War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  Making a memory of a smell, or imprinting odor, is exactly how a dog learns to seek out bombs, weapons caches, narcotics, missing persons, and, sadly, human remains. The process involves training a dog to associate odors with a reward. Dogs become visibly excited when they’ve discovered an odor they have been trained to detect. The less disciplined ones will cast their heads back, looking, waiting, and watching for the Kong (or tennis ball, or treat) they know is coming, too eager to contain themselves.

  In this age of modern warfare and police work, dogs are trained to detect homemade explosives. These bombs are potluck-style concoctions, and while the recipes vary greatly, the ingredients are basically the same.6 So each dog is trained on—or should be trained on—a handful of key bomb-making ingredients. This catalog of explosive scents includes TNT, smokeless powder, potassium chlorate, C-4 plastic explosive, detonating cord, and ammonium nitrate. And in order for military trained detection dogs to become certified, military regulations require that they meet a very high accuracy rate—explosive-detection dogs must hit 95 percent accuracy, and drug dogs must meet 90 percent accuracy. The key to this kind of training is repetition and reinforcement. Maintaining proficiency at such a high rate requires a minimum of four hours of explosive-detection training a week.7 Whether or not this rate of accuracy also takes place in the arena of combat has not been proven and may be impossible to quantify.8 This is at least in part due to the fact that there really is no way to assess how many bombs or bomb materials go undetected—unless, of course, they go off after a dog team has cleared an area. Whereas in a controlled environment, when planted materials are used in training, their hiding spots marked and known, those finds can be quantified and qualified.

  A dog hunting for scent is like a linguist who, even when standing before the Tower of Babel (or more practically speaking, an international airport), can hear not only a cacophony of many tongues clamoring at once, but who can pull apart the sounds to find and comprehend the individual voices.

  Imagine a leaf floating down a creek. Shiny and wet, it winks out from the moving water. At first the leaf spins in lazy, looping circles—around and around like a carnival ride. Then it meets with a new current, picks up speed, and travels much farther and faster than you thought possible. Powerful, unpredictable, this is the finicky prerogative of the wind.

  A rocky, dry path in the desert doesn’t much resemble a stream, but when the wind passes through the dust, moving around clusters of shrubs and bushes, you can imagine how the analogy of a leaf on moving water captures the movement of scent on air—the sensory path a dog must follow and all the obstacles in between. The shrubs would be like rocks in the water, parting the current and creating little eddies or pockets of scent. When a dog following scent across the desert floor comes upon a bush, he might pause and sniff around a little more, exploring the eddy created by wind, searching for a stronger pool of the odor he is tracking.

  In order to harness the power of a dog’s natural scent ability, a handler has to understand how a dog reads a scent trail, because it’s the handler’s job to assist the dog by tracking the wind. Because air is always flowing in the open space of the desert, all a handler needs to do is toe the earth and watch the dust lift to see which way the wind is going. Some handlers carry a spray bottle so they can punch a mist of water into the air and use that to detect the wind’s intensity and direction. It’s important that a handler has a good grasp on the direction of the wind because he needs to be able to “see” not what but where his dog is smelling.

  The majority of the dog teams being dispatched to combat theaters are trained to find mortar shells, C-4, detonation cords, and pressure plates under the desert sand and brush: the components insurgents employ in their destructive IEDs. Pressure plates have become increasingly common. Insurgents bury these plastic disks, the size of dessert dishes, just under the surface of roads, and when the weight of armored vehicles rolls over them, the little plate clicks upward and a bomb or mine hidden within it explodes.

  To find such deadly weapons, handlers and explosive-detecting dogs need to be prepared, focused. In addition to keeping watch on the wind, and on his dog, a handler must also keep his eye on the ground and the path ahead, watching for disturbances—wires, rock piles, things that do not

  belong—as well as any other sign of human interference, adding the keenness of the human eye to the power of the dog’s extraordinary nose.

  John Lutenberg has been training bloodhounds and other dogs to track and trail for decades. A former military dog handler, he’s brought his dogs to Kenya to help officials there hunt down poachers, helped with searches for missing persons, and chased down escaped convicts with the FBI.

  Lutenberg is tall and lean—a cross between Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda in a pair of light denim jeans, green cloth bomber jacket, and a faded blue cap pulled low over his forehead. His voice rolls out in a soft, gravelly drawl. Weathered and creased, his face is that of a true outdoorsman.

  This kind of trail work—the nighttime tracks on foot, the chasing down of escaped convicts from high-security prisons—has a dangerous edge. With only the narrow beams of flashlights and the helicopters circling above lighting the way, it would be far more hazardous work. But it isn’t the middle of the night; there are no helicopters circling overhead. Instead it is a crisp Colorado afternoon. The sky is a brilliant alabaster blue, and the wind pushes the clouds by at such a clip that the sunlight flickers behind them like a dying light bulb. At Chris Jakubin’s invitation, Lutenberg has come to Fort Carson to show me his bloodhounds.

