As it turned out, the suspect was a decoy—another transit cop, posing as a troublemaker. The second attack, though, had been unscripted: the decoy hadn’t meant to act as if he were running away. “The dog wasn’t wrong,” Rothschild said. It’s a police dog’s job to perceive threats, and the handler’s job to keep the dog in check. This is the hardest part of canine work. “You have to put emergency brakes on these creatures,” one handler told me. A single loss of control could cause wrongful injury, lawsuits, or even death, but the dog doesn’t know that. As Stewart Hilliard, a specialist in animal learning who works with the canine program at Lackland Air Force Base, put it, “You can’t think of a reward more desirable to a dog than the opportunity to keep biting that person.”
A few weeks earlier, at the National Police Dog Field Trials, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, I’d watched several dozen dogs wrestle with their conscience. The field trials are a kind of canine decathlon, modelled on Schutzhund competitions. They bring together the best-trained police dogs in the country to test their agility, obedience, and ability to track criminals and catch them. Rothschild and his German shepherd were there to represent New York, along with four other dogs and handlers from their region.
Detroit Lakes sits on a flat, glacier-scoured plain about an hour east of Fargo. Some officers had driven as far as fifteen hundred miles to get there, but were unprepared for the freezing rain and the local fare. (“It’s September—I brought all shorts!” Rothschild told me the first night, at a local buffet, while his teammates eyed the bratwurst; “I’m not eatin’ those things,” one of them said.) The night before, on the drive in from North Dakota, I’d received a speeding ticket on a desolate stretch of road. I later heard that the same thing had happened to two of the police officers—and they were driving their cruisers at the time.
“A lot of people are under the misapprehension that this is a dog show,” one of the judges, Gary Pietropaolo, a mustachioed ex-cop from Yonkers, told me the next day. We were sitting in folding chairs on a baseball field, watching the criminal-apprehension trial. By then, I’d seen dogs search for guns in tall grass, and dogs sniff out a suspect hidden in rows of identical wooden boxes. In this case, they had to chase down a gunman, bite his arm, and waylay him until the handler caught up to make the arrest. It was a stylized routine, scored on niceties of execution—sitting slightly askew at a handler’s side was enough to earn a deduction—but the dogs seemed deadly serious. At least four dogs had been killed or severely injured in the line of duty in the past year. One was thrown into traffic by an armed robber; another bit into a brick of cocaine; another was stabbed repeatedly; the last barely survived an attempted drowning. “If it’s not a violent felon, you typically don’t send in the dog,” Pietropaolo said. “In the use-of-force scale, it’s almost equal to using a nightstick.”
Earlier that morning, as I was running across the field to join the judges, I’d suddenly realized that I was being watched. At the other end of the field, a half dozen German shepherds were lined up along a fence, their eyes locked on my every move. To them, I must have seemed like just another target—a man in a turkey suit, dashing through the forest on opening day of hunting season. “You got lucky,” Rothschild told me later. Even with a protective sleeve on, an officer he knew was bitten so hard that his arm broke in two places, and Rothschild bore a dozen scars from trials gone awry. “It’s just something you have to overcome,” he said. “Most of us never got bit before going into canine. But you kind of get the feel of it. It’s normal wear and tear.”
Danz, Rothschild’s dog, was a big, bristling male with something of his handler’s swagger. When his turn came in the trial, he sat without a twitch while the decoy shot off a round and ran down the field. Then, at a murmured word from Rothschild, the dog took off—body low to the ground, feet a blur, like a shaggy brown missile. He was halfway across the field, in mid-flight, when Rothschild yelled “Stop!” The effect was immediate: Danz peeled away, circled back to his handler, and sat squarely at his side—a near-perfect routine.
Others weren’t so successful. When David Causey, a patrolman from Lake County, Florida, called his animal off, you could almost see the dog weighing his options. He glanced back at Causey, slowed down for a moment, then hunched his shoulders and accelerated toward the target. “That’s called ‘He fucked you,’ ” Causey’s friend David Williams told me. “Fifty points off. He’s out of the competition.”
