Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

  Rafi, on the other paw, was obsessed with swimming, a legacy of the sweet-natured Newfoundland in him, and the dogs were introduced to the ocean at the start of summer, within months of arriving at Bowral. The neighbour’s property was also ideal. It had a duck pond and, better yet, live ducks that catered to the dogs’ instinct to chase. Sarbi and Rafi worked as a team. Rafi herded the ducks towards Sarbi, who chased with sheer determination, gathering speed with each thunderous gallop. Imagine an eighteen-wheeler perched at the top of a hill with the handbrake off and you’ll have an idea of her force and momentum. Neither dog was deterred by the electric fence around the pond. Sarbi and Rafi jumped over it or pushed through it, letting out a little yip of pain when they made contact. An electric shock could not stop two dogs hell bent on doing what dogs do naturally. Fortunately, Sarbi and Rafi were not fast enough to catch the ducks.

  Rafi was a natural swimmer. With massive webbed paws as powerful as oars, he easily outswam the children. Once he leapt into the ocean and kept swimming until he was a dot on the horizon. Wendy quickly improvised and tied a long length of rope to his collar, fearing where he would end up if left to his own devices. Sarbi preferred to chase the whitewash of waves in the shallows, barking and snapping at the foam and delighting in the wake she threw up as she roared along the shore, her ears flopping up and down, her pink tongue hanging from the side of her mouth, drool flying everywhere.

  Rafi and Sarbi had landed with their bums in the butter. They grew like Topsy, fast and strong, and within months resembled miniature Shetland ponies, forcing Gemma to give up carrying them down to the local shops in a basket. By now, the dogs were taking the kids on walks, dragging them along at breakneck speed. Even the boys’ father, Carlos, was taken for a walk instead of the other way around.

  Sarbi and Rafi were afflicted with the Labrador’s innate obsession with food, like any member of the proud breed. Wendy bought a second refrigerator to accommodate the growing hounds, that were fed twice daily. Raw chicken necks by the kilogram; leftovers from the dining table. Family barbeques were a speciality. The cheeky pups sat obediently—for once!—gazes unflinching, begging to be tossed scraps, just as if they’d never been fed.

  At six months, it became necessary to feed them separately. Rafi was fierce on the fang—put bluntly, a guts. As soon as he scarfed his food he pushed his snout into Sarbi’s bowl and stole her dinner. She responded with a snarl and snap more than once, occasionally drawing blood.

  Rafi sneakily found other food sources, including a birthday cake from the family’s favourite French patisserie in Bowral, bought for Wendy’s birthday by her long-time friend, Anne. The cake was sealed in a box, resting safely on the back seat of Anne’s car when she arrived at the house. After being welcomed by the family, Anne reached in to get the cake. Instead, she found Rafi, taking up the entire back seat. He had snuck into the car with the dexterity of a cat burglar and his cake-covered face was as good as a guilty verdict.

  ‘In the time it took us to get through all the hugs and kisses he’d quietly demolished the entire thing,’ recalls Gemma.

  Fortunately for Rafi, the family could only laugh. After all, our emotional connection to dogs is pure and primal. For the most part, our dogs mirror the connection. As the garden variety dog lover knows, dogs are highly social mammals and experience fear, happiness and love.

  In 1872, the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin published his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he included hand-drawn illustrations of dogs (and cats) expressing fear, submission and aggression as well as some of the aforementioned emotions. The dogs’ expressions are remarkably similar to our own. Move forward 140 years and scientist Patricia McConnell sees it thus: ‘Emotions allow each of us, from an award-winning neurobiologist to a hungry bloodhound, to respond to the world in ways that allow us to keep growing.’

  McConnell might have added ‘growing together’. Rafi and Sarbi had grown up with the children, marking every significant milestone with the family. Christmas, birthdays, holidays. They were not like the pitiful hounds whose existence is as good as forgotten as they languish alone and lonely in suburban backyards, after the novelty of puppy-hood has worn thin and Christmas gone cold. Sarbi and Rafi were family in the truest sense of the word and had free rein of the house. Wendy and Carlos saw how the dogs taught the children empathy and compassion, and helped tease out their natural kindness.

