[nagdu] Beware of the Dogs.

[Ed Meskys]

I was especially interested about the new, successful, training used by 
Guide Dogs For The Blind in California.

Subject: Beware of the Dogs.


Copyright 2003 The NewYorker. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission..
Beware of the Dogs.
The NewYorker, 2012_02_27
BY:Burkhard Bilger. The weapons were housed in Long Island City, in a 
low-slung,
prefabricated building on Northern Boulevard. I could hear them growling and
yammering
in the dark. I'd arrived well before dawn on a wet, chilly October morning, 
and
still
wasn't sure how to proceed. A police officer had told me to meet him there 
at
five-forty-five,
but there was no bell to ring, no intercom to buzz. The building was 
surrounded
by
a ragged chain-link fence edged with spools of razor wire and posted with
warnings.
When I tested the gate, it was unlocked, but the entrance lay across an 
empty
parking
lot and up a wooden ramp. I wasn't sure that I could make it to the door in
time.
I've never been much good around dogs. In the town where I grew up, about an
hour
north of Oklahoma City, every other house seemed to be patrolled by some 
bawling
bluetick or excitable Irish setter, and the locals liked to leave them
unchained.
When I'd fill in for my brother on his paper route, or ride my one-speed 
bike to
a friend's house, I could usually count on a chase along the way, some 
homicidal
canine at my heels. The dogs didn't seem to give my friends as much trouble. 
And
my father had a way of puffing himself up and waving his arms that would 
send
them
scampering. But I never figured out how to show them who's boss.
One of the satisfactions of city life has been turning that relationship 
around.
A pet here is always on probation, its instincts curbed or swiftly 
incarcerated.
A hound that chases children around would be considered a public menace, and
even
the little yappers have to be kept on a leash. In the past ten years, 
though,
that
balance of power has shifted. Since the attacks on September 11th, New 
York's
subways
and train stations, parks and tourist destinations have been prowled by 
police
dogs-large,
pointy-eared, unnervingly observant beasts deeply unconvinced of our 
innocence.
They
sniff at backpacks and train their eyes on passersby, daring us to make a 
move.
It's
a little unsettling but also, under the circumstances, reassuring. There are
worse
things to fear than getting bitten.
The New York City subway has more than four hundred stations, eight hundred
miles
of track, six thousand cars, and, on any given weekday, five million 
passengers.
It's an anti-terrorism unit's nightmare. To sweep this teeming labyrinth for
bombs
would take an army of explosives experts equipped with chemical detectors.
Instead,
the city has gone to the dogs. Since 2001, the number of uniformed police 
has
dropped
by seventeen per cent. In that same period, the canine force has nearly 
doubled.
It now has around a hundred dogs, divided among the narcotics, bomb,
emergency-response,
and transit squads.
A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet
obedient.
It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast. Its eyes are 
equipped
for
night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the 
most
fractious
prey. But its true glory is its nose. In the nineteen-seventies, researchers
found
that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in 
the
nineties,
more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the 
most
recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion. It's a little
disheartening,
really," Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection 
Research
Institute,
at Auburn University, in Alabama, told me. I spent a good six years of my 
life
chasing
this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my 
equipment.
Just as astonishing, to Waggoner, is a dog's acuity-the way it can isolate 
and
identify
compounds within a scent, like the spices in a soup. Drug smugglers often 
try to
mask the smell of their shipments by packaging them with coffee beans, air
fresheners,
or sheets of fabric softener. To see if this can fool a dog, Waggoner has
flooded
his laboratory with different scents, then added minute quantities of heroin 
or
cocaine
to the mix. In one case, "the whole damn lab smelled like a Starbucks," he 
told
me,
but the dogs had no trouble homing in on the drug. They're just incredible 
at
finding
the needle in the haystack.
The New York police have two kinds of canines: detection dogs and patrol 
dogs.
The
former spend most of their time chasing down imaginary threats: terrorist
attacks
are so rare that the police have to stage simulations, with real explosives, 
to
keep
the dogs on their toes. Patrol dogs, on the other hand, have one of the most
dangerous
jobs in public life. Canine police are often called when a criminal is on 
the
loose,
and they're far more likely than others to have a lethal encounter. The 
crimes I
get called out on are always in progress," one officer told me. The suspects 
are
armed. They're known to be violent. So, by the mere nature of that call, 
it's
going
to be more dangerous. He shrugged. I guess I'm an adrenaline junkie. I got 
into
canine
to hunt men.
The dogs in Long Island City were heirs to an ancient and bloodthirsty line.
Their
ancestors, descended from the great mastiffs and sight hounds of 
Mesopotamia,
were
used as shock troops by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, and 
the
Greeks.
(Alexander the Great's dog, Peritas, is said to have saved his life at 
Gaugamela
by leaping in front of a Persian elephant and biting its lip.) They wrought
havoc
in the Roman Colosseum, ran with Attila's hordes, and wore battle armor 
beside
the
knights of the Middle Ages. In 1495, when Columbus sailed to what is now the
Dominican
Republic, he brought Spanish mastiffs almost three feet high at the withers 
and
greyhounds
that could run down an enemy and disembowel him. At the battle of Vega Real,
each
hound killed a hundred natives in less than an hour, according to the 
Dominican
friar
Bartolomé de las Casas. They carry these dogs with them as companions 
wherever
they
go," he later wrote. And kill the fettered Indians in multitudes like Hogs 
for
their
Food.
It took a while to break them of the habit. The colonists used dogs against
Indians
and slaves-"They should be large, strong and fierce," Benjamin Franklin
recommended,
"and will confound the enemy a good deal"-and the Confederates sent them 
after
escaping
Union prisoners at Andersonville. And though the U.S. Army opted for more 
modern
weaponry abroad, attack dogs were still used at home, for crowd control. Up
until
the nineteen-seventies, the police just wanted dogs that would bite 
everyone,"
Jim
Matarese, the treasurer of the United States Police Canine Association, told 
me.