For Causey, the result was made even worse by a sense of déjà vu. The year before, on the last day of the field trials, the same dog had bitten a decoy’s hand and then, for good measure, his crotch. It was a case of accidental reinforcement, Causey said. A few weeks earlier, in Florida, his dog had chased a felon into a closet. A rough struggle ensued until the dog, in desperation, bit the man between the legs. Immediate surrender. The next time the dog chased down a suspect, he tried the same trick. Success again! By the time the field trials rolled around, the behavior was locked in.
When Causey and Williams told me this story, we were having breakfast at a coffee shop with Kurt Dumond, the officer who had received the unfortunate bite. Williams, a garrulous Cajun with a life-size revolver tattooed on his hip (“I’m always packing”), pulled out his cell phone and called up some pictures he’d taken at the emergency room: Dumond in a pale-blue hospital gown, followed by several distressing closeups of his scrotum. “That’s a mess right there,” Dumond said. Williams nodded. “The nurse, when she sees it, she goes, ‘Woo woooooo!’ Then the doctor comes out and goes, ‘That is going to hurt!’ Kurt, he’d just told me he had a little laceration. I didn’t realize it was thirteen stitches’ worth.” This year, Williams added, Dumond wore a cup.
How do you keep a dog in line? The answer used to be simple: you smacked it or yelled at it or yanked on its chain. It wasn’t pretty, but it could get the job done. Punishment and compulsion are still common in dog training, though usually in more subtle forms—a tug on a leash, for instance, or a mild shock from an electric collar. Traditional trainers, from the monks of New Skete to Schutzhund champions like Friedrich Biehler, can produce very accomplished dogs. But, as behaviorism has worked its way from aquariums to kennels, more and more dogs are being taught with positive reinforcement, often using a handheld clicker. “You used to wait until the dog did something wrong, then corrected it,” Michele Pouliot, the director of research and development at Guide Dogs for the Blind in Oregon, told me. “Now you’re rewarding a behavior you like before it goes wrong.”
Like so much else in the dog world, the change mirrors a trend in child rearing—and provokes the same heated debate. (“The only thing two dog trainers can agree about is what the third dog trainer is doing wrong,” Steve White told me.) The tough love of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, and the tender manipulations of Victoria Stilwell, the host of It’s Me or the Dog, have their exact analogues in parenting styles. Hearing Pouliot talk about headstrong, distractible puppies—the kind that usually make good police dogs—is a lot like bearing an elementary-school teacher talk about attention-deficit disorder and the trouble with boys. “If a dog loves squirrels, you have to find something that excites him so much it overpowers the squirrel instinct,” Pouliot told me. “If you’re constantly on top of him—punishing, punishing, punishing—that behavior is not going away. You have to get that dog to try to figure out what you want.”
Canine police are conservative by nature. They have little margin for error or experiment, so they tend to play the Tiger Moms in this debate. “It goes like this,” Gary Pietropaolo, the judge from Yonkers, told me. “You always want to use positive motivation first. But, if that was the only thing we used with these animals, we wouldn’t have enough shelters in this country. What do you do with the dog that, if you show him the clicker, he shows you his teeth? Do you just kill him?”
It was the third day of the field trials, and Pietropaolo and the other judges were gathered in a conference room at the Holiday Inn, pooling their scores. Kurt
Dumond’s dog, Erek, held a thin lead over the rest of the field, with Rothschild’s Danz in fifth place. (Erek would eventually drop to third, Danz to eleventh, and the championship would go to a dog from Austin, Minnesota, named Ghost—one of only a few Belgian Malinois in a sea of German shepherds.) The best handlers never abuse their dogs, Pietropaolo said, but, like good parents, they make their authority clear. “If you tell your kid to sit down and be quiet at the table, and he doesn’t do it, it’s over. You have to make it happen. But you don’t necessarily have to grab him by the hair and drag him around.” The judge beside him grinned. “I still use a choke chain on the kid,” he said.
