The Dogs of 9/11, Part 2

The Presence of the Past

Ghosts of 9/11

I’m not interested in re-awakening the ghosts of 9/11 without good reason. And the reason I think this is important is that global events have micro-effects. The devastation at the World Trade Center affected most of the dogs tasked to find living victims at the site. If a healthy dog like Whorf, mentioned in the previous article on this topic, starts shedding profusely and refuses to eat, something has gone terribly wrong. And the culprit is deep inner stress. As author and creator of Natural Dog Training theory Kevin Behan writes, "Everything about a dog’s mind aligns around [the] simple principle of where, when and how deep inner stress comes out."

But it wasn’t just Whorf. Most of the dogs left their tasks unfinished. They’d been trained to find the living, not the dead. In fact, when dogs are trained for search-and-rescue work, human volunteers hide in make-believe disaster sites. Then, when the dog finds one, the victim acts happy and joyful and plays with the dog. That’s the dog’s “reward” for searching, that’s his emotional release. And that’s the feeling the dogs of 9/11 were searching for but weren’t getting because there were so few survivors.

So why did some 9/11 dogs seem to develop symptoms of PTSD while others didn’t?

There are a number of reasons. But before going into them, it should be noted that with most working dogs there’s a very narrow parameter of breed types used for each particular job or set of jobs that the dogs are suited for. The German shepherd and Belgian Malinois are often used for police and military work. Beagles are good at detecting drugs or other contraband at airports or border crossings. Dobermans and Rottweilers are favored for protection work. Bloodhounds, of course, are insanely good at tracking criminals through swamps, woody areas and the like. And golden retrievers and Labs excel as seeing-eye dogs and therapy dogs because of their easy-going, good-natured temperaments. Yet the multiplicity of different breeds found at a disaster site is a different story. You might easily find most if not all of the breeds mentioned above searching for survivors but you might also find Airedales, Jack Russell terriers, blue heelers, elkhounds, Viszlas, English setters, Dalmatians, dachshunds, poodles, even mutts.

Why is that? Why would so many different breeds be so good at search-and-rescue work?

The Predatory Sequence

A dog’s desire to search for things—whether he’s searching a disaster site or playing a game of “find-the-toy”—is another ghost from the past, a behavioral tendency “inherited” from wolves. It’s part of what biologists called the predatory sequence, a specific set of hunting behaviors that play out in an exact, progressive pattern from one step to the next, to the next step after that, and on and on.

Here’s how the sequence works. First the wolves leave their den to go out and search for large prey animals like bison or elk. Then, when they find a herd, they stand still and stare at the animals in a posture similar to the way herding dogs stare at a flock of sheep, called the eye-stalk. Then the wolves try to isolate or cull the weakest member of the herd. Once they get the herd moving, they chase that weakest member, eventually confusing it and wearing it out. Once the prey animal is too tired or confused to get away, the members of the pack who are close enough, or bold enough, use what’s called the grab-bite to get a grip on the hide of the animal. This is followed by the kill-bite, where one or more wolves rip open the animal’s hide. The final step is evisceration, where the wolves continue to pull back at the prey animal’s hide until its internal organs are on display like a smorgasbord.

One very interesting thing about this sequence is that once it’s set in motion the pack doesn’t stop. They don’t pause along the way to hunt rabbits or snack on road kill. They continue through the entire sequence until they’ve either eviscerated their prey or the prey escapes, in which case they go back to the den hungry and rest up for the next day.

While this set of behaviors seems to be hard-wired—the wolves seem to be following a stock script—these are drive behaviors, and are, thus, not related to instincts or reflexes.

What’s the difference?

Drives vs. Instincts

Drives are more fluid and flexible than instincts; they allow for improvisation, they’re not purely mechanical and invariable as instincts and reflexes are. Plus, instincts are often about avoiding present or potential danger while drives are, for the most part, about putting oneself in danger or into a vulnerable position so as to attain a specific goal such as hunting or mating. Drives also tend to play out over longer, unspecified periods of time. And finally, drives have an almost magnetic kind of quality. Dogs in a state of drive feel magnetically attracted to the potential prey or mate while instinctive behaviors have more of an electric quality.

So the “search” aspect of how search-and-rescue dogs are trained is an analogue of the first step in the wolf’s predatory sequence. But dogs aren’t wolves. In fact, domesticated dogs don’t have the full predatory sequence that wolves do. Even dogs who’ve become feralized, and live in the wild, are incapable of hunting large prey together. They’ve lost the knack for it, primarily because dogs have been bred for thousands of years to only exhibit specific bits and pieces of the wolf’s prey drive.

