The Secret Service goes shopping for dogs in Denver, Indiana, population 471. It’s an eleven-hour drive from RTC when pulling a ten-dog trailer. That’s with just one quick stop and no traffic, and doesn’t include getting stuck behind a horse and carriage.
A couple of the smaller roads that lead to Denver go through Northern Indiana Amish country. Scenic, yes, but to have to slow to five miles an hour when the canine selection team is so close to its destination can be painful. It’s even worse when heading back to D.C. with a trailer full of barking dogs at the beginning of the trip.
“It may be for only two miles, but two miles behind a horse is forever,” says Secret Service canine program instructor Steve M., who makes the trip every few months.
Denver is home to Vohne Liche Kennels, which has provided most of the Secret Service canines since the year 2000. Kenneth (Kenny) Licklider, who started Vohne Liche in 1993 after retiring from the Air Force, says the kennel has trained and/or provided dogs for more than five thousand agencies, including U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC).
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the kennels were often at near capacity. With almost six hundred dogs in the seven kennel buildings, Denver had more dogs than people for a while, and some months it still comes close.
Denver is just a couple of miles away from the larger town of Mexico. But Peru, about five miles south, is the place where most of the Secret Service instructors who select dogs go to eat and spend the night.
Peru, with a population of about 11,200, is the biggest city in Miami County. If you’re a local of a certain age, you may still be pronouncing it pee-roo. It’s no metropolis but it has a past more storied than many cities several times its size.
Depression-era gangster John Dillinger and his gang plundered weapons from a police arsenal in Peru in 1933. The deputies watched dumbstruck as the men ransacked their gun cabinets and made away with a variety of powerful weapons they’d soon use in deadly bank robberies.
In 1972 the ransom from an American Airlines hijacking was found by a farmer tending a soybean field. Another farmer, this one in a corn field, found a submachine gun used in the hijacking.
If that’s not colorful enough, Peru is also the self-proclaimed “Circus Capital of the World.”
“Children in Peru learn circus skills the way other kids learn soccer,” notes an article in USA Today, which also informs that Peru is “where human cannonball is a prestigious occupation.”
From the late 1890s until the 1940s, a half-dozen professional circuses, including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, chose Peru as a place to spend winters because of its relatively central location and proximity to railroads. When they eventually pulled up stakes for good, they left behind a circus-oriented population.
Today Peru is home to the International Circus Hall of Fame Museum, the Circus City Festival and Parade, a youth circus, and the Peru Amateur Circus.
The city is the backdrop for the 2006 film Little Big Top, about an aging drunk whose passion for clowning is reawakened when he moves back to Peru, his hometown. One scene features the real-life Mr. Weenie, a drive-in that’s hard to miss because of its logo: a giant smiling hot dog wearing a bow tie and a hat. A big yellow arrow under the happy hot dog points the hungry to the eatery, where they can get a large selection of wieners and burgers. (On Mondays customers can buy two corn dogs for $1.50.)
The Secret Service canine crews here for “buy trips” are so focused on finding quality canines that they don’t know much about Peru’s circus lore. But there’s a reminder of it every time they come into Peru from a certain direction: a sign with PERU painted in blue, with a painted red circus tent outline and colorful flags over it. Under that, CIRCUS CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
Beneath it all: HOME OF COLE PORTER. Who knew?
The hotel where they often stay is about as close as they come to the city’s big-top reputation. The Best Western Circus City Inn features circus-themed lobby decor, including large clowns etched in glass panels that separate the lobby from the pool. Every so often a young child who is raring to go swimming sees the giant clown faces and runs away, crying.
The town is not an ideal destination for the coulrophobic.
(Vohne Liche also runs its own hotel—a former barracks—down the road at Grissom Air Reserve Base. The refurbished lodging features two-room suites, convenient for handlers who come from across the country to train with dogs. Across the street is the Red Rocket Bar & Grill. The name has a double meaning to those in the dog world, but to most visitors, a red rocket is just a red rocket.)
The Best Western is a dog-friendly hotel. A sign at the front door proclaims, WE LOVE DOGS—BRING FIDO. The Secret Service takes the hotel up on this offer on a regular basis.