  Along with his fellow handler Terry Brown, Lutenberg brings Vicky from the back of their truck. At almost six years old, this dog’s velvety coat droops from her body; her ribs show and her jowls swing. A signature feature of the bloodhound breed,9 her loose skin flaps along her body with every long-legged move she makes. The dog with the greatest scent ability is, without question, the bloodhound. Where some breeds, like dachshunds, have 125 million scent receptors, and German shepherds have 225 million receptors, the bloodhound has on average 300 million.10

  The way a trail dog like Vicky follows scent on air is different than how an explosive-detection dog might uncover an IED along a road, or how a combat tracker dog would hunt down an insurgent, by mapping out a path and tracking odor on the ground. Many of the same components are at play—following the wind, making sure the dog is on odor—but it is a different skill and the dogs are trained in distinct ways.

  Lutenberg crouches down and pulls one long finger through the rosy dirt, drawing what looks like a triangle without a bottom, the point facing up. This is the scent cone, he says. Then he drags his finger across the dirt, starting at the base of the cone, and moves it from left to right, higher and higher until his finger, running out of space inside the cone, hits the top of the triangle at its smallest point. This is how the dog moves to catch the scent on the air—back and forth, closing in on her target until she lands right on top of it, right at the tip of the cone.

  And this is how she will find Jakubin, who, acting as the runaway decoy, has gone ahead of us, marking the trail with little orange ribbons and finally positioning himself somewhere among the brush and trees where our eyes won’t find him before Vicky’s nose does. The scent moves along the air, and if there’s wind, as there is on this afternoon, the scent pulls the dog away from the object it seeks, and so the nose could take longer to catch up to what the eyes might see first.

  Trailing scent on air is fast-paced work; it requires endurance, a steady and constant fitness. As soon as Vicky is on the scent she is on the move and she is moving fast. Because she doesn’t need to keep her nose to the ground, following scent with her nose in the air instead, she runs more freely. Brown, Vicky’s handler, is keeping pace with her, holding onto her long lead and charging ahead of us on the uneven, rocky terrain. Lutenberg manages an equally brisk pace behind them.

  When
they finally reach the slight incline below Jakubin’s hiding spot, where he is curled on the cold ground in the fetal position, Vicky makes a wide swing turn and dodges right past him, almost as if she didn’t see him. But a split second later, she makes another sharp turn and bounds right on top of Jakubin.

  Lutenberg maps out a replay. The wind was pushing to the right, tossing Jakubin’s scent out and away from him. “She got right here,” he says, pointing to the spot in the air where Vicky made her pivot. “And she smelled him: ‘he’s right here, he’s right here.’” Lutenberg’s voice rises in soft excitement as he imitates Vicky, or at least how he imagines she would sound were she able to talk.

  Vicky, he explains, didn’t see him because dogs use their noses above all else for detection, not their eyes.

  It’s a truism that adds yet another layer to the job when a handler works a trail—he had better be using his eyes and be prepared to stumble quickly upon a dangerous scenario, like when chasing an armed suspect. But even if dogs are nose strong, it’s something of a mischaracterization to say that dogs have bad vision. There are endless articles with titles like “Dogs Have Terrible Eyesight!” One of the most popular misperceptions is that dogs are color blind—they’re not, they do see color, just not as much color as we do. When we measure their eyesight the way we measure human eyesight, with 20/20 vision, we come to something of an egocentric conclusion, that dogs’ eyes are inferior. But there are different ways to assess how dogs take in information with their eyes. Perhaps to put into context how dogs see differently than humans or cats or birds of prey, it makes sense to use the standard human eye system, but otherwise it seems a little, er, short-sighted on our part to assess and appraise their visual capabilities measuring on a 20/20 scale.

  A dog’s visual acuity (how well he is able to see defined details at a distance) is not as strong as a human’s and not nearly as a strong as a cat’s (eagles actually take the cake on this in the animal kingdom, seeing four to five times better than humans), but there’s more to vision and interpreting information with one’s eyes than acuity. And though a dog’s eye may not be as sharp as our own, their overall ability to take in information with their eyes is perhaps much better than ours.

  For one thing, most dogs (and it does depend on the breed) have a much wider, more encompassing field of vision at 250 to 270 degrees than humans (at about 180 degrees)11 and even cats. For another, dogs see much better in low light and darkness than we do (dogs have what’s called a tapetum lucidum, the part of their eye that acts like a mirror, reflecting twice as much light, helping them to see better in the dark.)12 In fact, a dog’s eye has more light-sensitive cells, called rods, in the center of the retina.13 It’s an advantage that Alexandra Horowitz explains well in Inside of a Dog: “While we might make out a match being brightly struck in the distance on a dark night, the dog could detect the gentle flame on the lit candle. Arctic wolves spend a full half of the year living in utter darkness; if there is a flame on the horizon, they have the eyes to spot it.”14

  In 2002, the department of zoology at Tel Aviv University conducted a study15 to see how much a dog used its sight over its sense of smell when detecting explosives.16 They took trained dogs and ran them through detection drills in different settings under varying amounts of light. What, they wanted to know, would a dog do if he had ample light and had been given visual cues as to where the scented object would be? Would he rely more on his nose or his eyes? The gist of their conclusion was that sniff over see always prevailed. Even “in cases in which dogs could have used both olfaction and vision, they chose to use only olfaction.” It didn’t matter how much light they had. The study’s finding was, in part, that because dogs’ eyes are more sensitive to moving objects than stationary when they’re on the hunt, the nose is more reliable in seeking “prey” or, in this case, explosives.

