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

by Michael Ritland

  During this night-training gunfire exercise, Matt and Arras were out on a patrol scenario. One of the “decoys”—a trainer in a bite suit—crossed their path and fired off a couple of rounds. Matt did as he should and gave Arras the command, and the dog pile-drove the decoy to the ground, subdued him after a few minutes, and then heard the out command that Matt issued. This time, instead of returning to Matt’s side calmly, Arras, who was still very green, turned and looked at Matt, face clad in his NODs equipment and also carrying a gun, and took after Matt, leaping up to bite his handler in the middle of the chest. He drove Matt to the ground and had him in a very vulnerable position when, thankfully, he better recognized through scent and other inputs that this was the guy who was taking good care of him, and he immediately released Matt.

  In a fast-moving, dark, and chaotic scene like that, it’s easy to understand why Arras responded that way. It’s also easy to understand why we were all so grateful that Arras didn’t utilize his full capabilities as a biter. Anyone involved in the training of these dogs has to have, or will quickly develop, respect for the potential threat that these dogs pose.

  Another new environment for dogs is around and on a helicopter. We do a similar kind of exposure work with them, working from just having them be around the aircraft, to getting into one, to actually taking off and landing, and then flying in one over a greater distance. We refer to those takeoff and landing exercises as “doing elevators.” We place one dog in each helicopter along with a compliment of a crew and a team. The dog and handler are the last to board. We do the full load-up, dog and handler get on. We take off and then land two to three minutes later, repeating this process six to eight times with the dog.

  Everyone knows that the dogs just starting out with this training can be a bit apprehensive, and I’ve watched as backs press to the chopper’s fuselage and eyes go wide as the handler and the dog board. Once, we had a relatively inexperienced flier doing elevators. The others in the cabin were all handlers, so they knew what to look for, and they all watched the dog and immediately wall-papered themselves. They could see the dog defaulting to aggression mode, and he eyed every one of them, assessing who would be the choicest bite. The men kept pressing themselves against the cabin wall, each one trying to make himself as small a target as possible. I had to laugh a bit when I saw that. Five combat-trained and hardened frogmen, heavily armed, mind you, trying to keep as far as they could from this pacing menace. Obviously, we have 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 of the kind of power these dogs 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 get a dog to get over that revert-to-aggression mode by doing anything punitive to them. You would further incite that response and thus have to be even more punitive to the point of absolutely breaking the dog’s spirit. What we do is make those frightening and unfamiliar experiences more pleasant through the use of rewards. In training, even in bite work or getting a dog used to a muzzle or anything else, I carry with me some treats. Toys and food rewards work most often, and 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 that are unwilling to put their snouts in there to get them to associate the muzzle with a positive. At first, just letting them eat treats out of the muzzle is an effective way to get them used to the sight of the apparatus. When it comes time to place the muzzle over the dog’s head and snout, it’s much easier if they aren’t already on high alert or anxiety at the sight of the thing.

  No matter what you’re trying to do with the dogs to train them for the role they will play in combat or in your life, it’s important that they believe that some positive reward is coming their way. As trainers and handlers, our positive reward system also provides us with a growing confidence that we won’t be the ones the dogs turn their considerable bite force on.

  All those numbers in regard to bite force pale in comparison to something that’s difficult to quantify—the measure of a dog’s heart and how much abuse it’s willing to endure in order to subdue a human being. They’ve all got that potential to exert upward of 600 pounds of bite force, but how many of them are willing to do it at the expense of their own discomfort? That’s what the bite work in a contained area is all about. Think about it like this: we work on developing their tenacity in close combat, similar to the way a boxer spars in the ring. We’re also working to develop their technique, but it’s also about getting them to utilize their inherent aggression and push past a pain boundary—some physical pain, but mostly mental stress. When a dog feels you fighting back, when it feels your mental and emotional aggression working against its forces, that you are really locked in combat, then you are really testing the dog’s willingness to get the job done.

  Working in a bite suit against a dog is as much an acting job as it is a physical performance. Similar to what the dogs have to endure, more than just your physical stamina is being tested. As I said, dogs speak body language and pick up the energetic projections you give off. If you are working with a dog on its apprehension and bite skills, you have to be mentally strong and able to project the same kind of I’m bigger and badder and more willing to beat your ass than you are mine attitude. Anyone can go through the motions of standing there in a padded suit while a dog grabs him; it takes a good bit of artistry to act the part (and, believe me, it isn’t completely acting) of someone who has deadly intent. Dogs are highly sensitive to those signals we humans send out, and they absolutely get it when we’re afraid, and they take full advantage of it. It’s how they respond when you match aggression for aggression that determines whether or not they make the cut with us.

