What the Dog Knows (36 page)

Though dogs may be a great model for studying disease in humans, it is understandable that the military might not leap to investigate diseases that military working dogs suffer over their lifetime. In one of the few studies released on military dogs from the Vietnam War, both dogs and servicemen had elevated risks for testicular cancer. Hypotheses about the causes have ranged from exposure to Agent Orange or malathion to taking the antibiotic tetracycline.

Studies on the health of military working dogs are in their infancy. One epidemiologist privately expressed frustration about how little had been done. That is changing. A major study is under way on military working dogs deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and early results may be out by late 2014. Military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq may have been exposed to environmental toxins. Sandstorms there are dramatic and last for days. The dust particles are inhaled. Burn pits that the military has used to get rid of everything from human waste to metals have created exposure to smoke that concerns veterans' groups. If service people were exposed, so were the military dogs working alongside them.

Michael Peterson, an epidemiologist and veterinarian in charge of
the study for the Veterans Health Administration's post-deployment health group, said that the reason for studying the dogs is “99.9 percent human.” Peterson and a VA colleague, physician Wendi Dick, whose specialty is preventative medicine, are focusing on respiratory diseases first and foremost, but also on cancer, neurologic diseases, and neoplasms.

Peterson, Dick, and their fellow researchers are looking at medical records for a group of 450 military dogs deployed overseas from 2004 to 2007: Malinois, German shepherds, Dutch shepherds, and Labradors. They will be compared with a control group, dogs who were destined to deploy but stayed behind in the Military Working Dog Center at Lackland Airforce Base.

If the military dogs died or were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, the researchers have their tissue samples. Necropsies used to be routine for even healthy military working dogs, since they were standardly euthanized rather than being adopted out. That has changed since Robby's Law passed in 2000. Now military working dogs can return from overseas, be adopted, and get lost as a medical subject. It's hard, except in the abstract, to regret that change too much. Then there are dogs who were part of the contractor system and may have deployed for years at security points and embassies; there are dogs who, like Kathy Holbert's dog, searched for missing soldiers. Those health histories are inevitably lost or incomplete as well.

“We're really just testing a hypothesis. We don't know what we're going to find,” Peterson said. “We're keeping the categories very, very broad. This may be a dead end. We may stumble across something. This is just another piece of the puzzle.”

•  •  •

Dogs get sick, get old, die. Certain dogs you miss more than others. You try not to, but inevitably, that's what happens.

Kathy Holbert's cadaver dog, Strega, was eleven when she was
diagnosed with bile duct cancer. She had been over in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a year. She became ill and died within a couple of months in the mountains of West Virginia, where she'd spent most of her life. Kathy did everything, including an experimental procedure that injects a dye to help the immune system respond. She knew it was a long shot.

Danny Gooch's Kimbo died in March 2012, a year or so after his retirement. Danny's daughter had the vet keep one of Kimbo's canine teeth. For Father's Day, she had it mounted on a small gold clasp. Danny wears it on a chain he tucks down his T-shirt. His daughter got a small heart tattoo:
KIMBO, BFF
. Kimbo was dark and fierce; his tooth is small and white.

Sean Kelly had four patrol dogs during his police K9 handling career. Nero was his most recent, one of the happiest working dogs I'd ever met. He loved people, finding drugs and guns, and biting. He had a deep, forceful bark and one of the smoothest on-and-off switches I'd witnessed. He'd come off the bite sleeve and immediately sidle up to anyone watching, stump tail wagging. Nero visited homes for developmentally disabled children where the only coherent word Sean could understand, joyfully shouted over and over, was “Nero! Nero!”

Nero's ashes sit on Sean Kelly's mantel in North Carolina, in an eight-sided canister marked with his paw print. The Malinois's print is also tattooed on Sean's big calf. Nero's ashes aren't the only ones sitting on the Kelly family's mantel; Sean has the ashes of two of his other patrol dogs there as well.

Losing Nero hit Sean the hardest. Nero had been a military working dog with the special forces. He'd survived an IED that had killed his handler. The same bomb blew out Nero's incisors and put a gaping hole in his chest. His tail was amputated because his hindquarters were so damaged. He was a mess, but he was alive. Veterinarians patched his body together and gave him titanium teeth. But Nero, who had been one of the top apprehension dogs in his unit, who had helped save his handler before, as well as other unit members, could no longer do his
work. Post-traumatic stress disorder is too clinical a term: Nero and his world had been blown apart.

“You can't get into the dog's head and say, ‘It's okay, it's not going to happen again,' ” Sean said. Besides, that wouldn't have been the truth. So Nero returned to a military base in the U.S. to help train green K9 handlers. However, he had a lot more working parts than nonworking parts. Turning him into the equivalent of a practice dog was wasting a great dog. So in 2008, in a quietly arranged deal, Nero went to a police department in North Carolina. Sean, a former K9 officer from New York City, fell in love with him. Nero was six years old. He had drive, smarts, and a great nose. Although his tail and teeth were mangled, his head and chest mostly white, he still had his perfect, pointy Malinois ears. Inevitably, Nero's work in a small city in North Carolina, although not as dangerous as being with special forces in Iraq, had its challenges. Nero ran into a yellow jackets' nest tracking a suspect.

“I don't want that ear to flop over,” Sean told the vet when he brought Nero in. Nero's head was swollen with stings. “That's the only thing he's got going for him.” His pleas were in vain.

Despite his now comically flopped ear, Nero kept working. He got a second wind. He worked with Sean for three more years on the street. And while Nero had loved work, retirement at the age of nine felt fine, too.

“He adjusted too well to home life,” Sean said. “I'd come home, and he'd be on the bed.” Grinning, titanium canines gleaming.