  There was more to it, though. Whenever Nic and Marcelo were in trouble or sad, the dogs responded instinctively. Sarbi curled up next to Nic, and Rafi’s bulk crawled onto Marcelo’s tiny lap, obscuring him. Similarly, if Gemma needed bucking up, Rafi plopped a giant paw ever so softly on her face, leaving it there, almost as if he was patting the teenager. Sarbi, who was not a particularly cuddly canine (nothing unusual there—while we humans love hugging our dogs, dogs are not overly fond of it and see it as a display of social status), intuitively put her head in Gemma’s lap and looked up at her with those gorgeous liquid brown eyes. The kids and dogs seemed inseparable. And they were.

  Which is why in mid-2005 Wendy and Carlos faced a family dilemma unlike any before.

  Nic had won a place at the prestigious Sydney Con-servatorium of Music, a twice-daily, two-hour commute to and from Bowral. It was too much for the youngster and the family decided to move to Sydney. Unfortunately, the regional real estate market was in a slump and Wendy and Carlos were unable to find a buyer for their beautiful house. Without a sale, they couldn’t purchase a new home with a backyard big enough for Sarbi and Rafi. Despite a suburbs-wide search, they were unable to find a landlord who permitted two huge hounds as canine tenants. The only option was to find a new home for their beloved pets. It was a heartbreaking decision and one the family agonised over.

  Wendy placed an ad in the classifieds section of the local newspaper. Ideally, she hoped a like-minded family in Bowral would take Sarbi and Rafi, so they could stay on familiar territory and continue their carefree lives. A couple of families visited but left without the dogs, confessing they were simply too big. Bottom line, they feared they could not handle them.

  Wendy and Carlos were getting desperate. The kids, too, fretted over finding a suitable and loving new home for Sarbi and Rafi, one that would resemble their own. The prospect of losing their beloved mutts was bad enough but the added uncertainty was close to unbearable.

  Chapter 6

  RECRUITMENT DAY

  Corporal Murray Young was flicking through the local newspaper in the Southern Highlands in June of 2005 when he stopped at the ‘For Adoption’ notice in the classified advertisement section. ‘Two beautiful, intelligent Labrador Newfoundland crosses—brother and sister need a new home.’ The words struck a chord with the experienced soldier, a member of the Explosive Detection Dog (EDD) Section in the Australian Army, a tight-knit team of men always on the lookout for good, strong dogs to join the niche unit with a reputation as one of the best of its kind.

  The army has a long history of using dogs in the line of duty but, save for a brief time in the 1970s, did not breed its own hounds. The official policy was and is to adopt dogs that have failed to make the grade in customs or police work, or rescue dogs from animal shelters and council pounds. The latter also serves an altruistic purpose and saves unwanted and unloved dogs from being ‘put down’, the deceptively anodyne phrase meaning ‘euthanised’. Besides, the army has a high regard for dogs found at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals (RSPCA).

  ‘The RSPCA dog is like the Aussie soldier, he’s resourceful,’ former chief handler Corporal Fred Cox once said.

  Then there are the dogs adopted from families in the unenviable position of having to find a new home for them. They tend to be a better proposition still as they come with a known history and a pen sketch of their personality, skills and talents. And, importantly, a well-loved dog usually means a good disposition and you can never overstate the value of that.

  Murray scanned t
he ad and liked what he read. Experience had shown the best EDDs, as the dogs are known, were mixed-breed mutts like Sarbi and Rafi, and those with a working pedigree such as kelpies, Labrador-crosses and border collies. He picked up the phone and called the number.

