War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  Handler Staff Sergeant Ted Carlson brings out the dog who’s going to bite me, a slender Dutch shepherd named Rambo. From across the yard, I can hear Rambo’s ragged panting, the high-pitched whining and the sound of his teeth smacking together as he snaps at the air in anticipation. The sight of me in the suit has ignited the dog’s prey drive—the instinct that motivates him to chase and bite something into submission. It would seem that Rambo’s prey drive is quite high. My brain knows that I’m safe, but my body doesn’t—my muscles stiffen. It’s a physical primordial response. It’s fear.

  Jakubin stands with me in the middle of the yard, adjusting my stance. Before leaving me there on my own, he offers one final directive. “If you get knocked down, don’t move,” he says. “I’ll come and pick you up.”

  I hold my breath, shut my eyes, and wait for the blow. It takes Rambo under three seconds to clear the 25 feet separating us. I feel a spike of adrenaline as the dog makes contact, the force of his weight shoving me back as his open mouth locks around my arm. The sensation registers from dull to crisp, the trickle before the deluge as I feel teeth sink into me—and that sensation is pain.

  To put the feel of a dog bite into perspective, it might be helpful to start with what’s familiar—our own mouths. Per square inch, the human bite exerts 120 pounds of pressure. That’s enough to do some damage—think Mike Tyson, who managed to tear away a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear with his teeth. Dogs have more teeth than humans, 42 of them,4 but the big fangs, the canines, are the real damage doers. A dog’s straight, muscular jaw is designed for meat eating, unlike the construct of a human’s mouth and jaw, where the teeth move from side to side to better grind down on things that don’t try to run when you eat them, like vegetables.

  Different studies and tests have been conducted to try to measure the discrepancies in bite impact from the mouths of a variety of species. In an attempt to determine those animals who possess the most deadly powerful bites, the host of a National Geographic Channel series called Dangerous Encounters, Dr. Brady Barr, used a force-measuring device to scale an approximate bite impact among a range of different animals.5 He found that lions and sharks use roughly the same force of bite pressure at 600 pounds per square inch. But were you to get an appendage caught in an alligator’s jaws, you could expect something like 2,500 pounds of pressure to clamp down on your muscles, tendons, and joints, making it highly unlikely that you’d get your limb back in working order, let alone get it back at all.

  Depending on the breed, dog bites boast considerable force, ranging from that of an American pit bull terrier at 238 pounds of pressure per square inch6 to a bullmastiff, the breed with strongest bite, coming in at a recorded 552 pounds per square inch.7 In training a dog to attack and detain a suspect, the objective is to get a full-mouth bite with a solid grip. The strength of the bite comes from the clamp of the dog’s jaws. A weak bite happens when, for example, only a dog’s front teeth catch the material, and that’s not a bite that will hold for long. But the power of a dog bite depends on many things, from the obvious (how large the dog is) to the difficult to measure or predict with regularity (the dog’s desire to bite). The military most often employs two breeds—the Belgian Malinois and the German shepherd. According to the Air Force, the average military working dog’s bite exerts somewhere between 400 and 700 pounds of pressure.

  I can’t say for sure exactly how many pounds of pressure are coming down on my arm—Rambo isn’t a very big dog, and I’m fully aware that what I’m experiencing is hardly pushing the limits of dog-bite pain. And because I know this implicitly, I grit my own teeth and force a smile, taking a few steps around the yard. But Rambo has got a good, full-mouth bite, and for that reason he remains fastened to me. Whenever I move, I drag him along with me. Jakubin encourages me to try to pull my arm away from the dog; the resistance excites Rambo, activates his prey drive, which in turn further ignites in him a desire to bite. I tug my arm for all I’m worth, but Rambo’s grip seems only to get stronger.

  We repeat this move of run, jump, and bite a few more times. When I take off the suit, a marking the shape of a dog’s open mouth has already puffed pink and purple on my upper right arm, a swollen pinch where the dog’s jaw clamped down on my flesh. Within an hour, that marking will billow into a righteous bruise of deep blues and greens. Compared to some of the batterings I’ve seen on arms far more muscular and experienced than my own, this mark is like holding up a paper cut next to a machete wound. That doesn’t, however, keep me from regarding the bruise fondly over the next couple of weeks, proud as its coloring molts into withering shades of yellow and brown. When Rambo’s imprint finally fades and disappears completely, I am sorry to see it go.

  When Jakubin first became kennel master at the Air Force Academy in 2002, the dog program there was so new they didn’t even have a kennel, so he and his handlers operated out of an old house on a remote part of the Academy’s campus. The house is gone now; the area where it once stood is the site of their canine memorial. It’s on the top of a little hill; the incline is slick in places where snow leftover from a recent storm still clings to the ground. A large tree with gnarly limbs had fallen on the ground and it serves as a barrier that closes off the memorial, making for a fitting, somber fence.

