Canis familiaris, more humbly known as man’s best friend, has been going to combat since 400BC—possibly even earlier. Back then dogs were used as forward attack elements in the Peloponnesian War between the Greeks and Corinthians. Attila the Hun relied on dogs as sentinels during his conquest of Europe in the fifth century. Eleven hundred years later the Italian naturalist, Aldrovandus, detailed how the ancient Greeks bred particularly ferocious war dogs, trained to ‘be an enemy to everybody but his master’. They were given names indicative of their roles: Symmachi, for allies, and Somatophylakes, for bodyguards.
The English were fond of the fighting dog too. King Henry VIII and his daughter, the first Queen Elizabeth, used hundreds of hounds in battle. Across the English Channel the French emperor Napoleon, no lover of dogs as previously noted, employed them against the enemy and famously chained them to the walls of Alexandria to warn of looming danger. Napoleon later wrote of being stirred to the point of tears at the sight of a devoted dog sitting beside his slain master at the end of a battle in Europe in 1798. The dog’s grief haunted him unlike any other tragedy he had witnessed at war.
Soldiers in the Confederate and Union armies in the American Civil War trained dogs to catch fleeing prisoners and called them, somewhat ominously, ‘hounds of hell’. The author of War Dogs, A History of Loyalty and Heroism, Michael G. Lemish, writes that the escapees would have been terrified of the massive beasts on their trail, for to be caught ‘meant severe mutilation or death’.
In the Second World War, the United States military finally caught up with its Australian counterparts and officially used canines to patrol the coastline. Shortly after, it began the Dogs for Defence program in which Uncle Sam called on the public to donate healthy, obedient dogs to defend the nation. To support the war effort, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted his dog in the army. Fala, a Scottish terrier, achieved the rank of private. The promotional stunt worked and more than 19,000 family pets were contributed, of which more than half passed the recruitment test. Dogs have been deployed ever since.
Over time, war dogs have been used as messengers, mascots, ambulances, combatants, carriers, couriers, trackers, scouts and sentries. They have attacked approaching enemy fighters and horses wearing body armour and sharply spiked collars, and guarded fortress perimeters to prevent entry as much as escape. They pulled carts loaded with machine-guns and small cannons and wagons with wounded soldiers; they delivered messages to distant commanders, located fallen troopers, dragged them from the line of fire and delivered medication, water and, poignantly, comfort to the dying. Fast and agile, they also made for smaller targets and thus were more difficult to shoot than humans.
Fast forward to the present day. High-tech dogs abseil out of helicopters and parachute from planes to land with their masters in otherwise inaccessible places. The dogs love it. They have no concept of height and the rush of wind on the dog’s face is their equivalent of nirvana. The highest human-hound air assault was a 30,000 foot leap by a US Navy SEAL and his dog, Cara.
The now famous SEAL Team 6 that tracked down and killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, took with them a highly trained dog named Cairo. The fearsome warrior was winched down into bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan from the MH-60 helicopter along with the twenty hardened Marines. Details of Cairo’s mission are closely guarded but he was trained to sniff out explosives or find the high-value target if he had been hidden in the compound. Cairo was also trained as an attack and guard dog. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, has since had a private audience with President Obama and will be remem-bered for his role in one of the most daring combat raids in contemporary military history.
The modern military dog like Cairo fares much better than its historical counterpart. Today’s combat hounds wear sophisticated body armour and custom-built life vests. Heavily armoured assault jackets have been constructed to be bulletproof, stab proof and shrapnel proof. They even have vests equipped with long-range GPS systems. According to Foreign Policy magazine, the elite SEAL dogs like Cairo have infrared night-sight cameras and intruder communications systems able to penetrate concrete walls.
For all their brilliant agility and utility, the dogs also provide something more. Loyal guardianship.
In Afghanistan three stray dogs named Sasha, Rufus and Target prevented a suicide bomber from penetrating a US army barracks where 50 soldiers were relaxing in 2010. The mongrels attacked the intruder who detonated his suicide bomb vest, blowing himself up with 25 pounds of C4 explosives. Sasha was killed but Rufus and Target, who was pregnant and would later give birth to five pups, survived the blast. The soldiers nursed them to health—‘they were our babies’. The grateful men whose lives they saved repatriated Rufus and Target to the United States. Unfortunately, Target was later wrongly euthanised by an animal shelter when she wandered away from her home. Her tragic plight and pretty beseeching face made headlines around the world. Dog lovers grieved as if they had lost their own cherished pet.
Dogs grieve too. In 2011 animal experts said it was possible that an explosive detection dog with the British Army had died from a heart seizure just hours after his devoted companion, Lance Corporal Liam Tasker, was killed in a firefight with insurgents in Afghanistan. Theo, a springer spaniel-mix, was not quite two years old. ‘I think we underestimate the grieving process in dogs. Some dogs react very severely to their partner’s loss,’ a senior veterinarian said after Theo died.
