Someone recently told me the story of their Labrador retriever mix chasing and catching a deer fawn. The dog, who weighs about seventy pounds, is probably more active than most pets, very fit, but hardly an aggressive dog. The owner suspects that on a 10-point scale, the adult male is a 4 or a 5—neutral, in the sense that it never shows aggression toward humans or other dogs but doesn’t cower or retreat completely when approached by other canines. The owner wasn’t surprised to see the dog chase the three adult deer and the single fawn. However, when it caught the fawn, dragged it down from the rear, and then grabbed it by the neck and hoisted it off the ground, he was surprised. The fawn was about the same size as the dog, but the power of the dog’s neck and jaw muscles that enabled it to lift and shake the fawn wasn’t something the owner expected to see. He ordered the dog to stop, and it did, and the fawn, its heart racing and its legs wobbly but with no visible wounds, ambled off into the woods to join the adults.
I share this story because it highlights the fact that dogs and their prey drive, which to this point we’ve mostly talked about in terms of chasing balls, is an impressive sight. The speed with which dogs chase their prey, the strength they possess, and the instinctive move to shake their prey to snap its neck is present to a certain degree in nearly all dogs. The Labrador retriever mix in question here had killed a few voles and a lone squirrel prior to that incident and had chased its fair share of deer, fox, and, unadvisedly, a couple of elk prior to that fawn. It had some of the drive and tenacity of the Malinois we use, but certainly not to the same degree. The only reason it was able to catch the fawn was that its prey tried to hide behind a pile of fallen trees. The only reason the fawn survived was that the dog’s jaws were not powerful enough to puncture its skin, couldn’t whip it with enough force to break its neck, and it was willing to release its prey easily on command.
In a similar scenario with one of our military working dogs, the outcome for the fawn would have been very different. Most likely the fawn wouldn’t have had the chance to go into the kind of defensive hiding position, and that initial grab/bite/shake would have likely been lethal. When a dog that is a 10+ on that prey drive/aggression scale goes into action, he generally gets what he’s after and concludes the matter swiftly. That’s not to say that these dogs don’t need to work on their ability to attack and subdue human targets; they very definitely need to have their fighting skills refined.
I need to make this point clear from the start. The apprehension work that we do with a dog is to train it as a nonlethal force. Just because these dogs would have killed the fawn in that scenario above is not to say that they are trained to do the same thing in their work as SOF dogs. In most cases, a live capture of a suspected or clearly demonstrated insurgent, Taliban member, or other bad guy is much preferred over a neutralized one. A lot of valuable intelligence has been extracted from captured combatants. That is one of the reasons why I consider a dog to be such an effective weapon: it is a very highly skilled nonlethal force.
In some ways, calling what we do in this regard “bite work” is a bit of misnomer. Yes, we do teach the dogs some things they need to know, but as I pointed out in the previous chapter, when they are given the command reviere, to find a human, they do so with a desire that goes beyond a mere Ho-hum, here we go again, I’ve got work to do approach. As I mentioned, the difference in their demeanor when instructed to do detection work for explosives and when told to find a human target is substantial. They are eager in both cases, but there’s a palpable sense of the dog’s own explosive capabilities when on the hunt for a bad guy. It is as if every cell in the dog’s body, every bit of its canine ancestry, and the accumulated learning and experience in being able to provide for itself are turned on.
Having put on a bite suit or sleeve myself and felt the power of these dogs’ bodies and jaws, I can tell you it’s not something to take lightly, and I would not want to be on the receiving end of those blows and bites without that protective gear. In fact, I have been, and it’s an incredibly humbling experience. Even when wearing protective gear, I have at times experienced a level of pain as intense as anything I’ve endured.
As is true with exact measurements of a dog’s aural, olfactory, and vision capabilities, accurate measurements of a dog’s bite force are difficult to come by due to the variables involved. In those cases when a laboratory setting and testing procedure has been set up, those measurements also are questionable. For example, one study of canine bite force, conducted at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, used a protocol during which the dogs were anesthetized and had their jaw muscles stimulated electrically. My sense of this study, and others in which dogs bite down on objects with sensors attached to measure the bite force, is that they don’t account for the adrenaline rush that would naturally occur in a more “natural” setting. We’ve all heard stories of what people are capable of lifting when faced with an extreme situation, and when a dog is anesthetized or placed in a clinical environment, I don’t believe that its emotional and physiological response would be the same as it would be in actual (or practiced) combat.