During the Service’s weeklong buy trips, other hotel guests are likely to see a variety of Belgian Malinois parading in and out of the lobby, past the stuffed toy lion lounging in his wooden cage topped by big toy gorillas.
The testing of the dogs is mostly done at VLK, but some of the Secret Service dog buyers find it helpful to see how the dogs react in an environment like a hotel.
“I will typically bring the dogs back to the hotel room so I can socialize with them,” says Brian. “I don’t just want to see them in their working environment but their social environment. It’s important because these dogs are going to be living in someone’s home for eight or ten or more years.”
He also watches out for telltale signs of fear, shyness, or unwarranted aggression. Wanting to nosh on a pillow is one thing. (He doesn’t let them and rarely turns his back for more than a few seconds.) Wanting to nosh his arm when he reaches for a water glass on the bedside table is quite another.
—
The demand for high-end law-enforcement and military canines greatly increased after 9/11. A declaration by the Pentagon years later that dogs are the best defense against improvised bombs sent the demand through the roof.
Before this, it wasn’t as challenging to find dogs with a few years of solid training. Several dogs the Secret Service acquired in the first years of ERT were three or more years old. They still get the occasional older dog, like Hurricane. But the age and level of previous training have generally decreased as the demand has increased. Most dogs the Service now buys are about two years old.
There’s always the question of whether it’s better to have a dog with little to no training—a canine tabula rasa—since nothing has to be unlearned. But there is something to be said for a highly trained dog.
The increased demand means the Secret Service’s intensive screening process is more important than ever. Every month or so, depending on the Service’s canine class schedule, a couple of instructors, who are also trainers, hop in the cab of the Ford F-350 pickup and make the long drive to Denver.
The trailer they’re pulling is rarely empty. During their week of testing at VLK, instructors can weed out most of the dogs who won’t be good fits. But inevitably there will be one or two dogs who end up having to make the round-trip because of unforeseen medical or behavioral issues. Sometimes these are discovered right away. Other times, the problems can take months to discover—long after dogs and handlers have bonded.
On this trip to Denver, Steve has brought back a couple of dogs, including one with the odd name of Butyak (pronounced but-yok). He had failed the Service’s extensive medical testing. It’s not that he wouldn’t be good for other departments that demand slightly less physicality from their dogs. It’s just that his hips might not hold up under the more rigorous needs of the Secret Service.
Vohne Liche has a generous return policy for the Secret Service. Dogs can be returned up to a year after they’re selected. Not much fun for the dogs, but Licklider understands the Service’s need to be super selective.
“They do return the dogs more frequently than others, but they’re protecting the president of the United States. We give them a lot of leeway.”
Many of the dogs who make the round-trip to Indiana have had at least rudimentary training from the Secret Service and will be welcome additions to law-enforcement entities with even slightly less stringent standards.
But the ride back to the kennels probably feels extra long to these dogs—even without a horse and carriage to delay the inevitable.
—
Steve has been looking for Rex for a few minutes, but Rex is not where he’s supposed to be. A roster gives the kennel number for the Malinois, and Steve double-checks it with the dry-erase chart that shows all the dogs and their kennel locations. The dog is not there, nor in any kennels near it.
When it comes to dogs named Rex at Vohne Liche, it can be a little confusing. The misplaced Rex is technically Rex 62. That means he’s the sixty-second Rex the kennel has had so far in 2015, out of about one thousand dogs, and it’s only October.
Other names aren’t quite so traditional. Also present at the kennel are Wacko, Barko, Broke, Messie, and Vagany. The latter means tough or rough in Hungarian. Even though most K-9 departments try to keep the name a dog comes with, some will change a name if they’re concerned about its implications. Blackie is usually switched out. Vagany only sometimes.
The Secret Service dog who won the K-9 Olympics at Vohne Liche in August was one of the rare dogs whose name was changed after the Service got him. Luke’s champion ERT dog was originally named Beano. One wonders if he would have come so far if the instructors hadn’t switched his name to Nitro.
Someone tells Steve that Rex 62 must be in one of the other kennel buildings and points toward a likely location. Steve walks down the long rows of steel-barred kennels searching for the one with Rex 62’s name on it. The majority of the dogs are Malinois, but there are a surprising number of German shepherds, and many combinations of the two breeds. The kennel building is clean and, to say the least, cacophonous.
