are trained to do the same thing in their work as SOF dogs. In most cases, a live capture of a suspected or clearly demonstrated insurgent, Taliban member, or other bad guy is much preferred over a neutralized one. A lot of valuable intelligence has been extracted from captured combatants. That is one of the reasons why I consider a dog to be such an effective weapon: it is a very highly skilled nonlethal force.
In some ways, calling what we do in this regard “bite work” is a bit of misnomer. Yes, we do teach the dogs some things they need to know, but as I pointed out in the previous chapter, when they are given the command reviere, to find a human, they do so with a desire that goes beyond a mere Ho-hum, here we go again, I’ve got work to do approach. As I mentioned, the difference in their demeanor when instructed to do detection work for explosives and when told to find a human target is substantial. They are eager in both cases, but there’s a palpable sense of the dog’s own explosive capabilities when on the hunt for a bad guy. It is as if every cell in the dog’s body, every bit of its canine ancestry, and the accumulated learning and experience in being able to provide for itself are turned on.
Having put on a bite suit or sleeve myself and felt the power of these dogs’ bodies and jaws, I can tell you it’s not something to take lightly, and I would not want to be on the receiving end of those blows and bites without that protective gear. In fact, I have been, and it’s an incredibly humbling experience. Even when wearing protective gear, I have at times experienced a level of pain as intense as anything I’ve endured.
As is true with exact measurements of a dog’s aural, olfactory, and vision capabilities, accurate measurements of a dog’s bite force are difficult to come by due to the variables involved. In those cases when a laboratory setting and testing procedure has been set up, those measurements also are questionable. For example, one study of canine bite force, conducted at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, used a protocol during which the dogs were anesthetized and had their jaw muscles sti
mulated electrically. My sense of this study, and others in which dogs bite down on objects with sensors attached to measure the bite force, is that they don’t account for the adrenaline rush that would naturally occur in a more “natural” setting. We’ve all heard stories of what people are capable of lifting when faced with an extreme situation, and when a dog is anesthetized or placed in a clinical environment, I don’t believe that its emotional and physiological response would be the same as it would be in actual (or practiced) combat.
Nevertheless, those measurements do help establish some kind of baseline data. For example, in the Guelph study, a German shepherd was able to produce a bite force of 170 pounds per square inch at the front of its jaw and 568 pounds at the rear. Common sense will tell you that the rear number should be higher, since that’s closer to the lever point. Those numbers are impressive, but fall far short of the claims that I’ve heard of a dog being able to exert up to 2,000 pounds of pressure. As Stanley Coren pointed out in his May 2010 article “Dog Bite Force: Myths, Misinterpretations and Realities” in Psychology Today, that 2,000-pound figure (which would be roughly equivalent to a subcompact car being parked on your radius bone or ulna in your forearm) is likely the result of people not paying close enough attention to the units of measurement being cited. A 2,000-newton force is roughly equivalent to 450 pounds, since one newton is approximately a fifth of a pound. That puts us closer to the Guelph-study measurements.
Recently, Dr. Brady Barr, in a National Geographic television series entitled “Dangerous Encounters” and first broadcast in August of 2005, conducted similar kinds of live bite tests with a variety of species. He equipped a bite sleeve with a computerized measuring instrument and found that his human test subjects reached 127 pounds of pressure, while domestic dogs averaged 320 pounds. In comparison, lions and white sharks reached 600 pounds, while hyenas exerted 1,000 pounds, and crocodiles 2,500. That’s an impressive figure for the crocodile, but apparently Dr. Barr wasn’t satisfied with that performance, believing that the croc was just messing around. He redid the test and the croc rose to the challenge, reaching 6,000 pounds.
The scientists conducting the Guelph study published their results in Volume 214, Issue 3, of the March 2009 edition of the Journal of Anatomy, but it was for a second type of test they performed. For this, they used the skulls of dead dogs, took various measurements, and applied complicated formulas to arrive at some conclusions about how the size and shape of a cranium and jaw can affect the amount of pressure a dog can exert. They used terms like “cranial morphology” and “phylogentic analyses,” and lever formulas like CBF1 = (Lm × M = Lt × T) FPA/O to develop their evidence. Their detailed analyses came up with a conclusion most of us would have suspected: larger dogs exert greater bite force, and larger brachycephalic dogs (those with a proportionate lower jaw but a shortened upper jaw) have an advantage over mesaticephalic dogs. Dogs of this latter type, the most common skull shape, have a cranium portion that is roughly equal in size to the nasal cavity. In other words, the head of one of these dogs is roughly divided into equal portions of what we think of as the skull and the snout.
Malinois are mesaticephalic in terms of skull shape and are a large breed. According to the Guelph study, the statistical mean, or average, bite force for dogs with these characteristics, depending upon the level formula used, ranged from 2,749 N, or 617 pounds of force, to 2450 N, or 550 pounds at the molar, and between 170 and 150 pounds at the canine teeth at the front of the jaw.