  There’s a small marker for each dog, a piece of stone bearing a bronze plaque with the dog’s likeness etched in black. Jakubin walks toward them, his boots crunching on leaves and sticks. Ginger’s memorial marker is on the exact spot where the old kitchen was, where she used to sleep. It’s a peaceful place. Jakubin likes it here; if he could move the kennels back to this part of the campus again he would do it in a heartbeat.

  He stands for a few quiet moments facing their markers, the sun somewhere above, almost warm. Jakubin’s shadow falls behind him, the mountains in front of him, the dogs at his feet.

  Even after a long career, losing a dog never gets easier. “That’s the worst part of the job,” he says, “is to see a dog go. I’ve probably become numb to it over these years and I still find myself thinking about the dog and shedding a tear.”

  Inside this world of handlers and their working dogs is a culture of dedication and sacrifice, even grief—all the things one might expect to find. But there was something else I encountered, something surprising.

  Resistance to the idea of love.

  Three

  The Trouble with Loving a War Dog

  They were the only four-foots who could be trusted to do a piece of work strictly “on their own.” Each one knew his job and did it, not because he was made to, but because of the love which is the impelling motive for everything a free dog does for a man.

  —Ernest Harold Baynes, Animal Heroes of the Great War

  Everything is bright—the blue of the sky, the red-baked earth, even the glare off the many pairs of sunglasses is blinding. Kevin Howard sits in a collapsible mesh chair along with a few handlers from Chris Jakubin’s kennels and two other former military dog handlers. They, like Howard, have volunteered to help with the day’s training. The group is taking a lunch break from decoy work in the cold cavernous buildings on Fort Carson’s immense training grounds in Colorado. Some of the handlers keep on their bite-training gear, whether for convenience or because the added bulk wards off the winter chill. While they wait for the next dog teams to come through the exercise, we pick at paper plates of pulled-pork sandwiches and coleslaw, using the open truck beds simultaneously for seats and tabletops. The conversation meanders from talk of Howard’s recent scuba diving trip to the validity of canine PTSD. Howard has a raspy laugh and when he smiles, the small pucker of dip tucked snugly under his bottom lip bulges.

  Howard says that a dog will not show a true preference for his individual handlers. He doesn’t believe his dogs love him, nor does he believe that the emotion we call “love” has a place in working with dogs—affection maybe, but not love. Instead he fee
ls a dog is driven by a will to survive and make puppies.

  To understand dogs, he explains, you first have to understand that dogs exist with the dynamics of a wolf pack. Wolf pack speak is commonplace within the MWD program. The handler, Howard says, should be seen as the alpha male. He holds one hand up a little higher than the other to indicate the top of the pack where the handler, whom he refers to as a “benevolent dictator,” the person in charge who rules with cementlike consistency, should be. The benevolent dictator’s rules are hard and fast: if the dog stays within the preset boundaries, he will be rewarded and protected. If however, the dog breaks these rules, there are consequences, just as there would be in a wolf pack.

  In Howard’s view, it would be considerably worse for a handler to forget his position in the pack and treat his dog like a pet than it would be for a handler to show little or no emotional attachment to his dog. Treating a dog with too much affection is detrimental for an MWD, Howard says, because it ultimately undermines the dog’s sole purpose, which is to serve.

  This jives in part with the widely accepted theory that the domestic canine, or Canis lupus familiaris, is descended from the gray wolf, or Canis lupus. However, using a wolf theory of dominance is now commonly considered to be an outdated model for analyzing canine behavior. It doesn’t stand to reason, as author Alexandra Horowitz points out in her book Inside of a Dog, that because dogs descended from wolves that all of their ancestors’ attributes have transferred.1 More limiting, she argues, is the “faulty premise” of the “pack.” The real model of the wolves is not a pack, but a family. “In the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot.” Breaking down wolf (and subsequently dog) behavior into a “linear hierarchy with a ruling alpha pair and various ‘beta’ and even ‘gamma’ or ‘omega’ wolves below them” is just too simplistic.2

  But there’s an appeal, conceptually, to this perceived organizing principle behind the pack structure. As Horowitz smartly observes, it allows us to suppose that, within this line of thinking, we are “dominant and the dog submissive.”3 And perhaps because they’re influenced by the tiered structure of the military—military handlers still frequently teach, refer, or live by the dominance hierarchy of the wolf pack when training and working their dogs. And this leaves little room for the idea that dogs have a sophisticated set of emotions, or that they possess the ability to love freely or choose whom it is that they love.

  Jakubin, who is standing nearby, nods along in agreement as Howard makes his case, which is startling given all he’s said about the difficulty of losing a dog—his acknowledgement that with the loss of each dog there was real grief, real mourning. But he doesn’t contradict Howard, nor do any of the other handlers. On this afternoon the consensus of the group is that in the relationship between working dog and handler, there is more function than feeling. They seem to readily agree that whatever is exchanged between man and dog, that thing is not love.

  On Staff Sergeant Pascual Gutierrez’s first day of K-9 school, one of the instructors told the class: “Your dog is a weapon. Your dog is not a pet. Do not get close to your dog. Do not grow attached to your dog.”

