Dogs of war

Much has been made recently of the role of canine soldiers of Seal Team Six which annihilated OBL. Love them or hate dogs, there is no arguing that US Forces are on the right track –albeit reinventing the arrow – by using dogs in war, a practice as old as Darius and Xerxes.

My revulsion at endangering animals for human purposes should be qualified by saing that I firmly believe that every police cruiser, State Trooper, customs’ officer, Coast Guard boat, and border patrol should have the quantum advantage of a canine officer. In fact: a dog in every passenger and cargo plane, in every train, metro, and line cuiser! That’ll make some people very uncomfortable and the rest of us very safe. But here is my concern: Where do service dogs come from!?

Are the growing number of “war dogs” selected from among the approximately 3 million surplus dogs euthanized annually in US shelters alone? No, most of them are purpose bred. So here is something to ponder: We don't "breed" good soldiers, do we? We get whatever straggles into the recruitment office and train them. Many of them don’t measure up and Uncle Sam pays the return ticket to where they came from. Why, then, do we breed dogs just to put them in harm’s way when there are thousands of fit and trainable dogs at any given time with nothing to lose. Nothing but their lives because they are headed for the kill room anyway.

Breeding is not an exact science, ya’ know? An ideal service sire and dame can produce a litter of flunkies who add to the unmanageable numbers of dogs in need of homes, nearly one-third of them pure breeds – Alsatian, Malinois, Mastiff, Doberman, Bouvier, an infinite supply of Retrievers ... often by the box and barely weaned. So let’s connect the dots to see how a talent pool of millions can be mined (instead of further burdened) to provide a steady supply of service dogs. Simply, K-9 Units of the Armed Forces, cops, and any institution that holds back thugs, terrorists, and other undesirables, should each commission one or two canine behaviorists in every US State to identify promising specimens in city and county shelters via intelligence measurements that can be performed in any environment. Pay the modest adoption fee (instead of supporting expensive breeding programs and killing more animals with taxpayers’ money) and ship the candidates to dog boot camp.

Those who are up to the task earn a meaningful active life and perhaps even retirement with their human handlers. Those who don’t still benefit from a higher degree of adoptability. These shelter dogs, remember, have nothing to lose, but their lives. Most of the large, athletic, intelligent, assertive specimens found in shelters are hard to adopt because they require training and energy outlets the average person can’t provide. Those who are adopted end up tied in a yard “guarding” junk, or eating Fritos and watching soaps with a retiree. No, we need not produce more would be soldiers, sentries, trackers, and others talented dogs; the are already here, discarded, and about to be “wasted” one way or another. Awed as we are by the heroic comportment of dogs in the news (link) we forget that there are numerous potential heroes among the hopeless wards of every animal shelter in America, and we kill them without a thought. -- Dolores