They'd go to the pound and get dogs that were fear biters-just scared to 
death
of
people. Or someone would call in and say, 'I've got a real aggressive dog. 
He'll
bite! Well, we saw what happened at the marches from Selma: those dogs just 
ate
people
up.
In Europe, police dogs were a more refined lot, though not always to their
benefit.
The German shepherd, first registered as a breed in 1889 by a former cavalry
captain,
Max von Stephanitz, was selected for intelligence and steadiness as well as
power.
The Germans fielded thirty thousand dogs in the First World War, and used 
them
for
everything from transporting medicine and wounded soldiers to shuttling 
messages
between trenches. When the war was over, the animals were mostly killed,
discarded,
or consumed by the starving populace. Dog meat has been eaten in every major
German
crisis at least since the time of Frederick the Great, and is commonly 
referred
to
as 'blockade mutton,' " Time noted, in 1940. Dachshund is considered the 
most
succulent.
The survivors went on to second careers in law enforcement or as guide dogs 
for
the
blind, and their breeding and training grew ever more sophisticated. In 
Germany,
registered shepherds have to pass rigorous physical and behavioral tests, 
and
their
puppies are trained by nationwide networks of volunteers. Schutzhund
competitions,
in which dogs are tested for their ability to track, obey orders, and 
protect
their
owners, are a national passion, and the largest ones fill stadiums. They 
just
have
a different dog culture over there," Steve White, a dog trainer and former
canine
officer in the Seattle area, told me. If you look at North America, there 
are
maybe
five thousand German shepherd breeders. If you go to Germany, it's probably 
got
fifty-five
thousand.
It took the Lockerbie bombing, followed by the attacks at Columbine and 
Oklahoma
City, to galvanize interest in police and military dogs in America. Auburn's
canine
program began as an attempt to build a better bomb detector. In the 
eighties, we
thought, Let's build a machine that can mimic the dog! Robert Gillette, the
director
of the university's animal-health and performance program, told me. But you
can't
mimic a dog. It's just a superior mechanical working system. So in the 
nineties
we
began to think, Hmm, let's put some of that research into the animals. The
Department
of Defense has apparently come to the same conclusion. Since 2006, it has 
spent
close
to twenty billion dollars searching for explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
The
detection
rate has hung stubbornly at around fifty per cent," Lieutenant General 
Michael
Oates
told the magazine National Defense two years ago. When the same patrols use
dogs,
he added, the success rate leaps to eighty per cent: "Dogs are the best
detectors.
The American military now has some three thousand active-duty dogs in its 
ranks,
but good animals are hard to find. The American Kennel Club requires no 
proof of
health or intelligence to register an animal-just a pure bloodline-and 
breeders
are
often more concerned with looks than with ability. We breed for the almighty
dollar
here," one trainer told me. Programs like the ones at Auburn and at Lackland 
Air
Force Base, in San Antonio, are trying to reverse that trend. But their
graduates
are still the exceptions. Some of these dogs, they couldn't find a pork chop 
if
it
was hanging around their neck," a dog broker in Minnesota told me.
The upshot is that many, if not most, American police dogs now come from 
Europe.
Those in the New York subway were mostly born in Hungary, Slovakia, or the 
Czech
Republic-descendants of the powerful border-patrol dogs bred during the Cold
War.
Other police dogs come from brokers in Holland and Germany, and still 
respond to
Dutch and German commands: Sitz! Bleib! Los! Apport! Europeans have more 
dogs
than
they can use, so they sell the excess to us," White told me. We subsidize 
their
hobbies.
When I'd finally summoned the nerve to sprint across the parking lot and up 
the
ramp,
that morning in Long Island City, I stumbled in on six patrolmen strapping 
on
their
gear. They were all with the transit squad, which safeguards the subway: 
four
recruits
and two trainers. A dry-erase board hung on the wall, scrawled with notes. 
One
side
listed explosives that the dogs could detect, including C-4, TNT, ammonium
nitrate,
and several others. The other side listed fines for canine misbehavior: five
dollars
for urinating in the subway, twenty-five for biting someone ("must draw 
blood").
Wayne Rothschild, one of the trainers, had just finished adding his weight 
to
another
list on the board-part of a contest to see who could lose the most pounds by 
the
end of the week. (Canine police tend to be more active than others, but 
their
dogs
do most of the running.) The men in his squad averaged more than two hundred
pounds,
topping out at two hundred and thirty-six, for the sergeant, Randy Brenner.
One pound? a recruit was asked. You've lost one pound?
I swallowed a lot of aggression. And pizzas.
Rothschild laughed. At one eighty-one, he was among the fittest men in the
group.
He and Brenner had first met in junior high and later played football 
together
for
the Hicksville Comets-Rothschild at quarterback and Brenner at center. 
Twenty
years
later, they still looked their parts: Rothschild square-jawed and decisive, 
with
jet-black hair close-cropped on the sides; Brenner stolid, round, and
reliable-the
immovable object. Technically, Brenner was now Rothschild's boss, but their
relationship
hadn't changed much. I was blocking for him then and I'm still blocking for
him,"
Brenner said.
Like many of the men in the squad, Rothschild and Brenner had been around 
police
dogs most of their lives. Rothschild's father, uncle, brothers, and cousins 
were
in law enforcement, as were Brenner's father and grandfather. After high 
school,
Rothschild spent two years at a community college and another two working
construction,
before joining the force. Brenner took his police-academy entrance exam at
sixteen.
When the transit canine unit was formed, six years ago, they each put in for 
it
unbeknownst
to the other, and found themselves back on the same team. I'd rather be a 
cop in
canine than a sergeant somewhere else," Brenner said. It's all I ever 
wanted.