With such loyalty, it is no wonder dogs have been hailed as heroes, honoured with military funerals and awarded an array of medals for bravery and service. Monuments have been built and portraits painted to record dogs’ unyielding loyalty to man.
And yet. Much of it has not ended well for the devoted dog conscripted to war.
One of the most disturbing uses of man’s best friend was by the Soviets in the Second World War, in a savage effort to repel invading German tanks. The Russians trained dogs to find food hidden under tanks. In the days before the expected confrontations, the hounds were starved. As enemy tanks approached, soldiers strapped an explosives-filled coat on the backs of the innocent canines, freed them from their bonds and sent them in search of food. The dogs did as trained and crawled under the tanks, which triggered a raised detonator attached to the top of the coat. The bomb exploded, the dog was killed and casualties and fatalities were inflicted on the enemy. It is remarkably easy to feel sorry for them, these trusting hounds callously written off as expendable military equipment.
Thankfully, the Russian barbarity was abandoned when soldiers discovered that, while obedient and smart, the dogs had some limitations—the most serious being an inability to tell the difference between enemy and Soviet tanks. Dogs might not be colour-blind in the full sense of the word but they were blind to national insignias. That wasn’t all; no matter how desperately starved they were, some dogs were gun shy. Instead of barrelling headfirst into battle, they shied away from it, an instinctive fear that reduced their reliability and effectiveness but saved them from blowing themselves up.
Other nations and combatants also have been callous in their disregard for the kindliness and willingness of dogs to please and serve us humans, and it makes one wonder. If dogs can read human gestures and human behaviour better than any other species, including the marvellously intelligent chimpanzee, as American scientist Brian Hare recently argued, it seems an especially cruel oversight that they can’t read or foretell man’s duplicity. The tragedy of the anti-tank dogs shows the purity of canine loyalty.
The easiest and perhaps surest way to understand a dog is to accept that it sees the world through its nose and that it is, quite literally, a nose-aholic. The canine nose is the dog’s lifeline and it uses it in every interaction it undertakes. Dog noses are different to our human ones, physically and functionally. As well as having pride of place on a dog’s face, the nose has front nostrils that extend into flexible side slits to assist the sniffing process, and its shape is specifically designed to breathe in and out at the same time. Impressive, yes?
The nose has an internal membranous and bone structure built for smelling, armed with millions of receptor sites to process whatever smell, foul or otherwise, they have inhaled deeply and repeatedly. Compare. We humans have just six million receptor sites. The average dog has 220 million. A bloodhound, considered the crème de la canine of nose work, has about 30 million more. No wonder it has been dubbed ‘a nose with a dog attached’. As Alexandra Horowitz writes in her best-selling book, Inside of A Dog, ‘Dogs have more genes committed to coding olfactory cells, more cells, and more kinds (her emphasis) of cells, able to detect more kinds of smells.’
And what smells!
The non-profit Pine Street Foundation in California has taught five dogs to detect ovarian cancer in humans by smelling samples of their breath. The dogs are all pets of families who live near the research facility in San Anselmo, located 32 kilometres north of San Francisco. None of the volunteer hounds had any scent training before their proud owners signed them up to be scientific researchers. The canines were trained using operant conditioning, with a clicker and using food as rewards, and are now ready to go to work. By the end of 2011 the foundation will have completed recruiting ovarian cancer patients to then ‘closely examine the chemistry of exhaled breath,’ says the foundation’s research director Michael McCulloch.
McCulloch hopes the study will lead to the discovery of a new non-invasive test for this insidious disease, known as the ‘silent killer’ because it is usually detected in its later, more aggressive stages when treatment is less effective.
Pine Street has a strong track record. In 2006, researchers led by McCulloch taught another five dogs to sniff out the chemical changes in people who had recently been diagnosed with breast and lung cancer. The scientists worked out that canines can differentiate between cancerous and healthy cells because cancerous ones emit different metabolic waste products. The dogs accurately detected cancer cells at all four stages of the disease and across all age groups within 12,000 samples from 55 lung cancer patients, 31 breast cancer patients and 83 healthy controls.
In 2010, McCulloch and Emily Moser from the New College of Florida went on a search mission to examine all peer-reviewed studies on cancer-detecting canines. They narrowed in on six studies in which dogs had been used to detect breast, ovarian, lung and prostate cancers and melanoma. Their conclusion after reviewing the work was optimistic. ‘Early successes with canine scent detection suggest chemical analysis of exhaled breath may be a valid method for cancer detection.’
