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We have had family dogs practically all of our married lives, and have a dog cemetery under a huge tree at our lake place. We do not have a dog now because Poochie died a couple of years ago after being with us about 15 years, but some of our children and grandchildren are blessed with them, so we often enjoy their presence.
Dogs can be many things, so I was rather intrigued by new research by the University of Sydney that dogs can be “distinctly” pessimistic or optimistic. The Washington Post article by Rachel Feltman told of a complicated research project of rewards that dogs went through to determine their emotional status. Through differences in sounds dogs were rewarded with milk or water. Optimistic dogs kept hitting the targets whether they got anything in return or not. Pessimistic dogs gave up quickly.
I have a problem with the results of the research. Some dogs are smarter than others. Why keep hitting the target if no milk or water was supplied? The researchers said that pessimistic dogs made good guide dogs because they did better in training. Optimistic dogs made better search and rescue dogs. Well…
Our first dog was Sergeant, a black and white Spitz with a big, curved white tail. He was given to us by one of my Marine tech sergeants, a white redneck from Kentucky. The dog assumed the Jim Crow attitudes of the sergeant before we got him. We lived on a barrier island called New Topsail off the coast of North Carolina. Sergeant spent endless hours on the beach chasing land crabs that could go into reverse from forward in an instant. Sometimes they nailed him on the nose.
Sergeant was the most prejudiced dog we have ever had. He would treat whites like long-lost friends, bending his head for a good petting. He announced the approach of blacks by becoming a snarling wolf, barking his head off at 20 paces. About a third of my machinegun platoon was black, so it could be embarrassing. Sergeant finally met his demise by a suicide attack on a garbage truck driven by a black driver. I still don’t blame the driver.

Flicka, Snoopy, And Friga, Polar Opposites

Our next dog was a lovable, big golden retriever named Flicka. We had four young children at the time and they could do anything to her, short of deep wounds. She once gave us ten puppies in a short burst. They were a problem. Our next was Spooky, a black mongrel refugee from the dog pound who had been abused. He had an orange streak down his back from a previous owner who evidently had poured bleach on him to change his color. He never really trusted a human again because of dog PTSD.
Spooky was followed by a beautiful grey-blue Norwegian elkhound we called Friga. She assumed we were the first family and protected the family members with great passion. We trusted her with the life our kids. At the time we had teenage girls who often babysat in the neighborhood. They would sit for neighbors down the block who often came home drunk. We always sent Friga with them because if the husband ever decided to get fresh with our daughters, he would have discovered several new orifices in his body. We finally had to farm her out because she bit an uncle who patted one of our kids on the head. She was a good judge of character and a great dog.

Peter O’Toole, Giant Killer, And Tanis, The Calendar Watcher With GPS

Actually we have bought only one dog in our lifetime. Peter O’Toole was a Cairn terrier terror. Cairns are bred to force big bad badgers out of their underground holes. O’Toole was a 12-pound lightweight who did not fear 35-pound badger heavyweights. He could dig a hole faster than a posthole digger and our lawns always displayed his handiwork. We named him after the English actor because he had his eyes and hair.
He lived to be 17, which surprised the whole family. He never backed down. He had a classic brawl with an 80-pound black Labrador once in a Bismarck park. The lab had practically all of O’Toole in his mouth at one time during the 14th round—but he made it back for the 15th. As he aged he left the house sometimes and did not return for the night. The next day he would come home bedraggled and disheveled, crawl into his bed in a closet, and sleep it off.
Tanis, another pound dog, replaced O’Toole. He looked “terrier” except he was larger, was tan and black, and had parts missing. He had a mind like an appointments secretary. Somehow he knew it was Friday afternoon and it meant a trip to the lake to frogs and dog playgrounds. He would meet us at the door on summer and fall Fridays. The rest of the week days? Forget it. We did something to tip him off, but we never figured out what.
He also had a built-in GPS for horses, cows, and goats on farms on the Downer Road. He would be snoozing on the seat but then jump up to see if the horses were home on that certain farm. He was uncanny. He knew where all the animals were within the 45-mile drive. When he got tired of playing with young kids, he would go upstairs in the cottage and sneak under a very low bed for a snooze. He made it to 14 years.

Poochie The Wise

Our last dog was a white Bichon-terrier cross of some sort. He turned out to be a great traveler, riding in various motorhomes with us around North America. He was a favorite with little kids wherever we stopped. He was the smartest dog of our eight. Very perceptive. Knew when we were going to bed.
I don’t know how many words he knew, but Corky and I had to spell some if we didn’t want him to know. If we inadvertently said “out” during a normal conversation, he would run to the door. If he needed an outdoor break, he would bark once. If we didn’t open the door immediately, he would bark twice. That bark meant, “C’mon! Get with it! I gotta go!”
Poochie seemed “worldly-wise.” He never got blasted by skunks. Most of our dogs were victims and had to be scrubbed with tomato juice twice. He was a civilized gentleman, never getting into dog trouble that I can remember. He made it to be 15.
For three or four years Poochie had Bob, a daughter’s dog, as a partner. Poochie was the alpha but he treated Bob with respect. Bob was a Wheaten Terrier, larger than Poochie and real laid back. He had never experienced thunderstorms before because he had grown up in the San Juan Islands off Seattle, so his first experiences with storms were rather traumatic. If we were awakened in our bed with a cold dog nose on our cheeks, we knew a thunderstorm was coming.
The two had a useful partnership. If Bob needed to go out, he would nudge Poochie and Poochie would bark once, and both would go out. Bob then signaled their return by scratching once on the door. If we didn’t open it within 30 seconds, Bob scratched twice. Sometimes they teamed up and chased squirrels and rabbits, occasionally nailing one. When we traveled in the motorhome, both would ride up on the dash with heads between paws, watching the scenery and animals flash by. When Bob died Poochie grieved for at least a month.

