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.” ♦