He and Rothschild led the recruits to the kennel behind the offices, to get
their
new partners. A week earlier, each recruit had been paired with an equally 
green
police dog, a little over a year old. We want the dog to make up for where 
the
handler
is weak and vice versa," Brenner said. But I'll tell you, after a while the
person's
personality becomes similar to the dog's. Matthew Poletto, a rangy recruit 
with
the
jutting cheekbones and cut biceps of a bodybuilder, had been matched with
Ranger,
a skinny, high-strung Belgian Malinois-"like a German shepherd on steroids," 
as
one
handler put it. Horacio Maldonado, a small, soft-spoken Hispanic, had a 
sweet
female
Labrador named Ray. The others had big-boned, lordly shepherds with the
contained
power peculiar to the breed. The Labrador was a detection dog; the shepherds 
and
the Malinois were patrol dogs-though some, like Rothschild's German 
shepherd,
Danz,
did both.
For the next month and a half, the dogs and men would learn to work 
together, to
read each other's cues and idiosyncrasies, as if in an arranged marriage: 
police
dogs and their handlers are usually partnered for life. He's a great dog. 
It's
just
. . . sometimes I'd like to relax a little," Poletto said, sounding like the
honeymoon
was already over. You know, watch TV and not have him put the chew toy in my
lap.
Inside the kennel, the dogs were in an uproar. They lunged at their cages 
when
they
saw their owners, foam flying from their muzzles. They stayed here only when 
not
on patrol or at home with their partners, but even this much confinement was
hard
to bear. A lot of them are cage chewers," the unit's other trainer, Richard
Geraci,
told me. He showed me a photograph on his phone of a ventilation cover that 
his
dog,
Chief, had reduced to twisted scrap. That's quarter-inch steel," he said. A
German
shepherd's jaw can exert upward of seven hundred and fifty pounds per square
inch.
They just chew it up, tear it up. Chief's got broken teeth, but I'm 
surprised he
doesn't have more.
And yet the moment the cages were opened the noises stopped. The dogs 
trotted
silently
to their partners' side, then sat back on their haunches-ears erect, eyes
focussed
forward-and waited. It's like you've turned on a switch," Brenner said.
Canine police tend to talk about their dogs as if they were mechanical 
devices.
They
describe them as tools or technology and say that they're "building dogs"
through
proper training. They say that their animals need "maintenance" to be "fully
operational,"
and that a "dual-purpose dog"-one that has been taught to both chase down
criminals
and detect drugs or explosives-has "superior functionality. At home, a 
police
dog
may be like a member of the family. But once in the field it's just another
piece
of gear.
This is more than a manner of speaking. It's a way of thinking about dogs 
that
goes
back to the psychologist B. F. Skinner and his work on behaviorism, in the
nineteen-forties.
Skinner argued that it's pointless to imagine what's going on in an animal's
head.
Better to treat its mind as a black box, closed and unknowable, with inputs 
that
lead to predictable outputs. Skinner identified four ways to manipulate
behavior:
four buttons to push-positive reinforcement ("Good dog! Have a biscuit"),
positive
punishment ("Bad dog! Whack "), negative reinforcement ("Good dog! Now I'll 
stop
whacking you"), and negative punishment ("Bad dog! Give me back that 
biscuit").
Connect
an action to an outcome and almost any behavior can be trained. Skinner 
called
this
"operant conditioning," and considered it as effective for people as for 
their
pets.
Give me a child," he once said, "and I'll shape him into anything.
By treating animals as clever machines, behaviorists managed some impressive
feats:
rats navigated mazes, chickens played tic-tac-toe, pigeons played Ping-Pong.
During
the Second World War, Skinner went so far as to design a pigeon-guided 
missile.
The
birds sat in the nose cone, each one pecking at a target on a translucent 
plate.
The setup worked surprisingly well, but the pigeons were never enlisted-no 
one
in
the military would take them seriously, Skinner complained. Behaviorism, as 
a
means
of animal training, had a long, slow fuse.
The revolution, when it came, began with creatures beyond the reach of 
regular
compulsion.
An orca or a dolphin can't be tugged on a leash or stung with a whip. It 
can't
hear
what you're shouting most of the time. To make it do what you want, you have 
to
break
down the behavior into discrete components-swim over here, pick up that 
hoop,
leap
through the air-then offer a reward for each step. At marine parks and
aquariums,
in the nineteen-sixties, an orca that did something right would hear a 
whistle
blast
and get a fish. After a while, each behavior would be associated with a
different
hand signal, and become so rewarding, in and of itself, that the orca 
wouldn't
always
need to get a fish. One of the pioneers in this field, Karen Pryor, once 
taught
a
goldfish to swim through a tiny hoop just for the flicker of a flashlight. 
It's
easy,"
she told me. You just have to have a healthy goldfish. And it has to be 
hungry.
As operant conditioning has spread from aquariums to zoos, what once would 
have
been
circus acts have come to seem like ordinary good behavior. Thirty years ago, 
if
a
lion needed a flu shot, it had to be tranquillized. These days, it will walk 
up
to
its trainer and proffer its paw. I could give you examples all day," Ken
Ramirez,
the vice-president of animal training at the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago, 
told
me.
We have sharks that will swim from tank to tank, and a beluga whale that 
will
present
its belly for an ultrasound. Our sea otters hold their eyes open to get 
drops,
and
I've had a diabetic baboon submit to regular insulin injections. Not long 
ago,
when
a camel broke its jaw at the nearby Brookfield Zoo, it walked up to a table 
and
laid
its head on a lead plate for an X-ray. It makes managing animals so much
easier,"
Ramirez said. They do things as part of a game that you've taught them.
Dogs were made for this sort of thing. No other animal so loves a game or so
diligently
aims to please. No other has been shaped so specifically to our needs. 
