Ghosts of the Past - The Dogs of 9/11

Ghosts of the Past - The Dogs of 9/11

“We Need a Dog Over Here!”

I remember it very clearly. It was a mild, sunny Tuesday in early September. I was in my studio apartment on Second Avenue, near 70^th Street, eating breakfast and watching the morning news. My Dalmatian, Freddie, was in the bedroom, asleep in his crate, with the door open. Mike Sheehan—a former New York City cop, who’d since become a reporter for Fox 5 news— was stationed downtown outside City Hall covering the mayoral election. 

Suddenly a loud explosion came from behind him. The cameraman panned over to one of the towers at the World Trade Center, partially visible in the background. After a few tense moments, and some shaky camera work, Sheehan, who didn’t know what had happened, but was clearly shaken, threw it back to the newsroom.

The time was 8:46.

After a break, the Fox 5 anchors reported an unconfirmed rumor that a private commuter jet had apparently “lost its bearing” and accidentally crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. My first thought was that it hadn’t been an accident, that the same crew of terrorists who’d tried to blow up one of the towers with a truck bomb in 1992 were back with what I felt had been their “Three Stooges act.”

I took Freddie out to meet Roarke (a boxer) and Cassie (a miniature schnauzer) for our morning play session. When I got to Cassie’s building on 57^th Street I learned that both towers had been hit, not by commuter jets, but by big airliners. There was also an unconfirmed rumor that another jet had crashed into the Pentagon and that the attacks had definitely been committed by Osama Bin Laden’s crew.

Still, I thought, the most damage they could have done was on a couple of floors. Yes, some unfortunate souls would have died. But everything would get back to normal soon, I thought.

The dogs and I played for a while in the red-dirt softball field under the 59^th Street Bridge (there were far fewer dog runs in 2002 then there are today). I took Cassie home, then Roark and Freddie and I headed back up Second Avenue.

By this time the traffic had jammed to a standstill. Police sirens were useless at getting the cars and taxis moving, so the cops were actually driving up on the sidewalks.

After we walked a few blocks, I saw a group of people gathering around the front window of a nail salon. So I stopped to see what was going on. There was a TV mounted on the back wall. The images on the screen showed the slow-motion collapse of one of the towers. I felt like I’d just had the wind knocked out me, my knees buckled, and I finally came to grips with the seriousness of what had happened.

Like everybody else in New York (and much of the rest of the world), I was glued to the TV for the rest of the day. Finally, at about 6 in the evening, I took Freddie out for his evening walk. We saw two long, very long lines of people as far as the eye could see in both directions—many covered in a coating of gray dust—walking single file, plodding along, zombie-like, headed uptown. The subways and buses were out of service; so were the taxis. These poor souls had to walk all the way from the lowest reaches of Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Spanish Harlem, and beyond. They seemed to be in shock, dead tired, or both.

Those are some of my personal recollection of 9/11/2001.
Then came the rescue efforts, the media coverage, endless footage of the dust clouds, slow-motion plane crashes, the constant news reports, conjectures, and a lingering feeling of chaos.

What Do Search-and-Rescue Dogs Do When There’s No One to Rescue?

It wasn’t long before dozens of search-and-rescue crews showed up at Ground Zero, eager yet serious teams of dogs and handlers from all over the country. Unfortunately, there was almost no one to rescue. There were, for the most part, only bodies or body parts to be found. So after three weeks or so of steadfast commitment, yielding little or no results, most of the 350+ search-and-rescue teams packed up their hopes and their equipment, and went home. 

As one press release put it: “The mettle shown by these dogs and their human halves has affected the world in a way that should not be underestimated.” No kidding.

Here are some heartfelt comments from people who worked with those amazing animals.

“The site is very difficult for the dogs. They’re crawling on their bellies and squeezing through things. It’s incredible to watch.”                  —Sharon Gattas, Riverside Urban Search and Rescue

“They will search endlessly for that scent [of a living person] until they are called off.” —Lori Mohr, National Disaster Search Dog Foundation

“All they really want to do is work hard and love you. How can that not raise the human spirit?”—Gerald Lauber, Suffolk County SPCA

“Some rescue workers couldn’t take it. They asked if they could play fetch with Thunder. But then they’d sneak off in a corner to just be with Thunder, or maybe to talk with him.”—Bob Sessions, FEMA

“They may not cry to their fellow firemen or police, but somehow they open up to their dogs.”—Laura LoPresti, Monroe, MO 

“These dogs have [also] been trained to pick up on people they perceive as being in a state of trauma. So they’ve been visiting a lot of firemen, police, and cleanup detail.”—Anonymous

“He kind of withdrew from everything,” said Mike Owens, of Southwestern Ohio K-9 Search and Rescue, speaking about his partner Whorf. “There was so much death there, it was emotional for the dogs.”  Whorf located the dead bodies of two missing firefighters on the first day; then, overwhelmed, he lay down and curled up on the spot. He began shedding profusely, quit eating and refused to play with the other dogs.

