The Dogs of War

There’s a great article at National Geographic online about military working dogs and their handlers here:

War Dogs
Although I once wrote for Bill Faith’s website, Old War Dogs, may both rest in peace, and visited the dog training facility at Lackland AFB a couple of times on pharmaceutical business, I really didn’t know that much about the dogs’ training and their uses. The recent reading of a police procedural novel, Suspect, by Robert Crais, taught me a great deal more than I had previously known. Crais pairs a PTSD suffering Los Angeles policeman who lost his female partner in a murderous ambush with a PTSD suffering former military working dog who also lost her partner and handler in an equally murderous ambush in Afghanistan. Their partnering makes for a very entertaining read.

What makes this book unique is how Crais devotes a few chapters to detailing events and perceptions from the dog’s perspective. If you’ve ever wondered how dogs are able to detect and differentiate between so many different smells, you’ll learn by reading Suspect.

I once wrote a piece for American Thinker where I referenced dogs riding in autos and pickups with their muzzles turned eagerly into the wind with their ears flapping and their tongues lolling happily as they enjoyed the ride far more than their drivers. An editor at AT spiked that piece telling me that his big-city vet said allowing dogs to ride face into the wind was harmful. I responded that I had lived much of my life in Oklahoma, West Texas, New Mexico as well as fifteen years in the Deep South, where dogs riding with their muzzles in the wind were a common sight, and never once had I heard of any adverse effects.

The AT editor refused to relent, so I didn’t get the piece published; but I did check with my own vet who was raised on a large ranch and whose practice is primarily rural. She, too, said that in her many years as a ranch vet, she’d never seen a single instance of a dog harmed by riding in vehicles except for the occasional mutt who got too carried away with all the fun it was having and fell overboard. She explained that due to a dog’s expansive and hypersensitive olfactory system, a ride with its nose in the wind was the canine equivalent of an LSD trip due to the swarms of scents they were passing through, which explains their exuberant behavior. I reported that to the intransigent editor but he remained unyielding, trusting the expertise of his urban practitioner to that of my ol’ rancher vet.

There’s a very good Wikipedia page on war dogs as well with an amusing bit about the Russian Army’s failure in WWII to turn working dogs into antitank weapons against the German panzer units. Dogs were fitted with mines with extended toggle switches designed to be triggered when the dogs ran under enemy tanks. The program failed because the dogs, trained with stationery Russian tanks, were reluctant to run under a moving tank and when they did, they tended to select Russian tanks like those with which they’d been trained. There’s a treasure trove of such information on that Wikipedia site.

NOT crossposted at American Thinker.

Category: Military issues