  Gutierrez is a handler under Chris Jakubin’s command at the United States Air Force Academy kennels—all the guys call him Gutie. He’s stocky but trim and fit. His brown eyes brighten easily as he’s quick to smile and make jokes, but his pragmatic streak shows as soon as he begins describing the job of working with dogs. He’s been a handler for four years, and that first-day lesson was one he accepted; he considers it an important bottom-line truth, vital to the integrity of being a good handler. Inside this instruction is a cautionary tale: a handler who is too emotionally attached to his dog is more likely to make an irreparably poor combat zone decision if he does so with his heart and not his head.

  Staff Sergeant Pascual Gutierrez and Mack compete during the K–9 trials at Lackland in May 2012.

  Like all handlers, Gutierrez readily acknowledges that the business of MWD teams is saving human lives, sometimes at the expense of canine lives. Gutierrez accepts that in a scenario where his life—or the lives of the men and women walking behind him—was to be weighed against the life of his dog, human life will always take priority. And it is this long-prepared mentality that he will be bringing with him when, in less than one month’s time, he will be on his way to Afghanistan. It will be his sixth deployment, his third to that country, and his second as a canine handler. This time around he’ll be going downrange with a relatively green dog, Bert, a Belgian Malinois with a high work drive. Bert is an aggressive, unpredictable type who likes to bite, and after spending 43 days at the Air Force’s relatively new predeployment course, he and Bert were only now starting to mesh. Gutierrez is pleased; he feels that Bert has finally reached the point where the dog has accepted that he is his “dad.”

  This familial nomenclature is standard speak inside the military’s dog training program—handlers refer to themselves as “moms” and “dads,” especially when identifying the dog’s point of view. During drills and exercises handlers are never “master” or “keeper,” “handler” or “trainer”; they are always referred to in this parental terminology. It’s a natural corollary. Handlers are responsible for their dogs in the most basic ways and, by virtue of their occupation, are primarily caretakers—they feed their dogs, bathe them, give them exercise, keep them in good health—so referring to them in terms of guardianship feels apt. But this terminology is one of many discordant details in defining what a dog is to his handler—weapon, comrade, soldier, tool, or, in this case, child. And however subtle, it shines a light on this contradiction internalized in the culture of the handler-dog relationship. And it doesn’t help answer the question of why love would have to be selectively or summarily omitted from the equation.

  But as Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues in his book The Emotional Lives of Animals, recognizing emotional expression in dogs is not applying what’s human to animal; rather, it’s simply “identifying commonalities and then using human language to communicate what we observe.”4 In his opinion it is “bad biology to argue against the existence of animal emotions. Scientific research in evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology [the study of animal minds] and social neuroscience support the view that numerous and diverse animals have rich and deep emotional lives.”5

  In the most extreme instances of purely utilitarian human-canine relationships, where the dog is stripped of his uniqueness and seen merely as an object, Bekoff believes people will distance themselves to the point where even the language they use provides a protective barrier. This is a defense mechanism that creates a necessary emotional separation. He cites the classic example of laboratory researchers who assign numbers to their animal subjects rather than name them, because “once you name an animal,” Bekoff tells me, “you’ve formed a bond with him.”6

  Bekoff is not surprised when I tell him about Kevin Howard and his theory that dogs do not love their handlers. Bekoff reasons that military handlers might adopt a psychological distancing mechanism, knowing that in sending an animal to war there is the danger of the dog getting hurt, maimed, or even killed. And this is when, he believes, the idea of loving an animal that you’re sending into war, and acknowledging that this animal loves you back, becomes very complicated.

  When I ask Gutierrez to pinpoint what it was that cemented his relationship with Bert, he refrains from implicating “love” as a mitigating factor. So, what would he call that intangible thing: Bonding? Closeness? Affection?

  “I guess you could say affection,” he says. “But I think it’s more of a, ‘I’m the pack leader, now you’re going to listen to me.’”

  But even after he gives the credit of Bert’s bonding to the “wolf pack,” Gutierrez says with a sheepish sigh, knowing that he’s a
bout to contradict all he’s just said: “At the end of the day you do grow attached and the dog knows it.”

  While animals’ capacity for emotion might still be debated today, even Charles Darwin saw evidence to support the idea. A little more than a decade after he published The Origin of Species, Darwin produced The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. The Father of Evolution’s intent with this work was to show that animals not only had emotions, but also expressions much as humans do, along with other perceptible physical gestures. There were, he believed, visible expressions in some animals that were rendered in the animal visage that mirrored those of humans. For Darwin this was only further proof of the connective link of shared ancestry between man and nonhuman mammals.7

  Darwin made thorough study of his subjects by examining not only animal behavior but human as well before coming to this conclusion. He pored over piles of photographs of human facial expressions—examining

  children, babies, people of many cultures, even traveling to an insane

  asylum—to look closely at the similarities present when expressing fear, agony, and affection. He conducted this study and wrote this book containing his findings in part to prove “his underlying theory that humans are an extension of the animal continuum . . . to show that animals have many of the same ways of physically expressing emotions as humans.”8 And though he may have had mostly anecdotal evidence to back up his theory, he was on the right track.