“Morale is important... So we set up a scenario that the dog can win at. We used a New York firefighter. He hid amongst the rubble, and we sent her on a search. She finds him. He plays with her real good. She’s real happy, and ready to go to work again.”—Mark Bogush 

“The dog seeks a live person in hopes the survivor will play with him. If he’s not finding a live person, there is no one to play with. So when I get home at night, I send my 12-year-old son to hide in the woods. Then Jax finds him and they play tug of war with a towel.”—Tom Fahy 

“He was a great, big guy, and he was just bawling. He was crying like a baby. He couldn’t talk, but he mouthed the words: ‘Thank you,’ and ‘thank the dog.’“—Louis Wardoup, volunteer, describing how his dog Insee unearthed  a firefighter buried under the rubble. 

“One of the things, the handler told us, that really yanked on his emotions was the gift he and his dog Ranger received from a child: a small ziplock bag with two dog biscuits and two Hershey kisses inside, with a note printed by the child: ‘Lassie would be so proud of you.’”—Terri Crisp, Director, Emergency Animal Rescue Service

***

New Yorkers felt an emotional bond with one another after the attacks. In fact, all Americans, and even people from other countries, all around the world, felt that connection. “We are all New Yorkers now” was a phrase often heard.

It wasn’t just the search-and-rescue dogs who were traumatized. Many people were also deeply affected by these events. Some sought counseling, others turned to drugs and alcohol or began overindulging in “comfort foods.” And speaking of comfort, as Laura LoPresti, one of the people quoted above says, “Just petting a dog provides comfort to those who need it.”

Not surprisingly, dog ownership began to increase in the years following 9/11, so much so that some in the industry called it an “explosion.” That’s because dogs may not know much about international politics or man’s inhumanity to man, but they do know how to guard us, protect us, make us smile, and comfort us with their presence and their wagging tails. 

“We need a dog over here!”—call often heard at the WTC site. 

All these years later, some of us still need a dog over here.

The Presence of the Past

Now, I’m not interested in re-awakening the ghosts of 9/11 without good reason. And the reason I think this is important is that global events have micro-effects. The devastation at the World Trade Center affected most of the dogs tasked to find living victims there. If a healthy dog like Whorf starts shedding profusely and refuses to eat, something has gone terribly wrong. And the culprit is deep inner stress. But it wasn’t just Whorf. Most of the 9/11 dogs left their tasks unfinished. They were trained to find the living, not the dead. 

In fact, when dogs are trained for search-and-rescue, human volunteers hide in make-believe disaster sites. Then, when the dog finds one, the victim acts happy and joyful and plays with the dog. That’s the dog’s “reward” for searching, that’s his emotional release. And that’s the feeling the dogs of 9/11 were searching for but weren’t getting because there were so few survivors.

So why did dogs like Whorf seem to develop symptoms of PTSD while others didn’t?

There are a number of reasons. But before going into them, it should be noted that with most working dogs there’s a very narrow parameter of breed types used for each particular job or set of jobs that the dogs are suited for. The German shepherd and Belgian Malinois are often used for police and military work. Beagles are good at finding drugs or other contraband at airports or border crossings. Dobermans and Rottweilers are favored for protection work. Bloodhounds, of course, are insanely good at tracking criminals through all sorts of terrain. And golden retrievers and Labs excel as seeing-eye dogs and therapy dogs because of their easy-going, good-natured temperaments.

Yet the multiplicity of different breeds found at a disaster site is a different story. You might easily find most if not all of the breeds mentioned above but you might also find Airedales, Jack Russell terriers, Australian blue heelers, elkhounds, Hungarian Viszlas, English setters, Dalmatians, dachshunds, schnauzers, poodles, even mutts. Nearly all breeds are welcome.

Why is that? Why would so many different breeds be so good at search-and-rescue work?