The lymphoma was fast and aggressive. Despite chemotherapy, it was over in a matter of weeks. Nero was one day shy of his tenth birthday when he started gasping for air. Sean rushed him to the vet and into an exam room.

“I was sitting on the floor, and he came over and looked at me. I knew.”

•  •  •

Solo and I faced man-made mountains in downtown Durham off a gravel road where the city keeps street repair supplies. Mike turned his SUV around and put on its high beams, and I did the same with my Camry's headlights, so they cast pale light on the hills of yellow sand, crusher run, and rubble at the end of the road. The piles created cantilevered half-pipes of sand and granite rather than snow. The valleys between were cratered by tire ruts filled with muddy, alkaline water.

The limestone crusher run looked one-dimensional, like piles of gray-and-black fragmented leaves or frozen dirty ice that went straight up fifteen or twenty feet, an Escher without open space or grace. The sand across from it was piled even higher, a huge dune stretching out into the dark. It had been unused for so long that animals had burrowed into it, making cave villages on the sides. Across from that lay a heap of granite curbstones; the city of Durham had cut and pulled the stones like long narrow teeth from the mouth of downtown. That granite had lined the streets for decades, five inches wide and three feet down, curbs that shredded the tires of those who are bad at parallel parking, and testified to a city of an estimable age. Immovable. Strong. Here, piled and canted in every direction, the pinkish granite looked unstable, with black gaps: seesaws or dominoes if Solo stepped wrong. The skunky smell of asphalt permeated the air here, though we were surrounded by pine trees and fragrant wax myrtle.

Mike had planted some training material for Solo, somewhere on the mountains of crusher run, or down the half-pipe of sand, or in the rubble pile.

Solo barked sharply at me, impatient to be released, and then disappeared briefly into the woods and darkness to give the trees his canine greeting. He came out of the dark, back around the edge, running smoothly. I didn't need to tell him to start work. He motored up the sand dune, ran across the top, disappeared along the far edge, came back into the beams of the headlights, sampled the air before hesitating, and flipped himself around at the top, head raised. He dropped in like a teenage skateboarder on a ramp, straight down the hill, gathering
steam before switching back up and around and doing it again. He did that twice more, swooping gracefully, before he dropped down into the flat and ran toward the pile of granite. The scent from the rubble pile had drifted over to the sand dune and crawled up it—Solo was so experienced that he knew what had happened. He'd used those easy swoops to reject the dune as the source of the scent.

Solo only occasionally trained in rubble, and his hot-dog antics on the sand dune worried me. I watched as he stepped up, then up again, on the pieces of granite. I stood well back so he couldn't hear any unconscious gasps on my part as he gingerly climbed the uneven terrain. Mike, standing behind me, said in a low voice, “I tested it.”

Solo tested it, too, moving deliberately, sticking his head into the black holes where the scent swirled, moving up, over, back. Then he froze at one hole, turned his head back to stare at me, his eyes glowing amber in the headlights. He slowly backed down off the rubble so he could give his final alert.

“Sweet,” Mike said. “Sweet.”

I had a dog once. Wag. One of the seven great dogs. At any one time, you know, there are only seven. Did you know that?

—Peter O'Toole as Fisk Senior,
Dean Spanley
, 2008

Solo wasn't the only aging beast in our house. The rest of us were getting sore and creaky; silver crept across the tops of our heads, though Solo's head remained rich red and black. Only his muzzle had grizzled. Megan's entire head was a mixture of white and faded mahogany, her eyes increasingly bleary, as though a fog had descended and was slowly encasing her. She was thirteen, ancient in setter years. Although she was no longer as strikingly beautiful as in her youth, we still used her
nickname, Scarlett O'Setter, since she remained as self-centered and spoiled as ever. She continued to demand royalties and obeisance from us. If Solo lay sacked out on a soft dog bed, she would totter over and collapse on top of him, looking reproachful if he startled awake and leaped away from their colliding bones. Her days of tearing my rotator cuff by running out the end of her Flexi lead were gone. Seeing a squirrel would send her into an off-kilter wobble, like a toddler whose attention is diverted. Sometimes she just fell over.

My orthodoxies about dogs and old age softened and shifted with Megan's increasing weakness. We popped mild opiates into her mouth to keep her, and us, happy. We helped her up and down the stairs each night and morning with an elaborate harness that had a rubber handle on top—something I had sworn we wouldn't resort to. We bought her a Martha Stewart quilted dog jacket to keep her warm. She occasionally deigned to gaze on me with approval when I tucked a blanket over her at night. We had Dad's cherry rocker, his good binoculars—and Megan.

Nancy was right: I needed to start another cadaver dog. David and I also wanted to time the puppy's entrance with Megan's departure. We have a small house. Adding another dog in the bedroom at night would assure that it smelled like a bunkhouse. It already sounded like one: Three of us snored. Not Megan, of course. Except for her slovenly drinking habits, she remained a lady, even in decline.

“Why don't you just shoot her?” asked a practically minded K9 officer one night as I explained the Megan dilemma. I stared at him blankly. Dispatching her that way might betray my father's memory, I explained gently. Also, I didn't own a gun. Another K9 officer, Moses Irving, nodded in approval at my answer and glared at his (probably) joking friend. Moses was the minister of a basement congregation in his spare time. “Your father is looking down right now,” he said. “You're doing the right thing.”

Megan got extra food that night, although she always got extra food if she wanted it. She retained a wasp waist no matter what she ate.
David promised me that as long as the three-dog days and nights didn't stretch out for years, he could put up with the unknown chaos of three generations of dogs.