Free Navy SEAL Dogs by Mike Ritland Page B

spread out over two or three acres in the foothills of some local mountains. There were eight buildings scattered across the compound. Given the nature of today’s warfare and the kinds of battlegrounds on which wars are played out, we have to simulate not only mountainous terrain for the dogs but urban environments, too. Building searches are a common part of a MWD’s duties.
    We had six dogs and six handlers working that day. There were three similar buildings on the compound, each like what you might find at boot camp. Each building had about a hundred two-tiered beds, a couple of common-area rooms, a large mess/kitchen area, some storage rooms, and, most critical to this exercise, two larger shower areas and bathrooms. In other words, these were sprawling buildings with multiple good hiding spots.
    We picked the largest of the buildings for our hiding spot. I explained the training exercise to the handlers by saying, “Okay, you guys are going to patrol in, cordon off security, and go into this building and try to find a high-value target in there.” That means the handlers and the dogs were going to make their way into the compound and secure it. Then they were going to enter the largest building and look for the high-value target. That target would be me in a bite suit.
    I thought the scenario I set up would trip up the dogs because of the combination of elements they would encounter. This was a daytime exercise, but I blacked out all the windows, so it was dark in there. A dog’s vision isn’t as negatively affected as ours is when we go from a bright room to a pitch-black one, but, like us, a dog still needs some adjustment time. I selected a hiding spot in the shower area that was as far from the building’s entry point as possible. To add to the confusion caused by the dark, I turned on all the showerheads with the water running full blast. In my mind this was going to be a major obstacle, the equivalent of a dog working his way through an outdoor waterfall in the middle of the night.
    My intention to make it tougher on the dog by having the water running turned into a serious disadvantage not for the dog but for me. I was in a huge bite suit, wrestling with a wet dog. It was all I could do to keep my footing on the slippery tile floor while I waited for the dog’s handler to find me and get the dog off me. I didn’t need it, but there it was anyway: more proof that I had trained this dog well, because at this point in his training, which was about nineteen months in, he only obeyed the handler he was teamed with—and that was as it should be.
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    The object of detection-work training is to take full advantage of a dog’s innate ability to detect odors far better than a human can. As also mentioned earlier, a dog has, on average, 220 million scent receptors. A person has about 5 million. In 1999, researchers at Auburn University’s Institute for Biological Detection Systems conducted experiments on dogs’ scent receptors to better understand how they worked. They also conducted specific studies to see how little of an odor of something need be present in order for a dog to detect it. The study found that dogs could detect various explosives when only an extraordinarily small amount of the chemicals was present. They were also able to detect tiny amounts of other chemical “tags” that are used in explosives. Many governments, including our own, require odorous chemical tags to be placed in explosives as identifiers. That gives us some extra options with dogs that do detection work. In case a dog is not able to detect the explosives themselves, maybe he can detect those “taggant” chemicals instead. Either way, when a dog is trained to pick up the scent of explosives, you know when he’s found them because he is trained to give a physical response when he does, like that marine detection dog in Tikrit, Iraq, who sat