Selective
breeding has turned Canis lupus familiaris into the most physically varied
animal
on earth. Its genome is the Microsoft Windows of biological programming: 
layer
upon
layer of complex function and code, often accreted at cross-purposes. It can
produce
Great Danes big enough to kill wild boars and Chihuahuas small enough to go 
down
rat holes, beagles that track pythons and collies that catch Frisbees. When 
you
get
to a detection dog that wants to find ammonium nitrate just so that it can 
play
with
a rubber ball, that is a very, very complex end point," Auburn's Robert 
Gillette
told me.
The patrol dogs in the transit squad could bark on command (Speak!) and 
urinate
at
their handler's discretion (Empty!). They could climb ladders, crawl through
drainage
pipes, and leap through the open window of a moving car. They were smart,
disciplined,
extremely capable animals. But the blood of the old war hounds still ran in
them,
and their most effective ability was intimidation.
One canine team can do the work of ten or fifteen guys in a gang situation,"
Lieutenant
John Pappas, the head of the squad, told me. It's 'Fuck you! I'm not going
anywhere.
But when you throw in some jaws and paws-holy shit! It changes the 
landscape. In
2010, one station on the Lexington Avenue line was hit by twenty felonies in 
a
matter
of months. Once a canine unit was sent in, the number dropped to zero. It's 
like
pulling up in an M1 Abrams battle tank," Pappas said.
The commuters at Union Square seemed a peaceable crowd one Wednesday 
morning.
Yet
the dogs made even the innocent nervous. When the squad filed into a subway 
car,
I could see backs stiffen all around, eyes focussed on the floor. Each dog 
and
its
handler took position at a set of doors, overseen by Rothschild and Brenner.
Between
stations, the dogs watched the riders. When the doors opened, they pivoted
around
to study the crowd on the platform. The German shepherds soon settled into 
the
routine,
but the Malinois kept twisting about on its leash, registering each face 
like a
laser
scanner.
Malinois just really love bite work," a canine cop from Middletown, New 
York,
had
told me. They have this giant prey drive. Some people call them Maligators.
After
a while, one of the riders-a tall, spindly man in a yarn prayer cap-began to 
get
uncomfortable. He scooted down the seat, hunching his shoulders, and glared 
back
at the Malinois. If you tense up, if you're feeling threatened, the dog 
picks
that
up and perceives a threat," Brenner told me. Or as my friends used to say 
when I
was a kid, at the worst possible moments, "They can smell your fear.
Times Square is the busiest station in the city, and the main concourse was 
at
its
most cacophonous. A band of black bluegrass musicians, called the Ebony
Hillbillies,
was sprawled in lawn chairs playing an old fiddle tune called "Martha 
Campbell.
The
bass and banjo lines skittered from run to run while the washboard chattered
underneath,
mimicking the commuters around us. New York is just different," Brenner 
said,
looking
around with satisfaction. Our version of a crowd is different from anywhere 
else
in the world. And these dogs are tuning in to everything. They're trained 
for
handler
protection, and they don't know when that threat is going to be upon them.
The squad had been there only a few minutes when one of the German 
shepherds-a
huge
black male named Thunder-began to bark at something nearby. I could see a 
man in
a hoodie crouched beside a pillar. An officer was shouting at him to show 
his
hands,
but he wouldn't do it. One second, the two were frozen in a standoff, 
Thunder
straining
at the leash. Then the suspect lunged, the cop let go, and the dog leaped
through
the air. Get this dog off of me! the man screamed, as Thunder's jaw clamped
around
his arm. The handler called Thunder back, but then the suspect broke away 
and
the
dog was on him again within a few steps, jerking him to the ground.
As it turned out, the suspect was a decoy-another transit cop, posing as a
troublemaker.
The second attack, though, had been unscripted: the decoy hadn't meant to 
act as
if he were running away. The dog wasn't wrong," Rothschild said. It's a 
police
dog's
job to perceive threats, and the handler's job to keep the dog in check. 
This is
the hardest part of canine work. You have to put emergency brakes on these
creatures,"
one handler told me. A single loss of control could cause wrongful injury,
lawsuits,
or even death, but the dog doesn't know that. As Stewart Hilliard, a 
specialist
in
animal learning who works with the canine program at Lackland Air Force 
Base,
put
it, "You can't think of a reward more desirable to a dog than the 
opportunity to
keep biting that person.
A few weeks earlier, at the National Police Dog Field Trials, in Detroit 
Lakes,
Minnesota,
I'd watched several dozen dogs wrestle with their conscience. The field 
trials
are
a kind of canine decathlon, modelled on Schutzhund competitions. They bring
together
the best-trained police dogs in the country to test their agility, 
obedience,
and
ability to track criminals and catch them. Rothschild and his German 
shepherd
were
there to represent New York, along with four other dogs and handlers from 
their
region.
Detroit Lakes sits on a flat, glacier-scoured plain about an hour east of 
Fargo.
Some officers had driven as far as fifteen hundred miles to get there, but 
were
unprepared
for the freezing rain and the local fare. ("It's September-I brought all 
shorts!
Rothschild told me the first night, at a local buffet, while his teammates 
eyed
the
bratwurst; "I'm not eatin' those things," one of them said.) The night 
before,
on
the drive in from North Dakota, I'd received a speeding ticket on a desolate
stretch
of road. I later heard that the same thing had happened to two of the police
officers-and
they were driving their cruisers at the time.
A lot of people are under the misapprehension that this is a dog show," one 
of
the
judges, Gary Pietropaolo, a mustachioed ex-cop from Yonkers, told me the 
next
day.