For instance, sight hounds and scent hounds tend to have more of the search behavior than other breeds, while pointers, setters, and herding breeds have more of the eye-stalk, though they also have a bit of the search as well. Retrievers are supposed to have a soft grab-bite so that they don’t bite down hard on the quail, ducks, and other game birds they retrieve for their masters. But, again, they also have a bit of the search built-in to their behavioral repertoire as well. Terriers, on the other hand, have a hard kill-bite, enabling them to successfully bite down hard on small vermin, killing them quickly. But again, most terriers have a strong search component built into their behavioral patterns as well. In fact, searching seems to be hard-wired in most dog breeds, with a few exceptions.

Another way of looking at this is that whenever you activate any aspect of a dog’s prey drive (even the eye-stalk) you’re energizing the dog. That’s what drives do. And when a dog feels energized or “magnetized,” she wants to move toward something, in fact I would say that she feels pulled toward that something. Thus the dog’s motive, which is the desire to connect physically with an object of attraction, and the dog’s movement toward that attractor, which is the kinetic and emotional process of completing that physical connection, are always synonymous in the dog’s mind. Motivation = movement. So drives motivate a dog to move toward an end-point. And whether the dog is searching for a potential sex partner, a prey animal, or a survivor at a disaster site, the end-point or goal for the dog is simply to feel the sudden release of that pent-up drive energy, nothing more.

The Social Dynamic

There’s another part of the search-and-rescue process, which, also, in a way reflects the way wolves hunt, and that’s the fact that wolves work together as a cohesive group. It takes a pack of wolves (or at least two or three) to tire and confuse a large prey animal. It’s rare for one wolf to be able to do that on his own. And, fittingly, search-and-rescue dogs, military dogs, police dogs, drug-enforcement dogs, and the like, don’t operate alone either. The dogs and their handlers work together as a team. And don’t forget the make-believe survivor, hiding in the rubble! She’s also part of the social dynamic, in fact, the most important part because, as I said earlier, finding the victim provides the feeling of release the dog is working for.

That’s why dogs act happy when they find a survivor in the rubble, or catch a Frisbee in mid-air. In some cases, it’s why dogs get wiggly when you come home. And it’s why some of the search-and-rescue dogs of 9/11 became stressed, despondent and depressed, and why some of them seemed to develop symptoms of PTSD as a result, because there was no one to connect to, no survivor acting happy and excited, and thus no emotional resolution for the dog. And so when they went back home to Connecticut or Indiana or Georgia or Alabama, or wherever they were from, many of these dogs, perhaps most, weren’t the same happy campers who had been sent on what seemed like a wonderful adventure.

I don’t think all of the dogs were anxious or troubled, at least not for long. Being back in familiar surroundings can be a tonic: the familiar bed, the water bowl, the well-worn chewie toys, that wonderful back yard with all those games to play. Plus, by the time they got home the weather had changed. The heat of summer had given in to the first bite of autumn, another tonic for dogs. So, in all likelihood, most of them shook off the disappointment and stress they’d brought home with them and let it go, with tails a-waggin.’

When Dogs Can't Shake Off Bad Feelings

But some didn’t. They couldn’t. They couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been left undone. And those feelings also impacted the lives of their owners and handlers, perhaps in small ways, yes, but small things add up, especially when you’re dealing with wounded emotions. And believe me, there is a deep reservoir of emotion inside each and every dog, whether he’s a working dog or just a family pet. And those feelings, if not given an outlet, are like all the potential living victims that the dogs of 9/11/ couldn’t find. They stay stuck like phantoms in the dog’s mind and body as unresolved emotion and its byproduct, deep inner stress.

So acts of war—the friction that develops between peoples and nations—which take place on a grand stage, can have a trickle-down effect on our dogs even though, for the most part, they’re not actors in the drama, they’re just standing in the wings.

Yet without question 9/11 changed the world for some dogs. Puppies being bred and raised in certain kennels were now being bred to be war dogs. Not all puppies of course. But the ones who’d been issued “draft cards” had far different lives in store for them than they would have had otherwise. Some would have been trained to sniff out bad guys in cities and towns, or chase perps across otherwise quiet lawns, or down dark, deserted alleyways. Some would have become guide dogs or therapy dogs. Some would have been raised as family pets. And some would have become search-and-rescue dogs.

Instead, many of these dogs, these young puppies, were destined to live in barracks, to learn how to sniff out land mines and I.E.D.s, and search for and find wounded and dying soldiers. And no matter how brave they were, and no matter how well they were trained, some of them couldn’t shake off their war time experiences as easily as they and their handlers would have liked. The noise and the chaos, the explosions, the persistent rocket fire, the human casualties all took their toll. The emotions of these brave dogs got “stuck,” left unresolved, and so they developed PTSD, which for these brave, dedicated animals was a double whammy: they couldn’t function, which meant they couldn’t do their jobs. And these dogs love their jobs.

For the dogs of 9/11 that was the real tragedy, just as it’s a kind of crime that fifteen years later so many dogs are still being born and bred to become dedicated, serious-minded war dogs instead of happy-go-lucky, family pets.

Lee Charles Kelley

"Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?"