As he passes by, some dogs sit silently and stare, or lean their paws up on the bars and quietly reach out in what looks like a heartbreakingly stoic plea to go out and get some fresh air and hang with some people. They get good care here, but it’s not set up to be an intimate kennel with lots of attention given to each dog.
Most dogs bark like mad as Steve walks by. Some spin relentlessly. A couple of the Malinois jump high, straight up, as if on invisible trampolines. One dog a few rows over bounces so high his head and torso rise above the kennel wall. Dogs have been known to fly over into other kennels, but if they have such acrobatic leanings, they’re usually given a kennel with a ceiling.
Steve passes by a springer spaniel whose kennel card says “Teddy.”
Teddy? Steve does a double take.
He knows this dog. Teddy is one of many dogs from the first Friendly Dog class who ended up making the round-trip back to VLK. The rest of the returned dogs, including Ziggy, were snapped up by other K-9 units. But not Teddy. He has been here since his return more than a year ago.
He turned out not to be the dog the Secret Service instructors had hoped he would be. He proved a bit slow for their needs. Springers aren’t as in demand as other dogs, but a company in Europe has been eyeing him to do explosives detection there.
Meanwhile he stares sideways at visitors, like someone in a poker game who doesn’t trust the dealer.
“Sorry, buddy, someone’s gonna take you one of these days,” Steve says to him and moves on in pursuit of Rex 62.
He finally finds his Rex, toward the end of a row in the middle of the building. Steve is happy to find Rex 62, and Rex 62 is happy he has been found. When he sees Steve, he barks a few times and wags when Steve steps inside the kennel. Once Steve has leashed him up, Rex pushes past the door and leads Steve by all his barking brethren, pulling hard to get out of there.
He’s the last of several dogs they’ll be testing in this round. Vohne Liche has selected twenty-four dogs for the Secret Service to screen this week for its next Explosive Detection Team class. The dog trailer fits ten dogs, so they do the testing in shifts.
The area for today’s tests is just a few hundred yards away, but trailering them over is the most efficient way to go. After letting Rex 62 sniff the grass, lift his leg, and soak up some rays, they load him into the trailer and drive over to the edge of an alfalfa field, where they’ll begin to see who among these dogs has the right stuff.
—
Brian has been instrumental in developing testing for all the Secret Service canine jobs. He has been with the Secret Service since 1998 and training dogs professionally since 1988.
“He lives it, breathes it,” says Bill.
“There’s no one greater in the canine community,” says Stew of the trainer he has worked with since 2004.
Brian grew up immersed in dogs. His grandfather had a large farm on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where the family hunted geese, and occasionally quail and ducks, with their dogs. Brian’s dad had given him a black Lab named Apollo as his first field trial dog when he was about ten years old. But the dog wasn’t cut out for the work and was too energetic for their little house, so they gave Apollo to Brian’s grandfather.
Apollo thrived on the property, expending his energy running around in nature and never being much of a field trial dog. But Apollo and Brian’s grandfather had a way of communicating that would influence Brian for the rest of his life.
“I remember going down and seeing him with Apollo. He would tell that dog to go grab an apple, and Apollo would run into the orchard and grab an apple. He would tell him to go get a peach, and he’d go get a peach. Same with a plum.
“I was only ten or eleven years old at the time, and he and that dog just had something special that really clicked with me. It was like an epiphany. It wasn’t his training, it was the relationship and the communication that they had.
“He was in his seventies, the greatest man I’ve ever known, and that dog made him so happy and he made the dog so happy. I saw how that bond worked to make them understand each other,” says Brian.
Not long after, Brian got a black Lab named Spunker, who was another field trial dog. She was the real deal—an outstanding competitor in trials that tested the working abilities of gun dogs, and the best canine companion Brian could have imagined.
One day when he was about seventeen, Brian was visiting his grandfather when Spunker ran into the road chasing an errant Frisbee. A car hit her and dragged her underneath for what seemed to Brian like an eternity. They raced her to a veterinary hospital, but besides patching her up a little there wasn’t much they could do.