That’s a lot of numbers and scientific jargon, but it does have real-world implications. Obviously, a dog clamping down on you with the front of its jaws isn’t going to exert nearly as much force as a dog that clamps on and then chomps forward, getting you with those back teeth. If you’ve ever observed your dog as you played tug with them, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the dogs understand something about the physics of bite force, and they work pretty hard to get whatever they’ve got between their teeth into the backs of their mouths to hold it more securely. If you’ve ever attempted to pull a tennis ball out of your dog’s mouth, you know that it’s easier if you get it at the front and not the back.
It’s also pretty obvious that a dog will first bite with the front of the mouth; after all, that’s the widest opening and it makes access easiest. You can go on the Internet and see videos of protection dogs and other working dogs doing bite work, and you’ll see some pretty spectacular flashing of jaws and snarling and men in bite suits getting these dogs to grab and hold on with those front-of-jaw bites. Looks great, but if you’ve learned the physics lessons from above, those bites won’t exert as much force as back-of-the-jaw clamping. Those canine teeth are sharp and will puncture skin, but when it comes to bone-crushing power and the ability to really hold on to and subdue an adversary, a dog will have to get those back teeth on you.
Similarly, you can also see amazing scenes of flying dogs going after trainers in bite suits. These dogs launch themselves from twenty feet away and then contact their targets. Looks great. Not very effective. As any football coach will tell you, don’t leave your feet. Why?
As a former football player I can tell you that it’s hard to change direction in midair. As a dog trainer who’s been in various apprehension/bite-training scenarios, you can’t change direction very easily when your feet are off the ground, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to feint left or right and avoid a charging dog that doesn’t have four (or two) paws planted solidly. In addition, the amount of force and leverage you lose when you’re airborne versus solidly planted on the planet is substantial. In the NFL, some of those soaring tackles make the highlights reel, but the ones when the defensive player is firmly planted on the ground and drives the ball carrier back are not just more fundamentally sound but also inflict far greater punishment.
Also, those leaps are dangerous to the dog’s well-being. We want the dogs to recognize what environment they are in. If they take off after someone who is on a roof and the dog leaps, generally, they have a predictable path of travel while in the air. If they take off from twenty feet away, that gives the bad guy more time to move out of the way. Depending upon the locale, the dog could sail off that roof, hit a wall, or otherwise do serious damage to itself.
Essentially, then, when we teach dogs in bite-work scenarios, the techniques that we want them to develop are these: stay low and planted, continue to drive forward, and, to a lesser extent, get those back teeth involved. The reason why the last of those three is of lesser importance is that the dog’s natural instinct is to do that. The front-teeth grab is easier for the dog, and when they have you in that lesser-pressure grip, you can inflict some damage on them. That means that we have to work with the dogs to get them to be relentless, to continue to stay on the offensive despite the punishment they’re receiving, so that they can get that back-of-the-mouth crushing pressure on you.
Let me tell you, all those studies aside, I know that when a dog gets that maximum bite force on me, it is incredible. The pain is sharp and intense, my vision narrows, sounds seem to be silenced, and thoughts of how I can mess with this dog and get the better of him are replaced by a single thought: I wish this dog would get the fuck off of me!
Bite work is always a tricky thing, and even more so when working with a younger, less-experienced, or less-trained dog. When you factor in some of the other things I’ve mentioned about building plausible training scenarios and exposing dogs to various stimuli and environments, that bite-work-danger level rises. Once again, I’ve got to use Matt and Arras as an example of how events can sometimes get out of hand. We were on a training mission at night again, and Matt was wearing his Night Observation Devices (NODs) when we were in the mountains. By this time, he and Arras had done other night exercises, but this time we were introducing a new element—gunfire. We stress with the handlers the importance of taking that quick moment to really think through options before acting—as Matt was painfully aware after tumbling down that hill after a ball reward went bad
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Terrain, the dog’s temperament, and many other factors play into having simple control over the dog. There’s also the tactical side to consider. We use the mountains frequently and at night especially because those two things combine to produce about the most difficult environment the handlers will encounter. As they grow more confident and competent, we have to up the ante. The dogs and handlers will be going into tactically complex scenarios, and that means that they have to be prepared to deal with the possibility of enemy contact and engagement. That means weapons.
By the time we introduce nighttime gunfire into a mountain exercise, the dogs have already been exposed to the sound of weapons being fired. Essentially, they’ve been hardwired through breeding and training to have an aggressive response to the sound of a weapon’s discharge. To prepare them early on, we have a man in a bite suit fire a weapon and then flee. The dogs, of course, are supposed to pursue and subdue that individual. That’s seldom a problem for these dogs. They associate the sound of gunfire with aggression. That’s both good and bad. Due to the types of operations the dogs engage in, an immediate aggressive response to gunfire is not tactically sound. Consequently, we have to get them to not respond to gunfire, to desensitize them to the sound, and to only go into apprehension mode on command. The only way to do that is to fire round after round near them, reward them when they don’t freak out, and restrain them when they do.
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 9