A dog’s desire to search for things—whether he’s searching a disaster site or playing a game of “find-the-toy”—is another ghost from the past, a behavioral tendency “inherited” from wolves. It’s part of what biologists called the predatory sequence, a specific set of hunting behaviors that play out when a pack of wolves goes on a hunting expedition, and does so in an exact, progressive pattern from one step to the next until the sequence is finished.

Here’s how it works. First the wolves leave their den to go out and search for prey animals like bison or elk. Then, when they find their prey, they stand still and stare at the animals in a posture similar to the way herding dogs, like border collies, stare at a flock of sheep. This is called the eye-stalk. Then the wolves try to isolate or cull the weakest member of the herd. To do this they have to get the herd moving, then they chase that weakest member, eventually confusing it and wearing it out. Then, once the prey animal is too tired or too confused to keep trying to escape, the members of the pack who are close enough, use what’s called the grab-bite to get a grip on the hide of the animal. This is followed by the kill-bite, where one or more wolves rip open the animal’s hide.  The final step is evisceration, where the wolves continue to pull back at the prey animal’s hide until its internal organs are on display.

One very interesting thing about this sequence is that once it’s set in motion the pack doesn’t stop. They don’t pause along the way to hunt rabbits or snack on road kill. They continue through the entire sequence until they’ve either eviscerated their prey or the prey escapes, in which case they go back to the den hungry and rest up for the next day’s expedition.

While this set of behaviors seems to be hard-wired—that is the wolves seem to be following a kind of stock script—these are drive behaviors, and are, thus, not related to instincts or reflexes.

What’s the difference?

Drives are more fluid and flexible; they allow for improvisation, they’re not purely mechanical and invariable as instincts and reflexes are. Plus, instincts are often about avoiding present or potential danger while drives are, for the most part, about putting oneself in danger or into a vulnerable position so as to attain a specific goal such as hunting or mating. Drives also tend to play out over longer, unspecified periods of time. And finally, drives have an almost magnetic kind of quality. Dogs in a state of drive feel magnetically attracted to the potential prey or potential mate while instinctive behaviors have more of an electric quality. This is a very important distinction to make so I’ll repeat it here: drives can be sustained for much longer periods of time than instinctive behaviors, they’re more variable and improvisational in nature, and they have a magnetic rather than electric quality. Instinctive behaviors aren’t generally sustainable over long periods of time, and there’s no room for spontaneity.

This brings us back to the search-and-rescue dogs of 9/11. 
The “search” aspect of how search-and-rescue dogs are trained is an analogue of the first step in the wolf’s predatory sequence. But dogs aren’t wolves. In fact, domesticated dogs don’t have the full predatory sequence that wolves do. Even dogs who’ve become feralized, and form groups in the wild or in cities like Detroit and Moscow, are incapable of hunting large prey together. They’ve lost the knack for it, primarily because dogs have been bred for thousands of years to only exhibit specific bits and pieces of the wolf’s prey drive. For instance, sight hounds and scent hounds tend to have more of the search behavior than other breeds, while pointers, setters, and herding breeds have more of the eye-stalk, though they also have a bit of the search as well. Retrievers are supposed to have a soft grab-bite so that they don’t bite down hard on quail, ducks, and other game birds. But, again, they also have a bit of the search built-in to their behavioral repertoire as well. Terriers, on the other hand, have a hard kill-bite, enabling them to successfully bite down hard on small vermin, dispatching them quickly. But again, most terriers also have a strong search component built into their behavioral patterns as well. In fact, searching seems to be hard-wired in most dog breeds, with few exceptions.

Another way of looking at this is that whenever you activate any aspect of a dog’s prey drive (even the eye-stalk) you’re energizing the dog. That’s what drives do. And when a dog feels energized or “magnetized,” she wants to move toward something, in fact I would say that she actually feels pulled toward that something, whether it’s a squirrel in the park , a Frisbee in flight, the sound of her owner’s key in the front door, or her dinner bowl. Thus the dog’s motive—which is a desire to connect physically with an object of attraction—and the dog’s movement toward that attractor—which is the kinetic and emotional process of completing that physical connection—are always synonymous in the dog’s mind. In other words, motivation and physical movement are inextricably linked. So drives are what motivate a dog to move toward a potential end-point, which is a mixture of a desire to make contact with an object of attraction and a subsequent (and sudden) release of that pent-up drive energy. So, in effect, the dog isn’t chasing the prey or potential mate as much as he’s trying to rid himself of a complex set of feelings and sensations churning around inside his body.

