Dogs are used by first responders and the military for a number of tasks. Their keen sense of smell, speed, and keen hearing give them advantages over even drones or robots, and, according to Grok, trained dogs are used for a variety of tasks, including detecting explosives, providing security, locating enemies, doing sentry and perimeter work, and performing search and rescue. Two other duties mentioned by Grok are these.
- “Special operations support: High-risk missions (e.g., the dog Cairo on the 2011 bin Laden raid), including some aerial insertion (parachute or rappel with specialized gear).”
- “Israel has used MWDs heavily for detection and assault in Gaza (with high attrition).”
Note the “high attrition”: this means that the dogs die, even though they don’t choose to go into service. This is all I’m using from Grok; the rest of the writing here is mine or comes from the three sources below.
The breeds of dogs used in service are mainly German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and Labradors, and of course undergo a period of intensive training. But, according to the Fortune article below, there’s a shortage of good “war dogs” (most of the mention of dogs in these articles involves military use):
The Army set up the K-9 Corps in 1942. Today the Department of War’s Military Working Dog Program has more than 2,200 dog teams, according to the company, and more than 80% of U.S. military working dogs are bought from Europe. Lamm cited a Senate Armed Services Committee warning that “due to the finite number of breeders overseas, as well as rising market demand, the cost… to procure whelped military working dogs from Europe is skyrocketing.” He also cited the American Kennel Club’s assessment that “there is now a shortage of even mediocre quality foreign dogs available.”
The U.S. is “competing against other country governments” for the same animals, Lamm said, China and Russia among them.
The losses after purchase are expensive, too. According to the company, fewer than half of the dogs bought are judged fit for service after a roughly three-year acquisition and training pipeline. That means the U.S. has to buy and train about 200 dogs today to field 100 working animals later.
But Mammon to the rescue! In stepped entrepreneurs and geneticists, in the form of Palmer Luckey (“an American entrepreneur and co-founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries“), Ben Lamm, billionaire entrepreneur and founder of our old friend Colossal Biosciences, the “de-extinction company,” and Dave Spirk, who will be the CEO of Warhound Corporation.
Warhound received over $200 million in seed funding, with investors including, according to Fortune, “In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton, 8VC, USIT, Bob Nelsen, Breyer Capital, CAZ Investments, Neogenesis, Builders VC and Lux Capital, among others.” Colossal also benefits: to quote Fortune again:
Colossal licenses technology to Warhound and has an economic interest in it. Spinning companies out of Colossal’s research is “an intentional part of our model,” Lamm said.
How it’s being done (they’ve already started cloning trained dogs), and what will happen to the puppies, are described in the following three articles, though the archived Fortune article is the most informative. Scientific American is okay, but they still fall for Colossal’s hype. They say this:
Colossal Biosciences, which has a stake in Warhound and is providing much of the science, is no stranger to genetic engineering: last year the firm cloned and edited a gray wolf to create an animal that was genetically similar to the extinct dire wolf. The process for Warhound will look similar, Lamm says, but with modern dogs.
Nope. As I’ve pointed out, the “de-extincted dire wolf” is really a gray wolf with 20 DNA edits in 14 genes, producing an animal that is not “genetically similar to the extinct dire wolf”. [I corrected the earlier figures.] As I wrote on October 5, “Since gray wolves and dire wolves differ by 12 million DNA bases, the edits comprise only 0.0002% of the dire wolf genome. In other words, what Colossal produced, as anyone with neurons knows, is a grey wolf with a few morphological changes.” I wouldn’t say that .0002% is a great deal of added similarity!
But I digress in my animus towards the crumbling Scientific American. Here are the three articles; click on the screenshot to read any.
From Scientific American:
From Fortune (archived):
From engadget:
The process will involve cloning service dogs that have proven to be great at their jobs, a process that first involves replacing the nucleus of an oocyte with the nucleus from a somatic (b0dy) cell of the chosen service dog. This nucleus-replaced egg cell is then genetically tweaked to make a number of edits; these edits are designed to remove genes causing defects like hip problems and cancer, as well as to add in bits of DNA that make dogs faster or better able to smell. Only a limited number of edits are possible (the faux “dire wolves” used 20), and you better know what the DNA bits you’re adding will do. This is a problem, as we don’t often know what genes are the ones causing problems.