Guide-dog trainers were a lot like the police once, Michele Pouliot told me. Their methods were rooted in military dog training, brought over from Europe after the two world wars. “Everything was steeped in this tradition of very harsh treatment,” she said. “Everything was ‘You’re wrong.’ ” Then, six years ago, Guide Dogs for the Blind switched over to positive reinforcement. “It was a huge undertaking,” Pouliot told me. “We have sixty-five instructors who took years to get good at what they’re doing. You’re asking them to flip-flop a whole set of technical skills. It’s like starting all over.”
The benefits are already clear, Pouliot said. Less than half the dogs in her program used to complete their training successfully; now the number is close to three-quarters. “And the dogs are doing things they could never do before, unbelievable things,” she said. One of Pouliot’s specialties is canine musical freestyle—essentially, dancing with your dog. On YouTube, you can see her Australian shepherd, Listo, doing its best Ginger Rogers: waltzing backward, spinning pirouettes, doing double-takes, handstands, and cancan kicks, all to a medley of TV theme songs. “If you break down that routine and ask a traditional trainer, ‘How do you train that?’ he’d say, ‘Hmm,’ ” Pouliot told me. “It would be impossible. If I jerk a dog on a leash, I can make him sit. I can make him cringe. But I can’t make him show his natural joy.”
“How long have you been self-employed?”
Police dogs, though, aren’t like other animals. Their work is inherently harsh and contradictory. Joy is often beside the point. “We have to have an animal that’s willing to consummate its aggression on a living, breathing human, then contain it enough to come back to you,” one trainer told me. “That’s a lot to ask of any being, much less a dog.” Positive reinforcement may be better at coaxing dogs into dancing figure eights and giving high fives, as Pouliot’s partners do. But a certain amount of stress could inure an animal to the rigors of the street or the battlefield. “Dogs that are trained in a completely positive way, you deploy them in Afghanistan with the bombs going off—I think they’ll crumble,” a trainer at Auburn told me.
The program at Auburn is like boot camp for dogs. The Canine Detection Research Institute occupies part of an old military base in Anniston, Alabama, in the foothills of the southern Appalachians. When I visited, two weeks after the national field trials, I was taken to a low metal building across the road from the main offices. Inside, a narrow corridor was flanked by rows of steel cages, each with a small door that led to a dog run, outside. The air was edged with traces of ammonia and feces and reverberated with near-constant barking. Overhead, a loudspeaker system piped in still more noise: equipment clanking, boots stomping, engines roaring, bombs exploding.
“That’s a Spook Less soundtrack,” my guide explained. The system was first developed for stables, he said, and was used by police to get their horses ready for riot squads and other unsettling duties. The recordings could be swapped out to simulate thunderstorms, fireworks, screaming crowds, or construction sites. At one point, after a bombing raid—“I think that’s Saving Private Ryan”—I heard some bagpipes playing. When I asked what they were for, I was told that police have to attend a lot of funerals.
Auburn specializes in detection dogs. It has twenty-five trainers, who supply about a hundred animals a year to Amtrak, Federal Protective Services, and police departments around the country, including the N.Y.P.D. (Rothschild and his German shepherd, Danz, both trained there.) The average canine graduate costs twenty-one thousand dollars, including ten weeks of lessons for the handler. An elite Vapor Wake dog—“They’re like the Michael Jordans of dogs,” one of the trainers told me. “They can pick fragments out of the air”—costs thirty-two thousand, with an extra six weeks of training.
Detection dogs tend to vary by country and by national temperament. The French like standard poodles, the English springer spaniels. The Russians, in the Moscow airport, use a strange little breed called a Sulimov dog—a mixture of wild jackal, Lapland herding dog, and other breeds—which is said to be the world’s best bomb sniffer. Bloodhounds have long been used as trackers in the South. But at Auburn, as at most canine-detection programs in the country, the cages were filled with Labrador retrievers. They were good-natured, highly driven animals, and less liable to bite than pointy-eared dogs. They were in such demand, in fact, that Auburn was also experimenting with other breeds, including springer spaniels and German pointers. “The country is almost out of Labs for detection work,” one broker told me. “They’re gone. And they don’t have any Labs in Europe, either. I had a department wait ten months for one before I found it.”
