Soldier Dogs (35 page)

But would Rony have been a good match for our household? Would Rony have eaten Jake, lunged at family and friends? I didn’t bother finding out, because what if he was a teddy bear? I’d want to take him home even more than I already did, and that just wasn’t happening.

By the time the dogs are put up for adoption, they’ve been
through behavioral testing. And any dog who was ever trained in patrol work will have gone through something called a bite muzzle test. This involves testing how much attack a dog has left in him. It’s a somewhat complex process that shows what a dog will or won’t do under various conditions. Dogs who are not at Lackland are videotaped doing the test. The video is sent to Lackland, where, together with reading about a dog’s history, behavior experts can use it to evaluate how safe the dog might be for adoption.

Even if a dog isn’t perfect, he can still be adopted. Engstrom just has to be more selective about homes. Many bite-trained military working dogs are dog-aggressive even when they retire. It’s partly their socialization (or lack thereof; the dogs don’t get to interact much with one another) and partly the stock they come from and perhaps the fact that these dogs are not neutered. Whatever the case, Engstrom obviously won’t adopt a dog-aggressive dog to a home with another dog. If dogs are a little edgy, they won’t get to be in homes with children. There are plenty of couples and single people living in remote areas who would be more than happy to take these dogs. But if the dog-aggression is bad enough, the dog is euthanized.

This dog-aggression is something that many in the military working dog world would like to see change. Some are trying to get dogs more acclimated to each other by letting them have play time together, off leash, in a fenced area. They have to be monitored carefully, but it often works well. “They have to get used to each other. It’s not safe to have so much aggression toward other dogs. The dogs are not supposed to be fighting other dogs,” Arod told me.

Many health issues won’t preclude adoption unless it would be cruel for the dog to be kept alive only to suffer. A dog with a
terminal illness but who is pain free and seems to have a lot of time left could be considered for adoption. There’s no shortage of people who would adopt a dog to give him comfort and love in his last months.

Before the Robby law, Engstrom says, “it was extremely sad. We kept dogs working that had no business working, because there was no alternative. You would see dogs that literally had almost complete organ failure. We weren’t willing to give up these dogs to so easily die.”

I met a dog at Travis Air Force Base who was deploying the next day. He was twelve years old. He already had seven deployments under his belt. I was stunned that such an old dog would still be deploying. But the handlers told me that deploying was what was saving him from death: While this dog was a pussycat with his most recent handler, who had been with him for a few months, if he didn’t know you, watch out. He was extremely aggressive.

The handlers there are amazed that he is going so strong at twelve. They have a theory. They think he knows that if he doesn’t keep working, he’s done for. It’s the only explanation the handlers I interviewed could come up with. “He must know it, somehow.”

The average age of retirement is now about 8.3 years. Some people would like to see dogs retired before they start having too many physical ailments, so they can get a little pain-free enjoyment out of civilian life. But with Department of Defense budgets in distress, it’s unlikely that highly functional dogs will be let out early just to enjoy some couch time before arthritis sets in.

In 2010, the Department of Defense adopted out 304 dogs and transferred 34 to law enforcement. Eight dispo’d dogs who were healthy enough to be adopted were put down because they were
deemed too dangerous for adoption. Twelve temperamentally adoptable dogs had to be euthanized because of serious health issues that would have caused intractable pain.

Some say the numbers of adoptions would increase if the government would bring dogs who are retired while overseas back home. We’re not talking about dogs being abandoned on the streets of Kabul, as some who have heard about this issue seem to think. This is mostly about dogs who are left at permanent U.S. bases in places like Germany when they’re deemed unable to work. As it is, an adoptable dog stays at the base until adopted. If people in the United States want to adopt the dog, they have to pay for the dog to return home.

The official argument is this: Dogs, as hard as it may be to swallow, are still considered equipment. When standard equipment (without a cold nose and a tail) is pulled out of operation, it’s not sent back to where it came from. So if a dog is retired overseas, you don’t send him back to the States, even if that’s where he got his initial training. And military budgets have been crippled with the economic downturn. The government doesn’t want to be paying for dogs to come back to the States if private individuals will foot the bill.

Debbie Kandoll, founder of the group Military Working Dog Adoptions, calls this hogwash. “Uncle Sam transported those military working dog heroes over to permanent bases abroad. Uncle Sam has a responsibility to get the dog back to the continental U.S.,” she says. “There is no reason that half-empty U.S. military aircraft cannot transport these dogs back to CONUS [the continental United States]. At that point the adopter can pay for transport to the dog’s new residence.”

