The soldier advances through the damp, misty forest, her senses piqued by the slightest sign of danger, her taut muscles gliding visibly beneath desert-coloured fur.
Kali is a dog, but she's trained like a soldier. She is taught to move as efficiently as possible – a life-or-death skill in combat situations – and even here, on a routine training session in the woods of Southern Ontario, not a move is wasted. Coming up against a craggy wall of wet, black shale, she tenses and leaps to the ridge above her head with the agility of a mountain goat. Her handler, Kevin Whitenect, is waiting there. Praising her, he scoops up her leash and they continue their trek.
Working dogs like Kali are increasingly being recruited to join elite combat units. This spring, after Navy SEALs stormed the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was hiding, reports surfaced that a dog had been part of the expert team, possibly to check for explosives or sniff out people hiding. Experts speculated that the dog was most likely a German shepherd or a Malinois – the same breed of dog now scouting the terrain at Mr. Whitenect's side.
Tucked into the hills of Ontario's Niagara Escarpment is a facility that produces these four-legged soldiers. Baden K-9 Inc. has been quietly breeding and training highly specialized working dogs for 35 years for clients that include the U.S. military, the RCMP, Israeli special forces and private contractors in Iraq. It is the kind of work that demands secrecy, so the precise location of the facility is kept under wraps.
Mike McConnery, the company's founder, isn't happy about the spike in interest in his work since the bin Laden raid. He refuses to answer questions about whether one of his dogs might have been involved, and doesn't think any high-risk work for troops on the ground should be discussed.
“The people that [hire] us aren't going to come on camera. Quiet – that's the way of our dog. Now … we have all of these eyes on us,” he says. “It went viral, this thing. We're trying to maintain security here.”
So far, he has managed to maintain the security that the most specialized forces require. And with demand growing for these dogs, his son, Josh McConnery, has started a new company, Tier 1 K9, with Mr. Whitenect – a former soldier with Canadian special forces. They adapt Baden K-9 training techniques for special-ops clients.
In the field, dogs can help to uncover everything from an improvised explosive device to a lost child. They have an innate ability to track a scent – which the trainers enhance, starting when the puppies are just six weeks old. Dogs can move faster than humans, taking down a threat without using lethal force so that soldiers can operate more safely. Their hearing is far more sensitive, allowing them to detect sounds inaudible to their human handlers. If an enemy captures a dog, they do not have ways of making it talk.
Their special capabilities make these dogs well suited to work in war zones such as Afghanistan, where IEDs have become so common. Ten years ago, the U.S. military had roughly 1,400 dogs trained for service in tracking, patrol and explosives detection; today, that number has ballooned to 2,700.
“The guys that are in the field need an edge,” Mike McConnery says. “These dogs are probes, they're distraction devices, they're allies, they're guards, they're security. They can do things that technology can't do. ... You can't hide from these dogs.”
The training they receive at Baden K-9 and Tier 1 K9 includes a specialized vocabulary of commands. Otherwise, in a high-intensity battlefield situation, a shout of “no,” for example, could distract a dog for crucial seconds.
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