Dogs have such good noses that almost any breed can detect explosives. “If there are differences among them, they’re probably well within the margin of error for our ability to measure them,” Paul Waggoner, the behavioral scientist at the institute, told me. “The big key is trainability.” Waggoner, who is forty-five, is a bearded, bearish figure with an unnerving habit of rolling his eyes back in his head as he talks, like a psychic. Bloodhounds are usually too single-minded for detection work, he said. Once they’ve hit a trail, they can seem “brutally stupid” when asked to change gears. Border collies can be too smart for their own good: they follow their handlers’ cues rather than their own noses. Coonhounds like to go off crittering; dachshunds are too small and stumbly underfoot; and Doberman pinschers scare the bejesus out of people. What’s left are friendly working breeds like retrievers and pointers: animals both social and independent, whose bloodlines have been better maintained than those of most show dogs.
If patrol dogs are the Swiss Army knives of the canine world, detection dogs are the shivs. They don’t have to chase down felons, disarm robbers, or respond to the slightest cue. They just have to find bombs. Even so, until recently, only one in four dogs made it through the program. Like Schutzhund and guide-dog schools, Auburn sent its puppies to families for basic training, then brought them back for detection work after a year. But the dogs had to contend with so many environments—when I visited, they ran drills in a school, a shopping mall, along a highway, and in a mega-church—that any phobia was eventually found out. Rothschild’s dog, for instance, was afraid of slippery floors as a puppy, and he needed weeks of practice to get used to jumping fences.
PROBLEM
You know those terrible arithmetic problems about how many peaches some people buy, and so forth? Well, here’s one we like, made up by a third-grader who was asked to think up a problem similar to the ones in his book: “My father is forty-four years old. My dog is eight. If my dog was a human being, he would be fifty-six years old. How old would my father be if he was a dog? How old would my father plus my dog be if they were both human beings? | 1957 |
Four years ago, Auburn decided to try a more rigorous approach. The puppies now go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they’re trained and cared for by convicts in their cells. The companionship seems to have done the men good: some have been able to reduce their medications, and a few have gone on to become professional trainers. But the effect on the dogs has been even more dramatic. “You have startling noises and startling sights 24/7,” one of the trainers told me. “You have crowds, stairs, slick floors, grated floors. If a dog can get used to those, you know he’s not going to be fearful.” Eighty percent of Auburn’s puppies now go on to beco
me detection dogs.
I went to see the Vapor Wakes the next morning. They were being trained in an abandoned building near the woods, where the Army once taught officers to interrogate prisoners. Its dingy halls were lined with doors marked “Do Not Disturb: Interview in Progress,” each one with an identical office behind it. To find a person carrying a bomb in here, an ordinary dog would have had to search the building systematically, sniffing its way from room to room. The Vapor Wakes didn’t bother. They’d been taught to track explosives like living prey, following the trail of scent particles left suspended in the air.
“I’ll hide in one of these rooms, then you bring her in,” Tim Baird, the head trainer, told his assistant. He took a vest filled with TNT and wrapped it around his waist. Then he walked down the hall, turned the corner, and ducked into an office along the next corridor. The assistant brought in a small black Lab named Faye, her tail wagging furiously. She’d had thirty-nine days of detection training and twenty of Vapor Wake, and she knew that every drill was another chance at a reward. She scampered in a circle for a while, flaring the air, then took off in the wrong direction. Nothing there. She doubled back, sniffed at my pants—I’d stood next to Baird while he was stuffing the vest with dynamite—then shook me off and ran down the hall, catching a scent.
A dog sniffs the air like a wine taster, Waggoner had told me. It takes short, sharp breaths—as many as ten per second—drawing the scent deep into the nasal cavity to the olfactory epithelium. The receptors there are a hundred times denser than in a human, and can detect a wide array of molecules. When I followed Faye down the hall, I found her in the office, sitting on her haunches—the signal for “the bomb is here”—watching Baird with barely contained excitement. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a well-chewed tennis ball, then threw it down the hall with a whoop. Faye caught it on the first bounce.
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