We were sitting in folding chairs on a baseball field, watching the
criminal-apprehension
trial. By then, I'd seen dogs search for guns in tall grass, and dogs sniff 
out
a
suspect hidden in rows of identical wooden boxes. In this case, they had to
chase
down a gunman, bite his arm, and waylay him until the handler caught up to 
make
the
arrest. It was a stylized routine, scored on niceties of execution-sitting
slightly
askew at a handler's side was enough to earn a deduction-but the dogs seemed
deadly
serious. At least four dogs had been killed or severely injured in the line 
of
duty
in the past year. One was thrown into traffic by an armed robber; another 
bit
into
a brick of cocaine; another was stabbed repeatedly; the last barely survived 
an
attempted
drowning. If it's not a violent felon, you typically don't send in the dog,"
Pietropaolo
said. In the use-of-force scale, it's almost equal to using a nightstick.
Earlier that morning, as I was running across the field to join the judges, 
I'd
suddenly
realized that I was being watched. At the other end of the field, a half 
dozen
German
shepherds were lined up along a fence, their eyes locked on my every move. 
To
them,
I must have seemed like just another target-a man in a turkey suit, dashing
through
the forest on opening day of hunting season. You got lucky," Rothschild told 
me
later.
Even with a protective sleeve on, an officer he knew was bitten so hard that 
his
arm broke in two places, and Rothschild bore a dozen scars from trials gone
awry.
It's just something you have to overcome," he said. Most of us never got bit
before
going into canine. But you kind of get the feel of it. It's normal wear and
tear.
Danz, Rothschild's dog, was a big, bristling male with something of his
handler's
swagger. When his turn came in the trial, he sat without a twitch while the
decoy
shot off a round and ran down the field. Then, at a murmured word from
Rothschild,
the dog took off-body low to the ground, feet a blur, like a shaggy brown
missile.
He was halfway across the field, in mid-flight, when Rothschild yelled 
"Stop!
The
effect was immediate: Danz peeled away, circled back to his handler, and sat
squarely
at his side-a near-perfect routine.
Others weren't so successful. When David Causey, a patrolman from Lake 
County,
Florida,
called his animal off, you could almost see the dog weighing his options. He
glanced
back at Causey, slowed down for a moment, then hunched his shoulders and
accelerated
toward the target. That's called 'He fucked you,' " Causey's friend David
Williams
told me. Fifty points off. He's out of the competition.
For Causey, the result was made even worse by a sense of déjà vu. The year
before,
on the last day of the field trials, the same dog had bitten a decoy's hand 
and
then,
for good measure, his crotch. It was a case of accidental reinforcement, 
Causey
said.
A few weeks earlier, in Florida, his dog had chased a felon into a closet. A
rough
struggle ensued until the dog, in desperation, bit the man between the legs.
Immediate
surrender. The next time the dog chased down a suspect, he tried the same 
trick.
Success again! By the time the field trials rolled around, the behavior was
locked
in.
When Causey and Williams told me this story, we were having breakfast at a
coffee
shop with Kurt Dumond, the officer who had received the unfortunate bite.
Williams,
a garrulous Cajun with a life-size revolver tattooed on his hip ("I'm always
packing"),
pulled out his cell phone and called up some pictures he'd taken at the
emergency
room: Dumond in a pale-blue hospital gown, followed by several distressing
closeups
of his scrotum. That's a mess right there," Dumond said. Williams nodded. 
The
nurse,
when she sees it, she goes, 'Woo woooooo! Then the doctor comes out and 
goes,
'That
is going to hurt! Kurt, he'd just told me he had a little laceration. I 
didn't
realize
it was thirteen stitches' worth. This year, Williams added, Dumond wore a 
cup.
How do you keep a dog in line? The answer used to be simple: you smacked it 
or
yelled
at it or yanked on its chain. It wasn't pretty, but it could get the job 
done.
Punishment
and compulsion are still common in dog training, though usually in more 
subtle
forms-a
tug on a leash, for instance, or a mild shock from an electric collar.
Traditional
trainers, from the monks of New Skete to Schutzhund champions like Friedrich
Biehler,
can produce very accomplished dogs. But, as behaviorism has worked its way 
from
aquariums
to kennels, more and more dogs are being taught with positive reinforcement,
often
using a handheld clicker. You used to wait until the dog did something 
wrong,
then
corrected it," Michele Pouliot, the director of research and development at
Guide
Dogs for the Blind in Oregon, told me. Now you're rewarding a behavior you 
like
before
it goes wrong.
Like so much else in the dog world, the change mirrors a trend in child
rearing-and
provokes the same heated debate. ("The only thing two dog trainers can agree
about
is what the third dog trainer is doing wrong," Steve White told me.) The 
tough
love
of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, and the tender manipulations of Victoria
Stilwell,
the host of "It's Me or the Dog," have their exact analogues in parenting
styles.
Hearing Pouliot talk about headstrong, distractible puppies-the kind that
usually
make good police dogs-is a lot like hearing an elementary-school teacher 
talk
about
attention-deficit disorder and the trouble with boys. If a dog loves 
squirrels,
you
have to find something that excites him so much it overpowers the squirrel
instinct,"
Pouliot told me. If you're constantly on top of him-punishing, punishing,
punishing-that
behavior is not going away. You have to get that dog to try to figure out 
what
you
want.
Canine police are conservative by nature. They have little margin for error 
or
experiment,
so they tend to play the Tiger Moms in this debate. It goes like this," Gary
Pietropaolo,
the judge from Yonkers, told me. You always want to use positive motivation
first.
But, if that was the only thing we used with these animals, we wouldn't have
enough
shelters in this country. What do you do with the dog that, if you show him 
the
clicker,
he shows you his teeth? Do you just kill him?