War Dogs And Service Dogs

Most of us think of dogs as family, but they are often workers like the rest us—only the pay isn’t so great. The June 2014 issue of National Geographic has a terrific article, “The Dogs Of War: Out In Front of America’s Troops, Combat Canines And Their Handlers Lead The Way Onto The Most Dangerous Battlefields On Earth.” Humans have put dogs in harm’s way for hundreds of years. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadores used bull mastiffs against Indians. Ben Franklin urged the military to use dogs against the English in the Revolutionary War. In the 1835 Second Seminole War, we used Cuban-bred bloodhounds as swamp trackers.
Both sides used dogs in the Civil War to guard prisoners. Thousands of dogs lost their lives carrying messages for all parties in WW I. In WW II we Marines used dogs to sniff out Japanese soldiers in hundreds of island caves across the Pacific. In the Vietnam War over 4,000 dogs were used at the point in jungle patrols. But the use of improvised explosive devices (IED) in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars enabled dogs to play an ever more important role in war. It was the dogs’ ability to sniff out and identify explosive devices buried in the earth.  
The Pentagon spent billions of dollars on electric, electronic, and other exotic devices to find Taliban IEDs. To my knowledge they never found anything as efficient as dogs. A short paragraph in the article says it all: “A dog’s extraordinary sense of smell—up to 100,000 times more acute than a human’s—relies in part on a structure called the olfactory recess. This labyrinth of paper-thin bones is lined with millions of scent receptors attached by neurons to the brain, where the scents are analyzed. Sniffing up to five times a second, a dog constantly surveys its surroundings and even knows through which nostril it detects a scent. All of which helps combat dogs pinpoint IEDs.”
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars our military had 2,500 dogs sniffing right alongside our troops. It takes about two years to train explosive-sniffing dogs, and it gets more complicated as enemy bomb-makers begin to use more sophisticated explosives. Marine Corporal Jose Armenta lost both of his legs to an IED in Taliban country when he didn’t pay enough attention to what his partner bomb dog Zenit was doing. They both retired from the service and Jose was allowed to take Zenit home with him. Jose says, “He’s like my quiet partner. He bridges three worlds: the person I was before Afghanistan, the one I was there, and the one I became after. I joke that when he dies, I’ll get him stuffed and put him by the bed. But really I can’t imagine it. I don’t know what I’ll do then.” If you want to know more about bomb-sniffing dogs, read the National Geographic article.

Animals And Their Service To Animals
 
As a farm boy I had all kinds of relationships with animals and birds. Most animals have individual personalities. Some cows come up for a friendly scratch behind the ears. Others will chase you up a tree in their pasture. Pigs are generally smarter than most. They figure out how to swindle you out of an ear of corn with a grunt and a nudge. A few horses try to get even by squeezing you against the stall. Most serve us with gratitude and not a grudge.
Other animals and birds serve as service animals. A PTSD veteran of Iraq has a “psychiatric” parrot that talks him out of depression. Dolphins have served the U.S. Navy in many roles, even towing Navy Seals to attacks. Ferrets are used to predict imminent seizures.
Thousands of dogs are guiding blind people around obstacles in the world. That’s old hat. Now we have dogs trained to assist dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. They are called psychiatric service dogs because they are trained to analyze situations that will protect their human patients. Bob Taylor, a trainer of psychiatric service dogs, says, “I can’t go inside you and feel your feel your feelings, smell your smells, feel your brainwaves—but a dog can.”
Cancer-detecting dogs are being trained at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia. They sniff blood samples to determine various kinds of cancer. Dogs are accurate 90 percent of the time with ovarian cancer and over 98 percent effective with prostate cancer. Training a cancer-detecting dog is not cheap: about $36,000 a year. But what does a lab technician or a doctor cost to analyze blood samples? Healthy human beings produce about 2,000 chemical smells, so it does take time to teach a dog which chemicals are related to which cancer.
Ordinary guide and service dogs are trained to react to about 40 commands, such as turning on lights, opening doors, picking up dropped items, pulling wheelchairs, pushing elevator buttons, and assisting with simple business transactions. Have you noticed that a dog will often tilt her head when you talk to her? Well, she’s just trying to hear you better.
Will Rogers said, “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”

Raymond is a former Marine officer and school board superintendent and resides in Detroit Lakes.