Elite Belgian dogs favoured for police canine corps
Malinois breed helped take out bin Laden
WASHINGTON — It is driven to hunt and capture prey.
It looks like a leaner, more agile German shepherd. It has a 270-degree field of vision and the force of its bite equals 1,400 pounds per square inch. It can run almost 50 km/h. It can withstand the heat of the desert and an August day in Washington. It can smell drugs, bombs and unmarked graves.
It’s deadly enough to help take out Osama bin Laden, but gentle enough to push a toddler in a toy car.
Meet the Belgian Malinois, the weapon the White House didn’t use last Friday when Omar J. Gonzales scaled the fence and ran more than 60 metres to reach the mansion’s unlocked door, where he was finally taken down by an officer inside.
The man appeared to be unarmed — though a search later turned up a knife in his pocket and ammunition in his car — which may explain why he wasn’t taken out by sharpshooters on the roof, who are trained not to shoot unarmed intruders. By why didn’t White House guards release a specially trained Malinois?
The elite breed is the secret service’s favoured canine. After an intruder jumps the fence and triggers the alarm, canine teams are trained to be released within four seconds “to act as a missile, launching in the air to knock the subject down, and then biting an arm or leg if need be to subdue the person until the handler arrives,” Washington Post reported.
Chasing people down is one thing these dogs, which are also used by the U.S. military, do best.
In June, dogs, including the Belgian Malinois and other breeds, started patrolling outside the White House gates — the first time canine agents were deployed among the public. The secret service has had a canine team since 1976, when it was created to stop suicide bombers. The dogs train for 20 weeks before they start working and then do eight hours a week of retraining for the rest of their professional lives.
These dogs are no strangers to the front lines.
The U.S. Navy SEALs used a Belgian Malinois named Cairo in Operation Neptune Spear to capture and kill bin Laden.
The dog helped secure the perimeter of bin Laden’s com- pound, sniffing for bombs. The mission was a far cry from the early days of military dogs. During the Second World War, the military asked patriotic citizens to offer up their dogs for a defence program, an effort Susan Orlean documented in her book Rin Tin Tin, the Life and the Legend. A detachment of 125,000 dogs, ranging from Dobermans to poodles, was sent overseas. Some were used as suicide bombers. Some were left behind, others euthanized. Some survived but were forever changed by the experience.