Alex, a military working dog, was working alongside his handler with an Army military police unit in Afghanistan in 2018 when a nearby insurgent detonated a suicide vest. In shock with severe injuries including a fractured leg, the German Shepard was medically evacuated immediately.
Over the next few weeks, Alex received intensive care and treatment at the Department of Defense’s Veterinary Medical Center Europe in Landstuhl, Germany. Although he recovered well, his wounds were too severe to allow him to return to duty, and Alex was medically retired from the military and adopted.
Alex is just one of the many military working dogs (MWDs) deployed in support of combat operations.
“In FY 2019, nearly 1,000 MWDs deployed to support multiple combat operations,” mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Defense Health Agency (DHA) Veterinary Services Chief Army Col. Nicole Chevalier.
In the last two decades, more than 4,000 MWDs dogs have suffered combat injuries. But detailed information on the dogs’ injuries and treatments were not captured in any existing database, making it difficult to do any research and analysis on those incidents, Chevalier said.
Database Would Improve Care
Tracking that information and creating a comprehensive military working dog trauma registry is a key next step to improving MWD combat casualty care. This would allow military veterinarians and working dog handlers to draw lessons learned and improve the training and medical care provided to these highly trained canine warfighters.
The Defense Health Agency Veterinary Services is currently seeking funding for the MWD trauma registry, which should be operational in late 2021.
“A trauma registry would provide data to inform both evidence-based performance improvement and research efforts to better protect dogs in combat zones. In turn, this will minimize morbidity and mortality rates and reduce lost working days due to illness or injury,” Chevalier said.
Data from the registry might also help in the development of protective equipment.
A registry “would uniformly create an abstract containing vital statistics on a particular dog, the nature of how the dog was injured, and the extent of the injury itself, successful or failed treatments, and outcomes,” she explained.
This is important because “now there is a global shortage of working dogs,” Chevalier said, and they are not easy to replace.