  Murray explained the army was recruiting dogs for the EDD Section at the School of Military Engineering (SME) based in the Sydney suburb of Moorebank. The unit trained dogs to sniff out a vast range of lethal explosives found in weapons, bombs and ammunition used by enemy forces. Dangerous work. The dog was paired with a handpicked soldier and together they went through a rigorous training program to build a symbiotic working relationship. Known as an EDD team, the dog and handler were then deployed to various regiments in the army including the three Combat Engineer Regiments (known as 1CER, 2CER and 3CER) located in New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory, or the elite Incident Response Regiment (IRR) based at the Holsworthy barracks in New South Wales. The IRR was raised in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and unveiled by the then Australian defence minister Robert Hill in 2001. When fully manned, the regiment’s 300-plus troops are trained to respond to terrorist attacks involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive hazards in Australia and abroad.

  The first version of the dog section was established in Sydney in 1953 and was devised to train a variety of hounds to detect hidden mines and act as guard dogs.

  This was not what Wendy expected. Like many, she had no idea that the Australian Army used dogs. Police dogs she knew about. Those gorgeous, hard-working beagles, Labs and spaniels that trot around the legs of exhausted travellers, sniffing their luggage for contraband and drugs illegally imported into the country or between states, yes.

  But army dogs, no.

  Wendy was curious. She and Carlos had what seemed like an unsolvable problem. No one wanted to take their beloved Rafi and Sarbi. So when Corporal Young, then the chief instructor at the SME, stepped in to the equation with a potential solution to their agonising predicament Wendy heard him out.

  The Australian Defence Force has long employed a veritable military menagerie that has fed, fought, clothed, defended and supported its two-legged brothers- and sisters-in-arms on foreign fields. Among the feathered, furred and woolly troop have been pigeons, rabbits, cockatoos, camels, chooks, cats, horses, sheep, monkeys, donkeys and, of course, dogs. The first animal army deployment was a contingent of about 40,000 horses sent to assist Commonwealth soldiers in the Boer War in South Africa in the 1890s.

  Dogs were officially introduced to army life in the First World War, as messengers and ratters in the forlorn and fetid trenches, ribbons of graves that tunnelled cancerously through the earth for mile upon miserable mile on the Western Front. One messenger dog, working with the Fourth Division Signal Company in France in 1918, gained notoriety for its, ahem, unreliability. Named Bullet, the mutt worked to its own schedule. One day it took a mere eight minutes to deliver an important message but a few days later the canine courier took a very elastic nineteen hours.

  Infantry patrol dogs and tracker dogs were used in the Korean War. A patrol dog scouted ahead of the troop to find enemy positions and weapons and, once detected, a tracker dog, working on a leash in tandem with its handler, searched through the enemy positions, to help neutralise the threat. The teams were so successful that it made sense at war’s end to formalise the program in Australia, and in subsequent years dog teams were deployed as offensive and tactical tools to new battlefields in Borneo and again during the Malayan emergency.

  The Tracking Wing was officially established in 1966 at the School of Infantry in Ingleburn in Sydney, with a solitary mongrel liberated from death row for the princely sum of three dollars. The first dogs to be enlisted into what were then known as Combat Tracking Teams were named after Roman emperors and given lofty titles including Cassius, Marcus, Caesar and Tiber. The last three had the distinction of being the longest serving of the eleven Australian dogs sent to the Vietnam War in 1967.

  Once trained, these freshmen trackers were deployed to infantry battalions, to track fleeing enemy soldiers through impenetrable jungle woven thick with foliage. Like most of their canine predecessors in the First and Second World wars, none ever made it home.

  Australia’s strict quarantine regulations prevented the return of the hero dogs, which was utterly soul-destroying for the men with whom they had bonded and whose lives they helped save. The Diggers took solace knowing their mates had found new homes in embassies or with civilians but they never forgot their best mates.

  The early success of the tracker and mine dogs led to an ambitious attempt by the army in the 1970s to breed its own military working dog in conjunction with the CSIRO. Called the Psycho-Genetic Breeding Program (PGBP), the goal was to breed a miniaturised version of the German shepherd crossed with kelpie and border collie working dogs that would be small enough to be carried under one arm by a soldier in combat conditions. George Hulse, then a captain at the SME, was in charge of the program. He enlisted in the infantry at the age of seventeen and served in Malaya, Papua New Guinea and South Vietnam. By the end of the 1960s, he was an officer in the corps of engineers and one of the famous tunnel rats in the Vietnam War who took part in the battle of Coral and Balmoral.