Teamwork in Dogs and Wolves

There’s another part of the search-and-rescue process, which, also, in a way reflects the way wolves hunt, and that’s the fact that wolves work together as a cohesive group. It takes a pack of wolves (or at least two or three) to tire and confuse a large prey animal. It’s rare for one wolf to be able to do that on his own. And, fittingly, search-and-rescue dogs, military dogs, police dogs, drug-enforcement dogs, and the like, don’t operate alone either. The dogs and their handlers work together as a team. And don’t forget the make-believe survivor, hiding in the rubble! She’s also part of the social dynamic, in fact, the most important part because, as I said earlier, finding the victim provides the feeling of release the dog is working for.

That’s why dogs act happy when they find a survivor in the rubble, or catch a Frisbee in mid-air. In some cases, it’s why dogs get wiggly when you come home. And it’s why some of the search-and-rescue dogs of 9/11 became stressed, despondent and depressed, and why some of them seemed to develop symptoms of PTSD as a result. Why? Because there was no one to connect to, no survivor acting happy and excited, and thus no emotional resolution for the dog. So when the dogs went back home to Connecticut or Indiana or Georgia or Ohio or Alabama, or wherever they were from, many of these dogs, perhaps most of them, weren’t the same happy campers who had been sent on what seemed like a wonderful adventure. They were left feeling like they hadn’t completed their task or finished their mission.

Not all of the dogs were anxious or troubled, at least not for long. Being back in familiar surroundings can be a tonic for dogs: the familiar bed, the water bowl, the well-worn chewie toys, that wonderful back yard with all those games to play. Plus, by the time they got home the weather had changed. The warmth of summer had given in to the first bite of autumn, another tonic for dogs. So, in all likelihood, most of them shook off the disappointment and stress they’d brought home with them and let it go, with tails a-waggin.’

But some didn’t. They couldn’t. They couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been left undone. And those feelings impacted the lives of their owners and handlers, perhaps in small ways, yes, but small things add up, especially when you’re dealing with wounded emotions. And believe me, there is a deep reservoir of emotion inside each and every dog, whether he’s a working dog or just a family pet. And those feelings, if not given an outlet, are like all the potential living victims that the dogs of 9/11/ couldn’t find. They stay stuck like phantoms in the dog’s mind and body as unresolved emotion and its byproduct, deep inner stress.

And so it is that acts of war—the terrible friction that develops between peoples and nations which take place on a grand stage—can have a trickle-down effect on our dogs. even though they’re not the main actors in the drama, they’re just standing in the wings.

Yet without question 9/11 changed the world for some dogs. Puppies who were being bred and raised in certain kennels were now being bred to be war dogs. Not all puppies of course. But the ones who’d been issued “draft cards” had far different lives in store for them than they would have had otherwise. Some would have been trained to sniff out bad guys in cities and towns, or chase perps at night across otherwise quiet lawns, or down dark, deserted alleyways. Some would have become guide dogs or therapy dogs. Some would have been raised as family pets. And some would have become search-and-rescue dogs.

Instead, many of these dogs, these young puppies, were destined to live in barracks, to learn how to sniff out land mines and I.E.D.s, and search for and find wounded and dying soldiers. And no matter how brave they were, and no matter how well they were trained, some of them couldn’t shake off their war time experiences as easily as they and their handlers would have liked. The noise and the chaos, the explosions, the persistent rocket fire, the human casualties all took their toll. The emotions of these brave dogs got “stuck,” left unresolved, and so they developed PTSD, which for these brave, dedicated animals was a double whammy: they couldn’t function, which meant they couldn’t do their jobs.

And these dogs love their jobs.

For the dogs of 9/11 that was the real tragedy, just as it’s a kind of crime that so many years later so many dogs are still being born and bred to be war dogs. These wonderful, amazing dogs may be perfectly trained but not all of them make it through our human war zones alive or unscathed. In fact, it’s a problem that goes far beyond the military.

Dr. Rachel Yehuda of The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that PTSD affects up to 10% of all men and up to 14% of all women.  And just as men and women—whether soldiers, rape victims, or those who’ve experienced other forms of terror, brutality, or trauma—can develop PTSD, so can dogs. 

In fact, many dogs—including those who’ve been treated severely by their owners or trainers, or those who’ve been abandoned in shelters, or those who’ve been traumatized by dog-on-dog aggression—can all develop PTSD. And they need our help.