“We brought her back home and she had this huge hole in her body. She couldn’t use her back legs and I tried to take care of her for a week or so but I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to work out. I couldn’t let her suffer like that anymore.
“I wouldn’t let anybody go with me. I wanted to have her put down by myself. I carried her into the van and drove to the vet with her in my lap. It was just a me-and-her thing. Like with my grandfather when he and Apollo looked at each other and understood each other, she and I had that. She knew she was getting put down. She knew something. I could just feel it, that there was a kind of giving up. That it was OK. She let me know that.”
Brian can’t continue with the story. It’s still too much. He has been through many deaths of subsequent canine companions as well as dogs he and his handlers have worked with, but this one still rips him wide open. He understands what handlers go through when they lose their first working dog. And he understands that it can take a long, long time to get over.
After a stint in the Army as an infantry medic, he saw his first Rottweiler. “I thought it was the most amazing beast I’d ever laid eyes on,” he says. He ended up adopting one from a pound. He decided to train the dog at a Rottweiler kennel in Northern California, not far from where he was working in a psychiatric hospital. At the kennel, many dogs were doing Schutzhund, a dog sport that tests dogs for the traits needed for police or military work.
“I was done. I quit work, drove up there four days a week to train. It was the greatest thing in the world to me,” he says.
He ended up working full time in the world of dog training, which a decade later led to teaching some classes at the Secret Service. When a job for a Secret Service canine trainer/instructor opened, he immediately applied.
“When I got the job, I was euphoric,” he says. “To be out here and see how professional everybody was, and how good the quality of the dogs was, even coming in on the bottom of the totem pole was exciting.”
Many of the traits tested in Schutzhund are the ones he and the dog staff seek out on buy trips. Among them: courage, intelligence, perseverance, trainability, and drive.
Secret Service dogs have to have an additional trait: sociability. “A strong social police dog” is the term Brian uses. That piece can be the most difficult to find with high-intensity, high-drive dogs.
For ERT, for instance, the Service wants a dog who won’t back down until the fight with a bad guy is over or his handler calls him off. That same dog needs to be able to quickly get on with his day and not be a crazy, fuming mess afterward. In other words, the dog needs the coveted “off” switch. ERT dogs also can’t be dog aggressive, since they can work close together as a team.
Courage is one of the most important characteristics the Secret Service tests for. It’s not just the ERT dogs who need it. They all do. Even the Friendly Dogs. What is it exactly?
“The Friendly Dogs have to walk on a piece of concrete in hundred-degree heat for hours a day searching thousands of people. That’s not easy,” says Brian. “That takes a drive and a desire to perform and takes a level of courage as well.”
For EDT dogs, courage manifests in other ways.
“They have to frequently get on a military transport, land in a different country, often with a completely different climate and a very different way of living,” says Brian. “That can rattle a lot of dogs. They have to be strong enough in character that when they land, they can behave as though nothing has changed. And that’s not normal.”
The Secret Service uses a variety of tests for courage. The testing depends on the dog’s future role. They’re all tested in the dark, because night duty is a fact of life. ERT dogs will have to work in a completely dark room by themselves as part of testing. In training, anything that minimizes a dog’s senses can steal from their confidence. “That’s where courage kicks in,” explains Brian.
“That’s like telling an officer, ‘You’re going to go into the building and we’re going to put something on you to blind your eyes. Are you comfortable going in there and fighting?’ That’s a tough thing to ask of dogs.”
A dog who’s scared of the dark might bump into something and refuse to go forward. An ERT canine candidate might find the suspect but choose not to bite him, or be startled that he found him. These are issues the Service can work on up to a point, but if courage is not inherent in a dog’s makeup—or as Brian likes to say, “if Mom and Dad didn’t put in the courage and drive”—it’s probably not going to work.
At home, Brian has an animated assortment of dogs, goats, and chickens. It’s the one place he doesn’t worry about animals having drive or courage. His dogs are well trained, though, and his goats listen to him pretty well. Bill jokes that even his chickens come when called.
Brian doesn’t usually admit it at first, but if someone talks to him long enough, he may also mention that he has three cats. But these are not normal cats. One afternoon while he’s standing around the training yard watching handlers and talking with Bill, the subject comes up.