It was the third day of the field trials, and Pietropaolo and the other 
judges
were
gathered in a conference room at the Holiday Inn, pooling their scores. Kurt
Dumond's
dog, Erek, held a thin lead over the rest of the field, with Rothschild's 
Danz
in
fifth place. (Erek would eventually drop to third, Danz to eleventh, and the
championship
would go to a dog from Austin, Minnesota, named Ghost-one of only a few 
Belgian
Malinois
in a sea of German shepherds.) The best handlers never abuse their dogs,
Pietropaolo
said, but, like good parents, they make their authority clear. If you tell 
your
kid
to sit down and be quiet at the table, and he doesn't do it, it's over. You 
have
to make it happen. But you don't necessarily have to grab him by the hair 
and
drag
him around. The judge beside him grinned. I still use a choke chain on the 
kid,"
he said.
Guide-dog trainers were a lot like the police once, Michele Pouliot told me.
Their
methods were rooted in military dog training, brought over from Europe after 
the
two world wars. Everything was steeped in this tradition of very harsh
treatment,"
she said. Everything was 'You're wrong.' " Then, six years ago, Guide Dogs 
for
the
Blind switched over to positive reinforcement. It was a huge undertaking,"
Pouliot
told me. We have sixty-five instructors who took years to get good at what
they're
doing. You're asking them to flip-flop a whole set of technical skills. It's
like
starting all over.
The benefits are already clear, Pouliot said. Less than half the dogs in her
program
used to complete their training successfully; now the number is close to
three-quarters.
And the dogs are doing things they could never do before, unbelievable 
things,"
she
said. One of Pouliot's specialties is canine musical freestyle-essentially,
dancing
with your dog. On YouTube, you can see her Australian shepherd, Listo, doing 
its
best Ginger Rogers: waltzing backward, spinning pirouettes, doing 
double-takes,
handstands,
and cancan kicks, all to a medley of TV theme songs. If you break down that
routine
and ask a traditional trainer, 'How do you train that? he'd say, 'Hmm,' "
Pouliot
told me. It would be impossible. If I jerk a dog on a leash, I can make him 
sit.
I can make him cringe. But I can't make him show his natural joy.
Police dogs, though, aren't like other animals. Their work is inherently 
harsh
and
contradictory. Joy is often beside the point. We have to have an animal 
that's
willing
to consummate its aggression on a living, breathing human, then contain it
enough
to come back to you," one trainer told me. That's a lot to ask of any being,
much
less a dog. Positive reinforcement may be better at coaxing dogs into 
dancing
figure
eights and giving high fives, as Pouliot's partners do. But a certain amount 
of
stress
could inure an animal to the rigors of the street or the battlefield. Dogs 
that
are
trained in a completely positive way, you deploy them in Afghanistan with 
the
bombs
going off-I think they'll crumble," a trainer at Auburn told me.
The program at Auburn is like boot camp for dogs. The Canine Detection 
Research
Institute
occupies part of an old military base in Anniston, Alabama, in the foothills 
of
the
southern Appalachians. When I visited, two weeks after the national field
trials,
I was taken to a low metal building across the road from the main offices.
Inside,
a narrow corridor was flanked by rows of steel cages, each with a small door
that
led to a dog run, outside. The air was edged with traces of ammonia and 
feces
and
reverberated with near-constant barking. Overhead, a loudspeaker system 
piped in
still more noise: equipment clanking, boots stomping, engines roaring, bombs
exploding.
That's a Spook Less soundtrack," my guide explained. The system was first
developed
for stables, he said, and was used by police to get their horses ready for 
riot
squads
and other unsettling duties. The recordings could be swapped out to simulate
thunderstorms,
fireworks, screaming crowds, or construction sites. At one point, after a
bombing
raid-"I think that's 'Saving Private Ryan' "-I heard some bagpipes playing. 
When
I asked what they were for, I was told that police have to attend a lot of
funerals.
Auburn specializes in detection dogs. It has twenty-five trainers, who 
supply
about
a hundred animals a year to Amtrak, Federal Protective Services, and police
departments
around the country, including the N.Y.P.D. (Rothschild and his German 
shepherd,
Danz,
both trained there.) The average canine graduate costs twenty-one thousand
dollars,
including ten weeks of lessons for the handler. An élite Vapor Wake 
dog-"They're
like the Michael Jordans of dogs," one of the trainers told me. They can 
pick
fragments
out of the air"-costs thirty-two thousand, with an extra six weeks of 
training.
Detection dogs tend to vary by country and by national temperament. The 
French
like
standard poodles, the English springer spaniels. The Russians, in the Moscow
airport,
use a strange little breed called a Sulimov dog-a mixture of wild jackal,
Lapland
herding dog, and other breeds-which is said to be the world's best bomb 
sniffer.
Bloodhounds have long been used as trackers in the South. But at Auburn, as 
at
most
canine-detection programs in the country, the cages were filled with 
Labrador
retrievers.
They were good-natured, highly driven animals, and less liable to bite than
pointy-eared
dogs. They were in such demand, in fact, that Auburn was also experimenting 
with
other breeds, including springer spaniels and German pointers. The country 
is
almost
out of Labs for detection work," one broker told me. They're gone. And they
don't
have any Labs in Europe, either. I had a department wait ten months for one
before
I found it.
Dogs have such good noses that almost any breed can detect explosives. If 
there
are
differences among them, they're probably well within the margin of error for 
our
ability to measure them," Paul Waggoner, the behavioral scientist at the
institute,
told me. The big key is trainability. Waggoner, who is forty-five, is a 
bearded,
bearish figure with an unnerving habit of rolling his eyes back in his head 
as
he
talks, like a psychic. Bloodhounds are usually too single-minded for 
detection
work,
he said. Once they've hit a trail, they can seem "brutally stupid" when 
asked to
change gears. Border collies can be too smart for their own good: they 
follow
their
handlers' cues rather than their own noses. Coonhounds like to go off
crittering;
dachshunds are too small and stumbly underfoot; and Doberman pinschers scare 
the
bejesus out of people. What's left are friendly working breeds like 
retrievers
and
pointers: animals both social and independent, whose bloodlines have been 
better
maintained than those of most show dogs.