  So when we consider a dog’s sensory prowess, we have to take into account not only how a dog sees but why. Perhaps they don’t use their eyes because they don’t need them. And in this way the handler and dog dovetail nicely together—one sees while the other smells.

  Brown believes that 70 percent of his job should be devoted to reading the dog, interpreting her movements and her cues to make sense of the messages she gives him. In other words, if she tells him there’s no scent, why would he continue to work her down that path? It’s up to him to keep the dog moving to places where the scent is available.

  Vicky wrestles around with Jakubin, her eyes hard to read buried under the soft wrinkles, but by the way her tail beats the air, it’s clear she’s pleased with herself. She did her job well. But there’s no tennis ball or Kong for Vicky. The reward is the trail.

  For a war dog, scent is perhaps the dog’s keenest and most useful sense. Because of that, bloodhounds have been used during many wars to track and trail the enemy. Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Richardson wrote of the bloodhound’s talent for tracking (and made note of at least one bloodhound employed as a messenger dog17 during World War I), and the French sent bloodhounds to track the Vietcong in Southeast Asia but the dogs proved to be too noisy.18

  But dogs possess other innate abilities that can be drawn out, honed, and sometimes manipulated to great success. Take for example a dog’s sense of hearing. Most dogs can hear at a distance up to four times farther than humans, and their hearing ability overall is likely hundreds of times more powerful than ours.19 The difference is most dramatic though when it comes to frequency, which means dogs are especially good at deciphering pitch difference in sound and equally good at recognizing this sound.

  It is this combination of a dog’s keenest senses, selecting the most amenable breeds for the tasks required, applied with special attention to the individual dog’s suitability for war—judging the temperament, the will to work—that ultimately contributed to earning the dog a spot in successful missions again and again in war after war. To say nothing of their size, which allows them entry into smaller spaces, and their four legs, which carry them more swiftly to and from destinations.

  But early use of dogs in war was often less about deploying a skillful force to serve and protect; the entrée of canines into warfare was something of a bloody affair. In all likelihood, these early war dogs took more lives than they saved, and they were notable not for feats of bravery but for the vileness and violence of their use. It was not their inborn supersenses or their natural intelligence that was put to task, but rather something more primitive, fierce, and undisciplined.

  Take for example the dogs who ventured along on the journeys of Christopher Columbus. Though he did not have canines on his first voyage to the new world, Columbus brought them along years later when he returned to the Americas, calling his dogs “the most fearsome weapon of all.”20 In 1495, when the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the Taino, resisted his men, Columbus set his dogs loose. They attacked to kill and often disemboweled their victims.

  The conquistadors used dogs in their warmongering to torment and instill fear. In one particularly vulgar description of Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s exploits, a dog named Leoncico is said to have pounced on an elderly Indian woman, pinning her to the ground. When she pleaded for her life, the dog saw fit to spare her, though not before desecrating her by urinating on her as she lay on the ground. As the story goes, Balboa’s soldiers wanted to kill her anyway and feed her to their dogs as they were running low on supplies. Balboa however, refused. “If Leoncico had mercy on her,” he apparently replied, “I could do no less.”21

  Stories like these were actually used as shining examples in what were perhaps the first and most fervent arguments made for the integration of war dogs into the US military. Chief among these advocates was Benjamin Franklin. When he tried to convene a league of dogs—mastiffs and

  handlers—in 1755 as a defense against “Indian raids,” Franklin cited Hernán Cortés, who, while conquering Mexico and Peru, employed “savage greyhounds to drag down
and disembowel fleeing Aztecs.”22 Apparently Franklin, the enlightened man who brought the world electricity and bifocals, wasn’t squeamish about dogs as vehicles for violence. When he made his case for canines, he invoked the savage dogs Cortés had dispatched as a model, arguing that these dogs should be “large, strong and fierce” and could be turned loose to “confound the enemy a good deal and be very serviceable.”23 Franklin’s arguments did not garner much support.

  Despite the failure of Franklin’s attempt to rally support for a trained military dog force, dogs were otherwise a welcome presence alongside American soldiers on battlefields—some on American soil—centuries before their presence there was “official.”

  During the Revolutionary War, General George Washington exhibited a far more civil wartime etiquette where dogs were concerned. When his adversary’s dog wandered into his territory after the Battle of Shermantown, Washington did not take the fox terrier in as a captive or bargaining chip. While his own dogs did not travel with him during battle, he was very devoted to them and was perhaps thinking of them when he had the dog sent back to his master, General William Howe, with a note from Alexander Hamilton (who was at the time under Washington’s command). It read: “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar appears to belong to General Howe.”24