Posted by Hogbender on August 13, 2009, 9:42 am, in reply to "Re: War Dogs Of The Pacific"
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The story is told from beginning to end by the WWII Marines about their Devil Dogs.
You know, I never heard the word genetics, or the word drive spoken one time. They used weird words like bond, and trust.
They all trained their own dogs and none claimed to know much about dogs. They did it buy spending quality time with their dogs and making sure the dogs understood what was expected of them.
I saw one guy with a ball but he was using it to relax his dog instead of winding him up with it. It was a technique used back in ancient times called "playing fetch".
For some reason they wanted their dogs calm all the time, not wound up like a top.
The Marine Devil dogs were just untrained family pets that were donated for the war. Only 4 had to be put down at the end of the war because they failed to pass untraining. (Did I see that right) Every dog that was trained for war, was untrained after the war. Their words not mine. The dogs either went back to their original homes or the Marines talked the owners into giving them the dog to take home to their family.
I never saw a crated dog either. The dogs had to all get along but from what I saw, they never took their eyes off their Handlers long enough to look at another dog.
My Grandfather got to spend WWII, island hoping through the Pacific. He told me how many times his own life was saved by one of these dogs. He was not a Handler, and it happened more times than he could count.
It makes me ask the question to myself again. If we did this in such a short time in WWII, why doesn't every group of Warriors in Afghanistan have a dog in front of them that will warn them of the IED's that are wounding and killing so many?
We could crank out Explosive Detection Dogs so fast. We could empty the dog pounds virtually overnight.
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