If patrol dogs are the Swiss Army knives of the canine world, detection dogs 
are
the shivs. They don't have to chase down felons, disarm robbers, or respond 
to
the
slightest cue. They just have to find bombs. Even so, until recently, only 
one
in
four dogs made it through the program. Like Schutzhund and guide-dog 
schools,
Auburn
sent its puppies to families for basic training, then brought them back for
detection
work after a year. But the dogs had to contend with so many 
environments-when I
visited,
they ran drills in a school, a shopping mall, along a highway, and in a
mega-church-that
any phobia was eventually found out. Rothschild's dog, for instance, was 
afraid
of
slippery floors as a puppy, and he needed weeks of practice to get used to
jumping
fences.
Four years ago, Auburn decided to try a more rigorous approach. The puppies 
now
go
to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they're trained and cared for by
convicts
in their cells. The companionship seems to have done the men good: some have
been
able to reduce their medications, and a few have gone on to become 
professional
trainers.
But the effect on the dogs has been even more dramatic. You have startling
noises
and startling sights 24/7," one of the trainers told me. You have crowds,
stairs,
slick floors, grated floors. If a dog can get used to those, you know he's 
not
going
to be fearful. Eighty per cent of Auburn's puppies now go on to become 
detection
dogs.
I went to see the Vapor Wakes the next morning. They were being trained in 
an
abandoned
building near the woods, where the Army once taught officers to interrogate
prisoners.
Its dingy halls were lined with doors marked "Do Not Disturb: Interview in
Progress,"
each one with an identical office behind it. To find a person carrying a 
bomb in
here, an ordinary dog would have had to search the building systematically,
sniffing
its way from room to room. The Vapor Wakes didn't bother. They'd been taught 
to
track
explosives like living prey, following the trail of scent particles left
suspended
in the air.
I'll hide in one of these rooms, then you bring her in," Tim Baird, the head
trainer,
told his assistant. He took a vest filled with TNT and wrapped it around his
waist.
Then he walked down the hall, turned the corner, and ducked into an office 
along
the next corridor. The assistant brought in a small black Lab named Faye, 
her
tail
wagging furiously. She'd had thirty-nine days of detection training and 
twenty
of
Vapor Wake, and she knew that every drill was another chance at a reward. 
She
scampered
in a circle for a while, flaring the air, then took off in the wrong 
direction.
Nothing
there. She doubled back, sniffed at my pants-I'd stood next to Baird while 
he
was
stuffing the vest with dynamite-then shook me off and ran down the hall,
catching
a scent.
A dog sniffs the air like a wine taster, Waggoner had told me. It takes 
short,
sharp
breaths-as many as ten per second-drawing the scent deep into the nasal 
cavity
to
the olfactory epithelium. The receptors there are a hundred times denser 
than in
a human, and can detect a wide array of molecules. When I followed Faye down 
the
hall, I found her in the office, sitting on her haunches-the signal for "the
bomb
is here"-watching Baird with barely contained excitement. He reached into 
his
pocket
and pulled out a well-chewed tennis ball, then threw it down the hall with a
whoop.
Faye caught it on the first bounce.
The whole sequence had taken about thirty seconds. In one study, in Michigan 
in
2000,
police dogs managed to track down suspects ninety-three per cent of the 
time,
compared
with fifty-nine per cent for teams of two to four police officers. And the 
dogs
did
it five to ten times faster. Vapor Wakes focus on explosives-in an adjacent
room,
Baird taught the dogs to find more than a dozen kinds of chemical by hiding 
them
in a wall fitted with small compartments-but other dogs have been taught to 
find
everything from bedbugs to termites, lung cancer, diabetes, and the lithium 
in
cell
phones. At Auburn, a dog that can't cut it as a bomb detector could find 
work as
a fungus hound, sniffing out growths that attack and kill the roots of pine
trees
in the Southeast.
Its esteem for dogs notwithstanding, the university hasn't given up on
mechanizing
them. When I was in Waggoner's office, later that day, he played me a video 
from
a project called Autonomous Canine Navigation. It showed a yellow Labrador
moving
through a bomb site wearing an elaborate headset and a harness. The harness
contained
a computer, a video camera, a G.P.S., and an accelerometer, all remotely
controlled.
As we watched, a man on a rooftop transmitted some coördinates to the 
computer
below,
which directed the dog to the target by playing tones for "Left," "Right," 
and
"Stop"
over the headset. The computer can get within three metres," Waggoner said.
That's
more accurate than under human control. When the dog came to a doorway, it
sniffed
at the threshold and lay down. By then, a sensor had detected its rapid-fire
breathing,
which meant an explosive had been found. Lying down set off a switch on its
belly,
confirming the discovery.
The video ended with a tennis ball flying down from the roof and the dog 
jumping
up to snatch it. Even cyborgs, it seems, can use a little positive
reinforcement.
New York City is now experimenting with a simpler version of canine 
navigation.
In
October, it acquired an infrared video camera that mounts on a dog's back 
and
can
be remotely monitored by police. We can see what the dog is seeing," John
Pappas,
the head of the transit squad, told me. So we can use it in a building 
search.
If
there's a suspicious box, instead of sending a human being down there, I'll 
send
in the dog, then call him back if things look suspicious. The purchase was
approved
after the raid on Osama bin Laden, in which a Belgian Malinois named Cairo
played
an important role. The real technology here is the dog," Pappas said, "and a 
lot
of it is centered on the nose. That's the most useful tool we have.
On my last day with the squad, Rothschild and Brenner took the dogs for a 
sweep
of
Grand Central Terminal. It was nine o'clock on a Friday morning and a final 
wave
of commuters was rushing from the trains. Police in riot gear stood guard by 
the
tunnels to the tracks, machine guns at the ready, while voices blared 
overhead.
