Dr. Chaim Mandelberg greeted them in the conference room of the stainless steel and glass building that was the installation's neural center. It was furnished with thinly cushioned Naugahyde chairs and couches, white Formica tables, and a dull coffee-colored carpet. The abstract wall lithographs were bland. The room was designed to discourage ease and minimize distraction.
There were two congressmen, the chairman of a Philadelphia behavioral institute, a pale severe woman from the Houston Space Center, a Canidae researcher from Johns Hopkins, an SPCA representative and two men from the Pentagon who wore civilian clothes poorly.
Mandelberg didn't know these people, wasn't interested in them, and was annoyed that he had to sacrifice time to them. Now and then some reference to Behavior Development's dog work appeared in a professional journal, piquing interest and bringing a request for consultation, which was palatable enough, but recently two silly and inaccurate articles in popular magazines had sparked accusations of animal abuse and a public outcry large enough to discomfit the increasingly image-conscious and appropriations-hungry Pentagon. A substantial amount of BDI's work was underwritten by that body, and when it felt pressured enough to pull the string, then BDI had to jump. The Pentagon had made it clear that Mandelberg himself, not a subordinate, was to give the briefing.
Mandelberg was the director of BDI's New England facility and its Canine Amplification Program. He was thirty-three years old, aloof, incisive, could concentrate to the seeming point of catatonia, and had a mind capable of intuitive quantum leaps as well as computer like analysis.
Emotions rippled him no more than a soft breeze did the surface of a pond, but he was known as a genial, open, down-to-earth man, a pose he had resentfully but painstakingly undertaken for reasons of social and professional pragmatism. Had he given any thought to the subject he would have discovered that he considered human beings little more than faulty manifestations of an interesting abstraction, gross corporeal analogs, and that discovery would have been noted and filed and left him wholly undisturbed.
A thirty-cup coffeemaker was plugged between two platters of finger sandwiches. Mandelberg poured himself a cup and smiled at the visitors.
"Anyone else? Is everyone set up? Okay, fine."
He settled into a chair, crossing his legs and slouching some in the appearance of a natural casualness and said, "What I'd like to do first is give you a little background on the general nature of dogs. Every part of our amplification program derives from an understanding of that nature. The dog as we know it, Canis familiaris, is roughly 750,000 years old as a species, about the same age we are. There's still disagreement over his exact origins, but most likely he's either a descendant of the wolf, or of some extinct primogenitor that sired both wolf and dog. Whichever, he's a member of the genus Canis which also includes wolves, jackals, hyenas, coyotes and such. He is a predator — a very efficient one, I might add-and a pack animal. Like most group-hunting species, he has diverse and sophisticated relationships within his pack. It's this last quality that suits him so well for living with human beings: his human family becomes his surrogate pack.
"But forget for a moment that he's a pet. That role, in Western culture, is relatively recent-say the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
Prior to that, through the 10,000 years he's lived with us, he was nothing but a simple tool. What small affection man felt toward the dog was the same prideful fondness he experienced over a fleet mount or a finely crafted weapon. The dog's primary function was to assist in hunting, which was the most crucial activity of the day. The animal excelled at this and was a highly prized, if not indispensable, adjunct. We see them hunting with men in Neolithic cave paintings, in medieval tapestries and Renaissance paintings, and as we sit here this afternoon there are literally several millions of them in this country and across the world who are owned solely for their utilitarian value in hunting-pointers, setters, retrievers, scent hounds, and coursing animals.
"As man became less nomadic and began to build compounds and villages, he turned the dog toward a second basic function: defense. The dog's powerful pack-loyalty, along with his predator's sense of territory, were ideal traits for this. He protected the village, he protected his owner's herds and person. From guardian, the logical extension was to warrior. War dogs are found in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Assyrian has-reliefs. The Persians used them, they fought under Greek handlers, and the Celts armored them in leather cuirasses set with knife blades.
The Romans buried handler and dog together. Henry VIII sent them into the field and the conquistadores used them in South America. Gunpowder diminished their effectiveness in actual battle, but they continued to work as guards. Seventy thousand served in World War I, and they distinguished themselves in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The first police dog corps was formed in St. Malo in the fourteenth century. Today there are more than 100,000 privately owned, fully trained attack dogs in the United States, and another ten million untrained "pets' who are owned in large part for their innate protective capacities.
"Some few others work as specialists-avalanche and contraband detectors, and the like. The point is: the dog works. That's what he's been bred to do for millennia. The specific breeds we know did not evolve through accident or the whimsy of a privileged class. The dachshund isn't simply a funny-looking quirk of nature. He was bred long and low and with bold character expressly to rout vermin from their dens. Newfoundlands, at the opposite pole, were bred massive and strong, thick coated web-toed, and gentle, for plunging into cold seas after shipwreck victims who would cling to the animal's long coat while it towed them back to shore. Terriers were bred ever more aggressive and quick because they were used as rat killers.
"So now we have the dog as a social, pack-loyal, predacious working animal.
He is also a creature of fairly high intelligence. He can conceptualize, in a rudimentary fashion, and is capable of some abstraction. He experiences emotions and can fall victim to a spectrum of neuroses and behavior disorders. Pethood has been disastrous for him. Such status is not inherently contradictory or inimical to him, but it has blinded the general population to his larger nature, to his reality. People view him as little more than a friendly, animated toy.
As a direct consequence we have untold numbers of dogs whose nature is perverted, whose character is eroded, whose intelligence is confounded, who are denied constructive outlets for impulses which are very powerful, and who live in enormous frustration.
Among other growing problems, both dog-bite fatalities and nonlethal assaults have increased dramatically over the last years, and can go nowhere else but up. This results from the assumption that the dog does not exist except as we desire him to, and from a rapidly degenerating gene pool. Most dogs are now being bred for those qualities usually prized in a pet, which means subservience and obsequiousness. In nature these are qualities found only in very young animals. They serve to protect the pups against aggression from older dogs. Whether through ignorance, for personal amusement, or to profit from the demand of chain stores, pet shops and puppy-palaces, the meaning is the same: Breeders are storming toward an end dog who will be infantile and regressive in mind and behavior.
"At Behavior Development, we're working to create what we consider the ideal dog. This doesn't mean a new species or even a fertile mutation.
We're attempting to maximize the native potential of the dog. Our goal is a matter of degree. Beginning with a true comprehension of the animal, we seek to develop a strain of utter physical soundness, of the highest possible intelligence, of thoroughly stable temperament, of the keenest nose, and so on. We're approaching the problem from two directions: genetics and psychobiology. We do have a training program, but that's incidental, mostly an index of evaluation. We work exclusively with German shepherds. They're the best, most rounded, and perhaps most quintessential breed there is.