  Just to give you a sense of how strongly dogs respond to those signals we send, I have a close friend who can give off such a fierce vibe that he can be on the ground, a very compromising position, and when we release a dog to come after him, it will tear out initially and then come skidding to a stop six feet in front of him, sensing that he is one badass dude and thinking, I’d better be careful. My friend doesn’t shout, doesn’t strike other offensive postures, he just exudes a don’t mess with me mentality that the dogs can feel. Similarly, in some videos you’ll see a decoy flailing around, yelling and screaming, but the dogs aren’t focused on those vocalizations or actions. That looks good on the camera, but the dog isn’t really seeing or hearing that at all; in fact, the dog is more focused on prey movement and reward than what the decoy thinks he is projecting.

  The way that we get dogs to match aggression for aggression is by transferring between drives. When you’re doing apprehension or bite work, there are two main drives that the dog is working. He’s working in prey drive and he’s working in defensive drive. In my opinion, it should be offense and defense, just for congruency and for simplicity, because I honestly believe prey drive is all offensive. Identifying when a dog is in prey drive is pretty much learned from or derived from rules in nature or in captivity. Animal behaviorists and also trainers study how dogs react, observe their body posturing, see how a dog fits within its pack structure, and then make educated guesses about why the dogs do the things they do when pursuing but primarily confronting another animal. When an animal makes a choice to fight a human, it is an offensive decision. The key words here are “makes a choice.”

  In bite work, a dog starts out in prey drive (offense), and that’s very instinctual. He sees a guy in a suit, he gets the command, and, bam, he goes after him. He’s conditioned to fight with the guy. What usually doesn’t happen in most of the dog sports, and in much of the other bite-work training other dogs receive, is that they aren’t truly put into defense. 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 take anybody and teach him how to throw punches all night long, how to move around the ring, to counterpunch. But if he’s neve
r actually been hit, the first time he gets hit, he’ll be, like, Holy shit, what was that? And so you’ve got to teach that dog that Hey, not only is it okay, but you’re going to work through it.

  And so it’s a very, very simple, but not an easy process. You’ve got to have a truckload of experience of seeing dogs being worked, and then also working them to really identify and transition through these two drives. Prey relieves their stress. They feel like this is the natural order of things. I’m being the aggressor. I’m taking it to that thing. I’m going to dominate it.

  So when in prey drive, the dog detects something, his mouth is on it, he’s biting down, he’s scoring the touchdown. He’s getting after it; he’s loving life. And then all of a sudden, the decoy (the person in the bite suit) comes alive and starts bringing it to him. 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 going a third round. You’ve got to be able to recognize when the dog is in prey and when the dog is in defense. Put the dog too much on the defensive and for too long, and it will crack. We damn sure can’t have that happen.

  To keep the dog on the aggressive, we gradually increase those defensive thresholds by transferring back and forth between prey drive and defensive drive: 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 that dog is automatically coming at you like he wants to kill you. And it doesn’t matter what you do to him, he is completely unfazed by it. It may start out with the dog in prey, so you put a little bit of pressure on the dog and he starts to kind of wig out a little bit. Bam—you switch right back into prey and relieve that stress. Now you go back into defense. Now he lasts a few seconds longer, he starts to show stress, and—bam. Every time he starts to get to that boiling point—bam—you go right back into prey. 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 fall to the ground and let him really dominate me.

  You’re constantly evaluating this feeling-out process. A truly good decoy is someone who is absolutely priceless because he will make or break a dog. You can ruin a great dog with a incompetent decoy, or make an average dog fantastic by having a phenomenal decoy who can recognize those times of transitions and know how much pressure to put on, when to back off, when to relieve stress, when to put it on.

  In my mind, doing this kind of bite work is absolutely an art. The science of animal behaviorism is absolutely behind it, but putting that fundamental understanding of a dog’s assertive nature into practice to refine those instinctive skills isn’t something you can get from reading a book. You need to see a really, really good decoy who can work a dog and put him through that and imitate some of those behaviors. That will get you to a certain point, but you also have to eventually develop a feel for how stressed a dog is, recognize its body language and how it is communicating what it is thinking and feeling, before you can really train a dog well. You elevate this dog to a level where you, again, are teaching him how to fight, how to bring that natural instinct he has genetically deep down, which we’re already identified through our selection process, and now we’ve just teaching him to bring it at a much higher level to be able to take the rigors of the training. And it gets to where he’s ten times the dog that he was when we first got him.