The edited cells—you can make multiple clones by using different body cells from the same service dog—are then artificially fertilized using chemical stimulants, and these “fertilized” eggs are placed in a receptive surrogate mother dog. The pregnant mom’s embryos are checked genetically to see if they indeed correspond to the cloned service dog, and are usually removed by Caesarian section, as were the faux “dire wolves”. This poses an ethical issue, as it involves making dogs pregnant who never get to see their pups.
Now cloning body cells without editing has been going on for some time as rich people have sought to replace their dead or aging pets with ones that are largely genetically similar. This runs about $50,000 to $100,000 per animal, and has a pretty high failure rate, as things can go wrong at any step. I quote Sci. Am.:
Cloning dogs is not a new science. Research has shown that cloning service dogs produces puppies that have many of the same desirable traits. But the process can be harmful, says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University. The rate of successful live offspring remains low among the cloned dogs, and the process can put the surrogate mother in danger.
Another ethical problem to ponder! Once the cloned service dogs are removed from the surrogates and raised, they undergo training—after all, training is a behavioral and not a genetic modification—in the hopes that once you have puppies, not many of them will wash out. In addition, they will be EQUIPPED WITH WAR STUFF. As Fortune says, quoting Lamm:
Anduril is supplying equipment including eye and ear protection, body armor, and integration with its Eagle Eye system, so that “dogs, handlers, and autonomous systems operate as one team.”
Now the first thing I asked myself when I read about this is, “Why not just artifically select service dogs with the desired traits and not breed from ones with defects?” That’s a good question, as it might, in the end, be cheaper and easier. On the other hand, if you have a great service dog, cloning will enable you to get many copies of the dog at once via multiple surrogates. But that itself leads to another problem: since the multiple surrogates are pretty much genetically identical (that’s what clones are), perpetuating the line might lead to serious problem with inbreeding.
The upside of cloning is, of course, pecuniary. If you can get great service dogs this way, you could secure a government contract to keep providing dogs to the military, and that could be very profitable. I suspect this, and not scientific advance, is the main motivation for the effort. After all, you could take the aggressive genes out of pit bulls, but that wouldn’t be profitable.
Another problem, which I’ve noted above, is figuring out the limited array of genes you want to edit. Sci Am. quotes another geneticist:
Both scientists and private companies have genetically edited dogs before, and the research can “accelerate really fast because genomics in dog breeds already has a lot of data,” says Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive and Restore, who works on wildlife cloning for conservation. Researchers have edited dogs to tweak genes for hip dysplasia, make them hypoallergenic and treat muscle disease, although the long-term health effects of these changes remain unclear.
But optimizing traits at scale and across service dogs could take time—and leave room for unintended consequences, Novak adds.
“It can be hard to figure out exactly what genetic element is creating a trait,” he says, “and some traits can be the combinations of hundreds or thousands of mutations across genes.”
Traits like smelling ability and running speed are, no doubt, “polygenic,” involving several to many genes, and changing just a couple may not effect much change in the War Dogs.
Finally, I’ve mentioned some ethical problems. Although the project is touted as being “certified by the American Humane Society,” I’m not sure what kind of certification will prevent problems like this (from Sci Am):
“It is by no means a perfect science, and by that, I mean it’s still a fairly inefficient process,” Moses says. “It requires a lot of dogs to have invasive things done to them and to be killed in order to produce one cloned puppy.”
Finally (again from Sci. Am.), cloning can have unintended detrimental effects that aren’t known until later, as Ben Novak notes above.
I don’t know any way this can be done without either producing unwanted dogs, killing or harming the surrogates, or producing genetically defective dogs when the cloning goes wrong. In my view, the Humane Society’s certification is premature.
Will the War Dogs program produce what’s intended? Who knows? It’s more likely to succeed than the ludicrous efforts to “de-exinct” Woolly Mammoths, Thylacines, or Dodos, projects that in the end won’t produce any de-extinction nor make Colossal any money.
