Free War Dogs by Rebecca Frankel Page A

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 raspylaugh 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 feels 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 However, using a wolf theory of dominance is now commonly considered to be an outdated model for analyzing canine behavior.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 witha 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