  Like other things involved in training military working dogs, it’s a time-consuming process. If you’re not careful, you can create a couple of problems. One is that if you don’t put enough defense on the dog, then he never really, truly learns how to fight. This is certainly better than burning him out going the other way, which is putting too much defense on him. Now you’ve cracked and ruined the dog, and now his spirit is broken, and he relinquishes a lot of the backbone that he had. As a result, we always err on the side of prey drive and not taking the dogs overboard into the defensive.

  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, and, in some cases, 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 definitely is amped up a notch or two. That’s how it is when military working dogs transition from one drive to the other. Because the intensity is already well beyond your treat-seeking dog’s drive, their amped-up behaviors feel that much more aggressive/assertive.

  The other component of apprehension work is placing the dogs in a variety of environments, just like we do with detection training. A dog that will only fight when in a kind of training corral isn’t any good to us. Neither is a dog that is distracted by other stimuli. As a result, we travel far and wide and create a variety of topographical and situational scenarios so that the dogs have experience tracking and apprehending bad guys in everything from mountainous terrain to urban settings, both indoors and outdoors.

  So, how do we refine the dogs’ innate skills to make them effective at apprehending individuals? Just as with the detection work, we start them early, we continually increase the complexity and duration of the exercises—moving from play as pups to more serious work as adults—and push them to near their breaking point.

  Beginning in the four-to-five-week time frame, we start to develop and encourage that prey instinct. We always take advantage of the 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 dog to grip, but something you can tease it easily with, and we’ll develop that 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 it, it’s going to chase that thing and try to grab it. In our work, we do something similar, but with the intent of getting them a little bit frustrated that we have a hold of it. You tug with them a little bit, and then usually when they bite in a little bit deeper, we give them counterpressure by pulling back a little bit and holding still. The dog will usually naturally pull a little bit and then counter and go a little deeper. When he does that, I’ll let go of it 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, and it’s yours, and you get to have it, have fun.

  From that, we advance to doing that work in all different types of environments. We do it in buildings, out in fields, dark places, vehicles, or anywhere else that they may or may not encounter in their later training or downrange. And so the dogs are not just environmentally going places; they’re chasing balls in those environments, they’re doing rag and bite work in those environments.

  And just like every other step of dog training, as time progresses, we very slowly baby-step forward. From rags we’ll go to a puppy sleeve, which is basically just like a jute pillow. It’s very soft; it’s very easy for the dogs to grab on to. The same principles apply to what we did with the rags and towels.

  Sometimes we’ll take a twenty-ounce plastic bottle and flatten it and tie it to a string—making a “flirt pole”—and tease the dog with that because it’s a much different material. It’s very hard to hold on to. That teaches the dog 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 dogs can kind of half-ass the grip and still hang on to it because they’ve got sharp little puppy teeth that dig in and hold on. That doesn’t work on those plastic bottles.

  Even at five or six weeks old, when they’
re grabbing a rag, we pick them up off the ground, raising the back end higher than the mouth. We pat them hard on the rib cage. We place them on a slippery, elevated surface, still doing the bite work with them. Basically, we are just teaching them that no matter what position their bodies are in, no matter what environment they’re in, that they’re going to be okay and they just need to keep those jaws clamping down.

  From there, as the dogs age to the three-, four-, five-, six-month phase, during every couple of training sessions we increase the intensity in some way. One day we may increase pressure that we’re putting on the dogs. We’ll increase the hardness of the sleeves and the biting material, the thickness, judging what they can take. But it’s a very, very slow process.

  Once the dogs have their adult teeth in completely and they’re fully set, usually around seven to eight months, then we’ll start to get into the bite suits and introduce those elements and start to teach multi-area targeting. To do that, as the dogs are coming in, we don’t stand the same way or offer the same body parts to them every time. That’s not realistic for “street dogs” or ones like the SOF dogs that aren’t going to be doing this in a competitive environment. For sport work, where accuracy and the ability to target a specific area is measured and scored, that’s fine. Our dogs will be fighting people in a variety of environments. For example, in sport work, a bite to the left biceps is a targeted point value. Because of where our dogs might be operating, in a walled room, for instance, with the bad guy leaning against one of the walls and his left arm inside a doorway, the dog may not be able to get to that hidden arm. We do teach the dogs to target, but they have to learn to improvise.

  And that’s something that we work on throughout the entire time. We are always putting the dogs in weird positions. As the guys in the bite suit, we move at the last second. We may turn or crouch down or duck out of the way or raise a knee up and lean back or do anything that forces the dog to take what he can get, basically.