That man’s best friend really is the top dog in scientific research when it comes to scent and sniff should come as no great surprise. Pups are born blind and begin life relying on smell and touch. Ground scenting and air scenting—in fact, any scenting—comes naturally. In 1989 the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, reported the first known case in the United Kingdom of a dog owner whose hound alerted her to a melanoma by repeatedly licking the cancerous spot on her leg. That tongue-lashing saved her life. A few years before that, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a Shetland sheepdog in New York detected a virulent form of melanoma on its owner’s back. The discovery ultimately led scientists to test the diagnostic abilities of dogs in a project partly supported by the National Institutes of Health. ‘It may well be that, someday in the future, inspection by a dog may become a routine part of cancer screening,’ said Richard Simmons, a research associate who worked on the project.
McCulloch believes the dog nose is ‘one of the most sophisticated odour detection devices on the planet’, so sophisticated that it can sniff out a few tiny molecules in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. McCulloch’s colleague and the medical director at Pine Street, Michael Broffman, puts it rather more charmingly, ‘We often refer to our dogs as the best and original PET-scan.’
Knowing and accepting our limitations and as we learn more about the fine intelligence of man’s best friend, humans are increasingly calling on dogs to do a range of complicated and dexterous tasks. We faithfully put our lives directly in their paws. They guide the blind, hear for the deaf, help the physically disabled, find the lost, in body and soul, and even nurture stressed victims in criminal trials. They aid search and rescue missions when Mother Nature has unleashed her worst, or when the unthinkable happens, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
A retired Canadian search and rescue police dog named Trakr located the twentieth and last survivor of the World Trade Center attacks buried beneath ten metres of concrete and twisted metal. Genelle Guzman-McMillan had been trapped for more than twenty-three hours when Trakr indicated to his handler, James Symington, that he’d detected a human being close by.
‘Trakr came to a sudden stop . . . [his] body became still and erect . . . Trakr’s ears perked up and his tail stiffened. There was no doubt about it at that point: Trakr sensed somebody close by was buried alive. That somebody was me,’ she writes in her autobiography, Angel in the Rubble.
Four hours later, Guzman-McMillan was cut free from her concrete tomb in the mountain of burning debris.
Dogs also have been taught to detect pending seizures in epileptics and hypoglycaemic attacks in diabetics. They can smell fear, because fear smells. They can smell confidence and anger, too, for as Horowitz points out, pheromones are released when we are alarmed and charmed and our bodies go through physiological and metabolic changes. They magically teach prisoners and juvenile delinquents the meaning of compassion, care and responsibility. Therapy canines calm and comfort the sick. Doggie soothsayers foretell imminent earthquakes and thunderstorms.
Right now in Australia scientists at Monash University in the southern state of Victoria are investigating whether dogs can detect the range of raw human emotions, with a focus on determining whether dogs prefer happy or sad people. ‘There is some anecdotal evidence that if you have had a bad day at the office when you get home your dog knows it and comes up and gives you a nuzzle,’ says Melbourne-based animal behaviourist, Kate Mornement.
We have no qualms about giving canines the dirty and stinky work and it helps that they love it. Sniff for cadavers? No problem. Bed bugs, termites, dead game and fowl? Easy. If it really reeks, great. You might be turning your nose up but remember that dogs eat faeces, a habit known as coprophagia—disgusting to us but delightful to them. They also sniff other dogs’ urine and excrement and then, more often than not, sign the same spot with a splash of their own. Call it doggie graffiti. Think of how a dog introduces itself to another member of the species—straight to the rear end where its genitalia are located.
Dogs are not prejudiced: they don’t limit themselves to their own species. Remember the last time a dog decided to invade your personal space with an inappropriate sniff of your groin that had you shifting from foot to foot with embarrassment? Dogs have no time for embarrassment, especially when it comes to smells. To the dog, that invasive sniff was the most straightforward way to gather information about you, though, thankfully, we’ll never know what it discovered because it won’t tell.
Take your dog for walk and you will lose count of the times it sniffs repeatedly at something imperceptible to you. Dogs collect a veritable library of information about what’s gone on from invisible and visible stink spots—who’s been there, when they were there, what they did, what they ate for breakfast, if it was healthy, who they were with, on heat or not, dominant, submissive, aggressive, large, small.
Horowitz calls these cumulative piles of aging yet invisible scents from a parade of passing pooches a ‘community centre bulletin board’, and this seems about right. Humans need obvious cues, and many of them, to determine such things; dogs just need their schnoz, one big sniff and some form of physical, even disgusting, nose contact.
Hound expert Stanley Coren likened a dog on a sniffing mission to a human reading a newspaper. Pulling the dog away before it has finished sniffing means it has only ‘read the headlines’, not the whole story. As Coren says, it seems rather mean to deprive the dog of its daily gossip.
The father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, coined the phrase, I think, therefore I am. The canine Cogito would be: I sniff, therefore I am.