At the Wall Street Journal,
a story on bomb-sniffing dogs in Afghanistan. One dog, a Labrador named Gunner, has been so rattled by the experience that he refuses to work any more:
For weeks after he arrived at Camp Leatherneck, Gunner refused to leave the kennel compound. Even now almost any sound sends him into a panic. If a shipping container door slams somewhere nearby, Gunner hunches down and bolts for an open cage door. If an artillery round goes off in the distance, he races into Cpl. McCoy's tent, then weaves around the cages, his tail low and twitchy. Even the click of a camera shutter can send him flashing back to some bad experience only he can recall.
Nobody knows why:
"With some Marines, PTSD can be from one terrible event, or a cumulative effect," says Maj. Rob McLellan, 33-year-old operations officer of the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, who trains duck-hunting dogs back home in Green Bay, Wis. Likewise, he says, the stress sometimes "weighs a dog down to the point where the dog just snaps."
Dogs suffer from the horrors of war just like men do. And then there's Zoom:
Zoom, another Lab, refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog. Only after weeks of retraining, hours of playing with a reindeer squeaky toy and a gusher of good-boy praise was Zoom willing to go back to work.
4 comments:
Have you come across
Cracker! the Best Dog in Vietnam by
Cynthia Kadohata among the books your kids have brought home--vaguely relevant to this current point.
During the war in Vietnam, the military bureaucracy decided that dogs were "equipment" and the decision was made to abandon them wholesale during the withdrawal.
Needless to say, this increased the incidence of ptsd in the dogs' handlers, let alone the dogs'...
Ouch, that's sad.
(argh--not an editing friendly media)
Really, it (the short-lived policy to abandon all the working dogs in Vietnam--they were mass-euthanized or turned over to the South Koreans--to be eaten, many of their handlers feared) is one of those unbelievably stupid things that it's almost impossible to comprehend--particularly given the long history of use of dogs in warfare.
...and I don't think I'm being a flaccid wristed Euro-centric dog lover in writing this. I'm sure dogs of war all over Asia have often had trainers who would pretty much have cut their throats if something happened to their charges... Yes, yes, I do appreciate the dog as a legitimate culinary article in certain cultures--but that's not the same training that a dog gets when it's being groomed to nobly give its life for its owner.
In any case, an interesting historical sidenote to this piece apparently now registering concern for the psychological effects of war on the dogs...
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