“I’m not really a cat guy,” Brian says. “I have Bengal cats.”
Bill turns toward him. “Do you even know what a Bengal cat is? It’s what a guy who has cats calls them when he wants them to sound cool.”
Brian tells him the story of how he came to be a cat owner.
“I never had a cat in my life and then a few years ago I walk into PetSmart and there’s a lady petting this cat. There were bangs in her face and the cat hauls off and bites her in the face and I said, ‘That’s the cat for me!’ I never would have gotten the cat unless it looked like a patrol dog. I saw it apprehend the woman and that was it!”
“When you have to say cats with an s, that’s when you know you’re a cat guy,” Bill deadpans.
“Not with Bengal cats.”
—
A pad of lined, white paper on the tailgate of the Ford pickup truck serves as a makeshift report card for the dogs being tested by the Secret Service at VLK. The top pages whip in the strong wind that’s rushing across the green field of ten-inch-tall alfalfa. If a Malinois named Herta, who hails from Holland, could read the evaluation of her afternoon’s performance, she might wish the wind would rip away the page.
Afraid of kennel/trailer
Soft mouth—would not bite toy/ball taken out by hand
Possession (6)
Exchange (8)
Prey (6)
Hunt (5)
Visual out of kennel / slow to hunt / eventually found odor/ball
She’s going to need a much better showing in the next day’s stakeout, which tests for courage and drive and reactions to stress. Steve and Secret Service dog training assistant Shawn G. are pretty sure that while she’s a good dog, she’s not cut out for the Secret Service.
“Her head is small for her body,” observes Steve, as Herta gambols through the alfalfa, looking halfheartedly for a tennis ball. “Not that that means anything.”
On the fluttering report card pages, another dog’s comments state that his pursuit of a tug is “nonexistent,” but that he is “very social.” Social is good. Not having the drive to find a toy will probably not make him a presidential protector.
Boyan, from Slovakia, rates much better.
Ball possession (9)
Good on exchange (7)
Good chase on ball (8)
Great pace to problem
Immediate active search/found ball
Next up is Zigis, a Malinois from Hungary. He’s wagging, jumping, and whirling around Steve as they run together to the edge of the field, attached to each other by a ninety-foot nylon lead. He throws the tennis ball and Zigis bounds for it, springing through the alfalfa. Steve lets the lead slip from his hand so he won’t impede Zigis’s search. In a few seconds, Zigis, ball in mouth, is circling Steve, wagging and loping with the excitement of his find.
Steve leans over and pats him playfully, cheering his find in the kind of high, enthusiastic voice these dogs love.
“Ohhhh yeah! What’d you find, buddy? You’re a gooooood boy!”
Zigis revels in the praise, head high, mouth clutching the ball. Steve tries to get the ball from his mouth, and the dog resists but eventually gives it up. Steve throws the ball again.
After going through the same routine, Steve lobs the ball into the field a third time, but instead of letting Zigis run after it, he grabs the lead and jogs him back to the trailer. Zigis stares at the field in the area where the ball landed and looks up at Steve as if he can’t believe this guy is going to leave a perfectly good ball in the middle of the field. Steve has him jump into his kennel in the trailer and shuts the door.
A few minutes later, Steve opens Zigis’s kennel door, snaps on the lead, and lets him out. The dog pulls toward the spot in the alfalfa field where he clearly remembers the ball landed after Steve abandoned it there.
Zigis staccatos some barks, wags his tail vigorously, and bounces from side to side, bursting to find the ball. Steve lets him go. Zigis runs to within a couple of feet of the ball, as if guided by GPS. He sniffs the air, turns around, and boom. The ball is his again.
Steve cheers him on, and when he calls Zigis back, Zigis will not give up the ball. He has found his prey and isn’t going to let this guy who doesn’t know the value of a tennis ball throw it into the field and walk away from it again.
Steve likes this. He puts another tennis ball under his shoe to see what Zigis will do.
Some dogs will immediately drop the ball they’re holding and paw under his shoe to try to get the ball. But not Zigis. He keeps the ball in his mouth, dives down to his side, and digs to get to the other ball. When this doesn’t work, he lets go of the ball in his mouth and attacks the ground under Steve’s shoe with his jaws, pushing his front paws against the earth for better leverage.