Nevertheless, those measurements do help establish some kind of baseline data. For example, in the Guelph study, a German shepherd was able to produce a bite force of 170 pounds per square inch at the front of its jaw and 568 pounds at the rear. Common sense will tell you that the rear number should be higher, since that’s closer to the lever point. Those numbers are impressive, but fall far short of the claims that I’ve heard of a dog being able to exert up to 2,000 pounds of pressure. As Stanley Coren pointed out in his May 2010 article “Dog Bite Force: Myths, Misinterpretations and Realities” in Psychology Today, that 2,000-pound figure (which would be roughly equivalent to a subcompact car being parked on your radius bone or ulna in your forearm) is likely the result of people not paying close enough attention to the units of measurement being cited. A 2,000-newton force is roughly equivalent to 450 pounds, since one newton is approximately a fifth of a pound. That puts us closer to the Guelph-study measurements.
Recently, Dr. Brady Barr, in a National Geographic television series entitled “Dangerous Encounters” and first broadcast in August of 2005, conducted similar kinds of live bite tests with a variety of species. He equipped a bite sleeve with a computerized measuring instrument and found that his human test subjects reached 127 pounds of pressure, while domestic dogs averaged 320 pounds. In comparison, lions and white sharks reached 600 pounds, while hyenas exerted 1,000 pounds, and crocodiles 2,500. That’s an impressive figure for the crocodile, but apparently Dr. Barr wasn’t satisfied with that performance, believing that the croc was just messing around. He redid the test and the croc rose to the challenge, reaching 6,000 pounds.
The scientists conducting the Guelph study published their results in Volume 214, Issue 3, of the March 2009 edition of the Journal of Anatomy, but it was for a second type of test they performed. For this, they used the skulls of dead dogs, took various measurements, and applied complicated formulas to arrive at some conclusions about how the size and shape of a cranium and jaw can affect the amount of pressure a dog can exert. They used terms like “cranial morphology” and “phylogentic analyses,” and lever formulas like CBF1 = (Lm × M = Lt × T) FPA/O to develop their evidence. Their detailed analyses came up with a conclusion most of us would have suspected: larger dogs exert greater bite force, and larger brachycephalic dogs (those with a proportionate lower jaw but a shortened upper jaw) have an advantage over mesaticephalic dogs. Dogs of this latter type, the most common skull shape, have a cranium portion that is roughly equal in size to the nasal cavity. In other words, the head of one of these dogs is roughly divided into equal portions of what we think of as the skull and the snout.
Malinois are mesaticephalic in terms of skull shape and are a large breed. According to the Guelph study, the statistical mean, or average, bite force for dogs with these characteristics, depending upon the level formula used, ranged from 2,749 N, or 617 pounds of force, to 2450 N, or 550 pounds at the molar, and between 170 and 150 pounds at the canine teeth at the front of the jaw.
That’s a lot of numbers and scientific jargon, but it does have real-world implications. Obviously, a dog clamping down on you with the front of its jaws isn’t going to exert nearly as much force as a dog that clamps on and then chomps forward, getting you with those back teeth. If you’ve ever observed your dog as you played tug with them, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the dogs understand something about the physics of bite force, and they work pretty hard to get whatever they’ve got between their teeth into the backs of their mouths to hold it more securely. If you’ve ever attempted to pull a tennis ball out of your dog’s mouth, you know that it’s easier if you get it at the front and not the back.
It’s also pretty obvious that a dog will first bite with the front of the mouth; after all, that’s the widest opening and it makes access easiest. You can go on the Internet and see videos of protection dogs and other working dogs doing bite work, and you’ll see some pretty spectacular flashing of jaws and snarling and men in bite suits getting these dogs to grab and hold on with those front-of-