Forum

There will always be people around who can train dogs. The military centralizes training for standardization & because that's the military way, but the skill of training a working dog is not so arcane that it will die out. It is, however, definitely a skill that has to be learned, and the work of training dogs to a high level is going to continue to be specialized.

Dogs are relatively fragile, maintenance-intensive, and costly to replace. Your group can't realistically make friends with some wandering mutt & turn it into a working dog in a few sessions. My experience is with training spaniels for field trials: it takes two years to raise a pup to a high working standard & it takes weekly training work to maintain that high working standard. I don't see military working dogs or any kind of detection dog being any different. This isn't something the RPG group can do in a game context. I think for game purposes I would expect to see more junkyard dogs/meat dogs than highly trained working dogs. But the possibility that there are highly trained working dogs out there adds some fun possibilities to a game.

Good input. I appreciate the thoughts of an actual dog trainer [beyond just 'sit' 'stay' 'shake' and 'don't pee in the house' ].
I'm certain there will be people around who can train a dog to be a hunting dog [a pointer or grabber] or a sentry dog, but I don't see there being all that many people who can train a detection dog in a T2K context. As I understand it [and I could be wrong] most dogs can only detect one or two substances. Most police dogs, for example] are trained to detect cocaine and one other narcotic, usually meth. But that's different from your weed-and-heroin dog. Similarly, an IED dog only triggers on certain explosive elements, but not all of them. It's not much help to have a dog trigger on the smell of bagged mortar or artillery propellant, for example. You want a dog that will detect Semtex or other plastic explosives.
And I submit to you that people that know how to find and select the right pup, raise it properly, and train it to be a military /police dog are going to be pretty few on the ground in Poland /Sweden after a nuclear war and killing winter.

Any example of dogs being employed in mechanized warfare is the Soviet anti-tank dog of WWII. Given a surfeit of dogs and anti-tank mines or other shaped charges and a paucity effective anti-tank assets (plus desperation and maybe a propensity for harebrained schemes) someone might try to engineer a canine weapon system of this type. The basic method was to feed the hungry dogs underneath idling tanks until they were disposed to run under a tank when hungry; a dorsal lever triggered the explosive package. A defect discovered in production was that Soviet tanks used diesel and German tanks used gasoline, thus the dog's sense of smell caused them to prefer to run under a Soviet tank (which created a risk of friendly fire incidents).

There doesn't seem anything in game applicable to animal training, and the program would last several months anyway. If I were going to game out the deployment of an anti-tank dog, given the abysmal record of the weapon system I would adjudicate it thus: First, it locks on to the nearest vehicle (tracked if any, then wheeled if no tracked vehicles on the same map). As soon as it came under fire, I would have the dog roll 1d6: on a 1, it begins to return to whomever released it and no longer needs to roll. On a 6 it moves toward the vehicle it is tracking. On a 2-5 it is deterred by the fire and remains in the hex. It should roll again every round thereafter until it is shot, decides to flee to its master or reaches the target. In the unlikely event that it reaches the target, treat the attack as though the tank has hit an anti-tank mine.

Personally I love dogs but it's an interesting bit of history and an example of the crazy ideas that desperate people can come up with. Here's an article which doesn't cite sources but seems like a decent overview of the topic and accords with other things that I've read about this strange weapon system over the years: https://historyofyesterday.com/the-sovi ... 00425652eb

I served in the Army as a Military Policeman and I wish there was a Military Police Archetype with specialty of dog handler.

I had found this write up that someone had written up for animal handler:
Animal Handler: When working with a trained animal, you can direct it at Short Range to: Fetch/Carry - bring a small item to you or carry it to Short Range
Attack- With an Empathy roll, your animal can cause a target at Short Range to be Pinned (held in place) or knocked Prone. Target must succeed at a Mobility roll to move.
Additionally, the animal allows you to recover 1 additional Rank of Stress as if it were an additional Signature Item.

In Mutant Year Zero Core book there is a Dog Handler Archetype with Sic a Dog specialty that could be worked into Twilight 2000.

More on war dogs and dogs in war here, some of which would a applicable to the world of Twilight 2000: https://bjmh.gold.ac.uk/article/view/1465/1577

I wish there was a Military Police Archetype with specialty of dog handler.

Technically, you have half of it. Under the taxonomy used in the book, contemporary to the period, military police are classified as combat support. Whether that's a good fit (it's not) is something T2k has struggled with since its inception.

An example of dogs being employed in mechanized warfare is the Soviet anti-tank dog of WWII.

"That's not the kind of bomb dog I was looking for!"

This would be rough if I ran into it in a game. Canine Suicide Bombers would definitely be a veil but probably a line for me. Real-world, though, I totally get how a military could come to that as a solution. Wild dogs would certainly be in abundance and if you were desperate to find an anti-tank solution...

Maybe in my game, they'd just come out from under the burning tank singed Looney Tunes-style and run off to safety.