  In 1970 the brass dispatched Hulse to the United States to see how the allies went about producing mine and tunnel detection dogs. At the Aberdeen Proving Ground in the state of Maryland, Hulse noted that the US Army was also breeding its own dogs. On observing the pups, he realised that the little balls of fluff would learn various behaviours with minimal human-designed training processes. The observation convinced the Australian captain that there were development opportunities for canines in the military far beyond their current employment capabilities.

  The goal of the PGBP was to breed lightweight, quiet, robust dogs with a strong retrieval drive that would not be gun shy or frightened by loud explosions. Hulse had one other criterion for the dream detection dogs.

  ‘It needs to be jungle green,’ he says now, with a laugh.

  Scientifically speaking, he wasn’t joking. He believed it could eventually be done under the right circumstances.

  The official response?

  ‘Forget your green dog.’

  The first iteration of specially bred German shepherds was born at SME in 1972. Each breeding pair delivered about six dogs, 50/50 male and female. Over the next eight years, four generations of pups were born, and the best of these were to be crossed with kelpies and border collies for another four generations (a canine generation is two years) to produce a new ‘bloodline’. The plan then was that the best of the new bloodline would be in-bred for two more generations to produce a ‘phenotype’, or a specific dog breed that met the criteria for passive detection purposes.

  ‘The aim was to minimise the size of the “chassis” before out-crossing to the other working-dog breeds,’ Hulse says now.

  He wanted to breed the dogs down to about 16 kilograms without losing their working-dog attributes. German shepherd dogs usually weigh between 30 and 40 kilograms and bitches between 22 and 32 kilograms.

  The dogs showed promise and the pups were exposed to a whole inventory of combat conditions and battle noise simulation at the age of three weeks—when they opened their eyes. They were tested for courage and timidity, and tried on various transport media, with every pup’s performance noted daily on a score sheet for later analysis.

  The program got off to a fine start but politics and fiscal restraints within the defence department meant it would be short-lived. The out-crossing to kelpies and border collies, under supervision from the CSIRO, did not happen. As a result, the program didn’t have the necessary time required to identify emerging trends or to see significant genetic changes in the breed. As Hulse says now, at least ten generations were needed.

  ‘This was the shortest time possible that the CSIRO could indicate a dog possessing the attributes we wanted,’ he says. ‘The next breed
ing program would have been to consolidate the breed standard and continue to develop the dogs to undertake very specific roles—for example, conduct reconnaissance at night controlled by radio and other remote-control devices. The dogs could be equipped with state-of-the-art mounted devices such as cameras and infrared detection scanners. The dogs could be trained to patrol routes and housing areas to detect caches, IEDs, personnel and ambushes. At least, that was the promise. I firmly believe that dogs are capable of all these things, and more. It’s just that we need to develop the dog and its training program for it to know what it is that we want it to do.’

  The end of the program, however, didn’t mean the end of dogs in the Australian Army and, as it turned out, military working dogs went on to do exactly what Hulse had hoped in the 1970s.

  In more recent years, Australian Explosive Detection Dog teams have served in war zones in Somalia, Bougainville, East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Iraq. Currently, several are on duty in southern Afghanistan. Fortunately, most have returned to Australia. After a month in quarantine they either continue working or retire to live out their days as pampered pets with their soldier-handlers or other adoptive families.

  Not every canine is cut out for service, and fewer still are cut out for nerve-racking work in dangerous conditions. Some don’t have the patience or the smarts required. Others are incapable of being quiet and calm in stress-ful situations, when nerves of steel are required. (A wide yawn is a canine self-relaxation technique and usually does the trick; humans yawn for oxygen, dogs for calm.) Some hounds refuse to acknowledge commands or choose to respond in their own time (bad dog); others are unable to master the discipline required to hunt for the olfactory information that says ‘explosive’ when more delightfully pungent smells—well, at least to dogs—are calling.

  Finding a pliable and workable dog was therefore essential, which is why Corporal Young had one, and only one, question for Wendy.