Warrior Pups
By Jeff Kamen
Lyon’s Press

I don’t wish to impair anyone’s enjoyment of naked ladies with stories about dead dogs, but I feel this is the only opportunity I’m ever going to get to talk about a real-life problem that I found out about the hard way: chip bags. My intent is to spread awareness about this relatively unknown danger so that no one has to go through what we went through.

One night in May I found our 11-year-old dachshund, Beckett, dead under a tree in our backyard at 3 A.M. with a Cheetos bag wrapped around his head. His body was cold and stiff.

Earlier that day we had begun a landscaping project. When the work crew left for the night, they made a neat pile of their tools, chain saws, and a 12-pack of soda. Beckett likely went out around midnight to take a pee, as he did nearly every night, and found the Cheetos bag buried amid the workers’ trash.

“A lot of these bags,” it reads on PreventPetSuffocation.com, “are made from a strong mylar-like material which helps keep snacks fresher. When a curious dog puts his head into the bag looking for leftover crumbs, the bag creates a vacuum-like seal around the dog’s neck. As he tries to breathe, the bag tightens, cutting off the oxygen.”

This, I sadly learned, is not an uncommon way for animals to die. So, whether you have pets or not: tear, rip, and cut up your chip bags when you’re finished with them.

From here, we turn to War Pups, a book about military working dogs. Beckett died doing what he loves — eating — and the same could probably be said for all the brave dogs that have fallen while serving in the U.S. military. Author Jeff Kamen and his wife, photographer Julie Stone-Kamen, spent a month living at the Lackland Air Force Base in south Texas where almost all of the military’s dogs are born, bred, and trained. The result of their experience is this book.

As a bleeding-heart liberal, I eyed this work with suspicion. “Those dogs,” I heard myself saying, “didn’t volunteer to be sent into a war created by multinational corporations who want to rape foreign lands to profit from their natural resources!”

But as my wife Tania pointed out, “Those dogs probably DO want to be in a war zone.” Dogs were born to hunt and kill, she explained, but we’ve bred that out of them.

She’s right, of course. We used to laugh at Beckett and call him a fake dog. “The dachshund: nature’s clown.” Whenever wolves came on TV, we’d look at him and go, “How did you come from that? There’s no way.” And Beckett agreed. He did not carry himself like a dog, did not think of himself as a dog, and while there were very few dogs he could literally look down upon (so short were his legs), he looked down on the other members of his species. He seemed to be under the impression that he was a German prince.

The Belgian Malinois, on the other hand, the military’s breed of choice, is fucking BONKERS. And I mean that in a good way. They are DOG to the power of ten. I especially enjoyed the stories about the bad Malinois puppies that bite anyone and anything in sight.

“Even as puppies,” Kamen writes, “Belgian Malinois dogs like to snap their teeth together over and over again. They seem to enjoy the clacking sound. They love to bite even more. It’s one of the traits that makes them great patrol dogs, but less than appropriate house pets for the untrained owner.”

I’m an untrained owner, so the training details that Kamen divulges were interesting to me because we hope to adopt another dog soon. We plan to be more disciplined parents this time around — well, Tania already is a good dog owner, it’s me who needs to be disciplined. But besides all the endearing stories of foster parents rearing warrior puppies and the amazing tales of canine courage on the battlefield, there’s a wealth of information beneficial to any dog owner.

Kamen writes, for instance, “There are some real ‘don’ts’ which fosters must observe. One of them is instructive for all of us who have very young dogs: Puppies should not participate in sustained running because that kind of repeated pounding is too harsh for their soft, developing bones and joints.”

So: chip bags, no. Warrior Pups, yes. And no sustained running for puppies.

Book Image: Courtesy Of Jeff Kamen