When
two of the squad's Vapor Wakes ambled in from the street, they stopped at 
the
entrance
and stared. The mess hall in a Georgia prison had nothing on this scene: a
thousand
New Yorkers late for their appointments. It's an extreme situation," 
Rothschild
said.
But we try to put the dogs in the hardest scenarios possible. We don't know 
how
the
next explosive is going to go through. The dogs didn't seem to mind. They 
just
lifted
their noses and sniffed the air.
Earlier that morning, Rothschild had arranged for two decoys to make runs
through
the subway and the train terminal. One would be carrying seven pounds of
ammonium
nitrate, wrapped in black panty hose and stuffed in a backpack; the other 
would
have
twenty pounds of dynamite in a baby stroller. Vapor Wakes can track a scent 
in
the
air for up to half an hour, I was told, but the trail wouldn't last long in
Grand
Central. You have the trains pulling in air over here," Rothschild said. 
You've
got
the mass of people pulling the air down under these arches. You've got vents
bringing
it around, and the smells from all the restaurants. He shook his head. It's 
like
when a boat passes. You can see the wave right afterward, but eventually it
dissipates.
Horacio Maldonado, one of the new recruits, positioned himself under an 
arched
entrance
on the west side of the station. His black Lab, Ray, could smell most of the
passersby
from there-she had a range of about thirty feet-but a crowd like this was 
full
of
false leads. The chemicals found in explosives can also be found in drugs,
cosmetics,
fertilizer, construction supplies, and other mundanities. I'd heard of a 
police
dog
driven wild by a table patched with plastic wood filler, and a dog tearing 
down
a
wall with nail-gun cartridges hidden inside it. I remember one time, we 
stopped
a
guy in Columbus Circle, he had two hundred nitrogen pills in his pocket,"
Maldonado
told me. Turned out he was going to Europe and had just come from his 
doctor. So
you've got to use your common sense. The guy's sixty, seventy years old. He
isn't
sweating. Does he look like a suicide bomber?
False positives are the bugbears of canine detection, but the bigger problem 
is
miscommunication.
A leash can be like a faulty phone line. The handler thinks the dog is 
telling
him
something; the dog thinks it's the handler's idea. ("Dogs are pretty easy," 
one
trainer
told me. The problem is usually at the other end of the leash.") At Auburn 
one
afternoon,
I'd watched Waggoner put a Labrador into an fMRI scanner, to see which part 
of
its
brain lit up when detecting a scent. Some day, he said, detection dogs may 
carry
EEGs that set off an alarm when a bomb is found. For now, though, cops and 
dogs
have
no choice but to try to talk to one another.
When the explosives went by, they were about twenty feet from Maldonado. The
decoy,
a young man in a blue sweatshirt with a Mets cap underneath the hood, was 
buried
so deep in the crowd that I almost missed him. The Vapor Wake didn't. She 
lunged
forward on her leash, Maldonado stumbling behind. The decoy walked beneath 
the
arch
and down the corridor, heading toward a set of stairs that led to the 
subway.
Ray
cut zigzags across his trail, zeroing in on the scent. Soon, she was only 
about
ten
feet away, pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a
lizard's,
claws scrabbling on the tile. She was about to catch up when a middle-aged 
woman
sauntered by with three toy dogs on a leash beside her. Ray stopped and 
glanced
at
them-a little hungrily, I thought-then shook her head and continued. But by 
then
the trail had drifted, and the decoy was down the stairs.
It was a rare mistake. I'd seen the Vapor Wakes catch half a dozen decoys 
that
week,
and even Ray found her man eventually, when he doubled back through the 
subway.
But
would she have caught him in real life? Yeah, she was in odor," Rothschild 
said.
She was just eliminating the possibilities. She would have gotten him.
Afterward, when Ray was chasing her tennis ball around, some commuters 
stopped
to
watch. They were standing in one of the world's prime targets for terrorism,
surrounded
by a bomb squad with a suspect in custody, but that didn't seem to concern 
them.
They smiled and watched the nice dog play with its ball, then hurried on 
their
way.
Detection-dog stories almost always have happy endings. If they don't, they
aren't
about dogs anymore. When the training session was over, Rothschild went to 
get
Danz,
who was waiting in a mobile kennel, nearby. His cage was brand new and 
luxurious
by most standards-custom-built and climate-controlled, with sensors that 
would
sound
an alarm and open the windows if the air got too hot-but Danz was glad to be
free
of it. He leaped to the ground when the gate opened, and shook his fur as if
casting
off a rope. Then he ran to Rothschild's side and waited, as always, for a
signal.
It was a cold, clear morning, with sunlight streaming through the treetops, 
and
the
last patches of green were aglow in Bryant Park. Rothschild waited a beat, 
just
to
remind the dog who was in charge, then quietly said "Empty. Danz jumped into 
the
ivy and lifted his leg to a lamppost, glancing back to make sure this was 
O.K. A
police dog's life is all about delayed gratification. You know that ball ? 
You
can
' t have it . Not right now . That treat ? Maybe later , if you do exactly 
what
I
say . Danz had an alpha male's domineering drive-it wasn't hard to imagine 
him
howling
at the head of a pack-but he'd long since learned to tamp it down. And who 
was
to
say he wasn't happier this way: always cared for, always needed, always 
knowing
exactly
what was expected of him?
Some police keep their dogs in a crate at night, when the family is around. 
My
husband
doesn't put his gun on the kitchen table," Kurt Dumond's wife, Helen, told 
me.
And
he doesn't let his police dog loose in the house. But Rothschild, who had 
two
young
children, let his dog roam free at home. Danz was named for Vincent Danz, a 
New
York
cop and family friend, who died in the attacks on September 11th, and 
Rothschild
never forgot that the dog was also looking after him. He let Danz wander 
through
the park a while longer. This is his time," he said. His time to play. When 
he
empties,
I just let him be a dog.