This work breaks down into three general categories-stress, stimulation, and forced expansion. Forced expansion is simply pushing the dog to the boundaries of its physical and mental capabilities. An athlete's regimen is a good analog-squeezing out that extra ten percent, then an additional five, then the remaining two, and so on.
Limits can't be known until they are reached. For this, our obstacles are higher, our crawl pipes longer, our exercise routines and training more demanding. These programs are carefully monitored to ensure that no dog is pushed too far. They ask everything the animal can give, but no more.
"Stimulation begins as soon as the pup's sensory faculties and mental processes are functioning on more than a basic level, about ten days, and continues up to the age of eighteen months, at which point a dog may be said to be intellectually, hormonally and physiologically an adult. This includes introduction to engaging novel situations, various forms of play, and light puzzle-solving. We provide him with an interesting environment that encourages his active physical and mental involvement.
"Our stress program is the most promising and unique. It begins when the pup is one week old, is applied most heavily during the next seven weeks, and continues in an abating form to the age of six months. We've found that there's little benefit to be gained after that. With our own pups, anyway; we've worked with older inexperienced animals, up to three and in one case four years old, and gotten positive results, but not of a level to justify the effort. Stress itself is neutral. It can be either destructive or constructive, depending on the amount brought to bear. Apply too much to any organism-man or beast-and exceed its threshold, and you'll break the organism. Overuse physical stress, you cripple the subject-if you put too much weight on a bone it will snap.
Overdo psychological stress, the end is psychosis-if you totally isolate a man long enough he'll go mad. But controlled stress is a strengthening factor. It's precisely what you do to your muscles when you exercise, gradually forcing development, realizing additional potential each time. Psychological stress directly parallels this, only what is being strengthened and actualized is character. That comprises mental integrity, adaptability, intelligence, and emotional texture. We use several methods: a centrifuge, exposure to temperature extremes, startling lights and noises, insoluble mazes, rooms with vibrating floors and moving walls, and so on. The results have exceeded our expectations. We have some truly phenomenal dogs here-nothing bizarre, not "thinking' animals, or freaks, but dogs who function at peak capacity in terms of innate canine abilities, which are sufficiently impressive in themselves."
On the tunnel range a fourteen-month-old bitch stopped, dipped its head, raised it, then dipped again. Its forehead creased.
"Go on," the handler said. "Let's go, girl."
But the dog felt an expanding hollowness in its chest, a vague sense of absence. Its tongue dried.
The handler urged it a second time, and reluctantly it stepped forward, then suddenly scuttled back.
It whined and pawed.
"What is it, huh?"
The handler dropped to a knee and probed the grass. His fingers lipped a small ridge in the dirt. He worked both his hands under it and pulled. A six-foot square of ground tilted up on bearings to reveal a deep, shadowy hole. Man and dog peered down. The dog drew back.
The man hugged the dog, petted it lavishly. "Good girl, you found it!
Good girl!" He fished a chunk of dried beef from his pocket and gave it to the dog, who swallowed with a pleased wriggle of its shoulders and a wagging tail.
A young male was working ten yards in front of its handler in the woods behind the warehouse. Coming up on a hanging vine loop, it sat and began to bark. The handler advanced, patted it on the head, told it it was a good dog, and to stay. He snipped the vine in two with wire cutters and pushed the ends aside. He heaped the dog with praise and gave it a piece of dried beef.
He waited until the dog finished, then pointed and ordered, "Go out."
The dog moved ahead with a long confident stride, a touch of the cavalier's attitude. It traveled a hundred yards, concentration dimming as it found everything in order and began to focus on a pleasant tingling of its skin, an inchoate anticipation of the wire-brush grooming it would receive later.
It failed to see the thin tripwire stretched through the undergrowth.
Flash powder exploded with a harmless but loud Wumph! and a bright flare of light.
The dog yelped and dropped to the ground, ears flat against its skull.
It shook.
The handler ran up. "Shame! Bad dog! Shame on you." The dog hunched its head into its shoulders and squeezed its eyes nearly shut. "Shame!
If that was a real mine, you'd have been blown to bits. Shame on you!"
Two miles from BDI, on a stoney patch of land which held scent poorly, and which the corporation rented from a farmer, a handler worked an eighteen-month-old male. The leash was twelve feet long and the dog wore a tracking harness. A mile-long scent-trail had been laid twenty hours earlier, eight hours beyond the optimum limit even on ideal terrain.
The handler was bored. This was a good dog, with a superb nose. The handler knew it could handle the exercise easily, but his director had insisted he run it anyway. The handler carefully masked his boredom, concerned lest he depress and blunt the animal.
The dog followed the scent to its end, a canvas knapsack with the smell of the man who'd laid the trail, seized the sack and barked happily.
The handler roughed the animal with affection, then unsnapped the leash and threw sticks for it, a game good scent dogs usually enjoyed. He decided to go over his director's head and request an exercise that would truly tax this dog and let it shine, as it deserved to do.
Entering the canteen, Cindy Falk and Ron Schlegel passed an exposure cage in which a five-week-old pup huddled in a corner, thick saliva on its jaws.
Half a dozen pups were similarly caged around the room, part of the stress program. Dogs became anxious in close confinement, particularly young ones.
Opaque cages mitigated this some by offering a cave sense of security, but open-wire ones, like these, made them feel not only trapped but vulnerable.
Speaking to or otherwise comforting a pup in an exposure cage was prohibited. The cages were placed in high-movement areas around the installation, and sometimes taken to the parking lot of a nearby shopping center or to the high-school gym field.
Ron bought a fresh-ham sandwich and French fries, Cindy got pie and coffee.
They went to a table and sat on molded plastic chairs.
"The motivation's all wrong with food reward," Cindy said, picking up the conversation again.
Cindy trained BDI's dogs for obedience and attack. Ron worked on intelligence testing. They were nearly, but not quite, lovers, and it was the little remaining gap that caused Ron, helplessly, to argue with her more than he thought tactical.
Ron used beef chunks to get his dogs to work. He was trying to persuade Cindy it was the best method.
"Hell," he said, "what more basic motivation could you have? Food is survival. Every cellular impulse he has pushes a dog toward wanting to eat."
Cindy shook her head, swirling her hair. "It's inferior.
Look, in obedience training you don't just run the animal through routines until they become habit. You want him to think, to understand what's required and concentrate on the exercises. He does this because one, it's an outlet for his intelligence and lets him strut his stuff, and two, and more important, it allows him to please his trainer, the love object, the Alpha wolf, the leader, who gives him approval and affection for doing it right.
With food rewards all he thinks about is his gut, and he doesn't focus on his work. And you end up having to carry around a pocketful of goodies all the time, because if you can't toss him a reward after a command a couple of times, he's not going to trust you, and you're not going to be able to trust him. That's for obedience. For attack work forget it. The motivation there is strictly pack defense loyalty and love. The last thing he's interested in is a snack."