She says many people have adopted dogs from overseas sight
unseen. They get information from the kennel master and the dog’s handler, and if they like the dog, they figure out how to make it work. (On her Web site she gives tips for situations like this and provides contact information for U.S. military dog kennels Stateside and around the world.) It takes time and money to do this. I’ve heard figures ranging from $400 to $2,000 for transport, depending on location, time of year, and size of dog.

In order for retiring dogs to be flown back home on the government’s bill, these dogs would need to be reclassified as MWD veterans instead of excess equipment, Kandoll says. Her group and a few others are pushing for an amendment to the Robby law that would make this possible. “We can’t let an ocean stand in the way of getting these deserving dogs wonderful homes,” she says.

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I
t’s not just people who adopt from overseas locations who put a Herculean effort into adopting a military working dog. While I was at Lackland, I met a couple who drove 1,047 miles, from rural Illinois, to pick up their dog. That the pickup happened to coincide with a wedding a few hours away was pure luck. “We’d have come down for her no matter what,” says Jerry Self, president of an engineering firm in Illinois.

Self heard about military dogs in December 2009, when a friend sent him a link to a video about the fact that the dogs need good homes when they retire. Shortly after, he put in his paperwork. In early 2011, Engstrom called to talk to him, to get to know more about his situation, and to give him the news that it wouldn’t be long now.

Self and his wife, Karen, had been in San Antonio for two days when I met them at Engstrom’s desk at Lackland. They were there to pick up Asta—the beautiful light fawn-colored Malinois I’d seen earlier in the kennel. They’d met her a couple of days earlier as they were looking for a good match. Self thought he wanted an old war
vet German shepherd, but he and his wife saw Asta and knew she was the one. “There was something about the way she looked at us,” he told me.

Asta was only two years old. She was as green as they come. She had not received much military training, because she had gotten injured and had fractured a vertebra near the end of her spine. She had undergone surgery, but she was compromised, and the vets didn’t think it would be wise to put her into the program.

I waited to watch the Selfs and Asta meet in the adoption room and for them to walk off to their car with their new dog. But it turned out that Asta needed a couple more official clearances before they could bring her home. So they’d stay in San Antonio one more night. They were disappointed but took it in stride. “We waited this long, what’s another day or two?” Self said.

“She’s going to have a good life with us.”

We kept in touch. Asta rode the 1,047 miles home to Casey, Illinois, like a trouper, never a peep, Jerry Self wrote me. They stopped for breaks pretty often, and when they stayed at hotels along the way, Asta slept in her crate. There were no accidents, there was no barking.

Back at home, Asta was gentle with the Selfs’ grandchildren, and with their Chihuahua, who is grouchy about Asta being there. The Selfs don’t think Asta would have been a good patrol dog because “there’s not a mean bone in her body. She loves affection, and she gets quite a lot.”

Asta has a thing for Frisbees. She owns about a dozen, and while she likes to chase after them, she prefers to fold them taco style and trot around with them. When Jerry Self goes to throw them, they wobble badly because of all the teeth marks. And she slobbers on everything. And she is high energy. “She gallops around like a horse most of the time…. She is young and rambunctious and likes to jump up on the couch and office furniture, and knocks everything down,” Jerry says.

In fact, the Selfs find that at this stage, life is a bit more tame when Asta is enjoying time in a special 110- by 80-foot fenced-in area they built around their house for her. It has big trees and grass in it. Squirrels scamper up and down the trees, and the family’s three cats like to bask in the sunshine and watch the latest addition to the household. She doesn’t pay them much mind, though. She’s just enjoying her newfound life in this lush, green, bucolic land—a long, long way from the war zone where she could well be right now had she not been injured.

Which brings me back to Jake. If not for his own accident—an accident of birth—
could
he have been a military working dog? Would he have withstood the rigors of training, of Yuma, of deployment? Would he have learned to fiercely guard a Kong, to want it so badly he would do anything for it?

He has the spirit, the loyalty, the can-do attitude. He has patience, a great nose, no crippling fears. But does he have the drive? Would he be willing to do anything for a reward? Since
I can take a Kong or tennis ball out of his mouth and have him shrug it off with a smile, his drive for that kind of reward is not strong enough.