Navy SEAL Dogs by Mike Ritland

crack—and we can’t have that happen.
    To keep the dog on the aggressive, we gradually increase those defensive thresholds by shifting the dog back and forth between prey drive and defensive drive, so he’s thinking, “I’m going after it. I’m preserving my life.” Over time, that threshold for defense goes up and up and up, enough to where now that dog is automatically coming at you like he wants to kill you. It doesn’t matter what you do to him, he is completely unfazed by it. It may start out with the dog in prey drive. You start to put a little bit of pressure on him so he switches into defense drive, and he starts to wig out a little bit. Bam! You switch things right back so the dog goes into prey drive and can relieve that stress. Now you put the dog back into defense drive. Now he lasts a few seconds longer. When he starts to show stress again, bam. Every time he starts to get to that boiling point, bam, you get him right back into prey drive. I back off, I reward him, I look away from him, I let him dominate me, and I take a bite to the back. Maybe I even fall to the ground and let him really dominate me.
    It’s a feeling-out process that you have to be constantly evaluating as you go. A truly good decoy is absolutely priceless because he will make or break a dog. You can ruin a great dog with an incompetent decoy, or make an average dog fantastic by having a phenomenal decoy who can recognize when to shift drives and know how much pressure to put on, when to back off, when to relieve stress, and when to put it on.
    In my mind, doing this kind of bite work is absolutely an art. You have to eventually develop a feel for how stressed an individual dog gets, recognize his body language and how he is communicating, and understand what he is thinking and feeling, before you can really train a dog well. You need to elevate a dog to a level where you’re teaching him how to fight, how to bring up that natural instinct that he has genetically deep down, an instinct that we’ve already identified through the training-selection process. Now we’re just teaching him to bring that genetic instinct up to a much higher level, so he is able to handle the rigors of training. Eventually we arrive at the dog being ten times the dog he was when we first got him.
    Like other aspects of training MWDs, this is a time-consuming process. If you’re not careful, you can create a couple of problems. One is that if you don’t put the dog into defensive drive enough, he never really learns how to fight. This is certainly better than burning him out going the other way, which is putting him on the defensive too much. That way you’ve cracked and ruined the dog and broken his spirit, so that he relinquishes a lot of the backbone that he had. As a result, we always err on the side of prey drive and don’t take the dogs overboard on defense drive.
    Unless you’ve seen these dogs in action, it’s difficult to convey the differences in their responses when in each of the two drives. It is a matter of degree of intensity as well as specific behaviors. In terms of intensity, think of your dog when you reward him with a treat—he takes it readily and willingly but is gentle and nonaggressive. When you give your dog a treat and other dogs are present, your dog’s sense of competition for resources is higher. He will take the treat, reaching for it more aggressively; in some cases, a dog will turn his head and his eyes seem to roll back in the same way that a great white shark does when attacking prey. Your dog won’t bite you in order to get the treat, but he is definitely amped up a notch or two. That’s how it is when an MWD shifts from one drive to the other. Because the intensity is already well beyond your treat-seeking dog’s drive, his amped-up behavior feels that much more aggressive/assertive/on the offensive.
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    A dog that