“Most dogs aren’t this tenacious,” Steve says. “They’ll paw and scratch at it but he wants to put his mouth on it bad. Look at that!”
Steve lifts up his foot. “I’ll give that to him. Look at that. That’s just a nice dog.”
Next up is Tek, a stunning black German shepherd with tawny paws. The Hungarian dog doesn’t want to jump out of his trailer kennel, which is only a couple of feet off the ground, so Steve helps guide him out. He and Steve trot together toward the field for several steps but the dog trips on the lead and is momentarily splayed out on the cut grass. He gets up, shakes it off, and moves on.
Steve grabs a rope tug toy that’s lying in the grass near the field and Tek grabs the other end. They play for a minute and Tek relinquishes the tug. He runs out a few steps and Steve throws the tug back to him. Instead of jumping to catch it, Tek flinches when it gets near, not wanting the ball to hit him in the head. Steve smiles and shakes his head.
He calls him and rubs his back quickly a few times, encouraging him with a few “good boy” comments. Pep talk over, he throws a tennis ball into the field. Tek runs into the field and trips again.
“He’s a klutz,” laughs Shawn, who’s taking notes nearby.
Undaunted, Tek wanders around, looking for the ball. This is no hot pursuit. It looks more like he’s taking advantage of being able to stretch his legs and enjoy the wind through his thick fur. A minute later he finds the ball, scoops it up in his mouth, and stands in the field until Steve calls him. He gives it back to Steve, who throws it back to the field. Tek watches the ball and then seems to forget about it as Steve takes him back to the trailer. The dog jumps in, Steve pets him a few times and shuts the kennel door.
“He’s a beautiful dog. A nice dog, too,” he says to Shawn, like a teacher scraping for something positive to tell parents of a C-minus student. This is not the same kind of “nice” as Zigis.
Shawn and Steve go over some of their notes on the dogs and in a few minutes, it’s time for Tek to come out of the trailer again. The shepherd jumps down without assistance this time and runs with Steve toward the field.
Steve strokes Tek’s dark head, which is already warmed by the autumn sun. Then he points to the field. “Go ahead!” Steve tells him in a high, happy voice, motioning for him to head out and look for the tennis ball.
Tek wags for a couple beats, then jogs into the alfalfa. Several yards in, he slows to a trot and then to a walk, sniffing here and there, then not really sniffing so much as hanging out and enjoying the outdoor experience.
“Get the ball, boy!” Steve coaches from the sidelines.
This seems to get Tek back on track, and nose down, he makes his way toward where Steve had thrown the ball.
“He might be on it!” Shawn says.
He’s within a couple of yards when a little yellow and black butterfly flutters up from the alfalfa and zigzags low in the air. Tek sees the butterfly and trots toward it, entranced.
His head traces its movements, and when the colorful insect flies away in another direction, Tek follows after it—not like he wants to eat it, but more like he has found a beguiling new friend. Steve lets him enjoy his time with the butterfly.
Shawn, scorecard in hand, writes “chased butterfly.” Not that they would forget.
—
Early Friday morning, Steve and Shawn load up the trailer with the ten dogs who have impressed them the most with their prey drive, hunt drive, courage, environmental stability, intelligence, and other qualities essential to a solid EDT dog. The original pool of twenty-four dogs didn’t have candidates that would meet the Secret Service’s stringent standards, so Vohne Liche had provided Steve and Shawn several more to test during the week.
Whoever chooses the dogs also trains the dogs as much as they can before a new class begins, and they teach the class, too. Steve and Shawn have a lot of skin in this game and work hard to select just the right canines.
“I continually think about who we are training these dogs to protect, and the extremely important mission of these dogs,” says Steve. “The amount of responsibility that these dogs are entrusted with is pretty amazing when you think about it.”
He feels good about the new recruits: Rex 62, Laila, Boyan, Fusti, Ringo, Pepe, Bolt, Athos, Ricky, and Zigis.
The dogs bark in the trailer, and the white truck kicks up a cloud of dust in the dirt driveway. Steve tunes the radio to a country music station and settles in for the long drive ahead.