Page 130 - JSOM Winter 2022

however, the lack of preventable/potentially preventable inju- Conclusion
ries and deaths that require a change to policy or doctrine for
prevention indicates that the policies already in place may be Traumatic injury prevention among deployed MWDs is criti-
sufficient for protecting MWDs from injuries. cal, as it reduces the time an MWD is unable to perform their
essential missions of safeguarding the force and neutralizing
enemy combatants. Many of the injuries identified in this
Type of trauma, mechanism of injury, injury prevention cat-
egory, and selected intervention were all associated with dog population were minor – such as small lacerations to the paw
subpopulation (i.e., SOF MPCs and conventional MWDs). SOF pad or minor abrasions after a dog fight – and likely required
MPCs more frequently operate as part of higher risk missions only short recovery times, allowing the MWDs to return to
in more austere environments, and a 2021 study by Edwards et duty quickly. Nonetheless, this study has demonstrated that
al. confirmed that these dogs were more likely to sustain mor- deployed MWDs experience preventable and potentially pre-
15
tal injures compared to conventional MWDs. Thus, the find- ventable injuries, some of which are severe. Improvements in
ing that injuries among SOF MPCs were significantly different handler training and development of innovative protective
from those sustained by conventional MWDs was unsurprising. equipment specific for MWDs may significantly reduce the
Importantly, in SOF MPCs, there were few applicable interven- number of traumatic injuries experienced on the battlefield.
tions because 38% of injuries were unpreventable and over half
of the injury events (52%) did not have sufficient information Author Contributions
in the veterinary treatment records for the SME panel to de- JC and THE conceived the study concept. THE obtained fund-
termine an injury prevention category. This is likely due to the ing. THE and LFFS coordinated and collected the data. JC and
high risk and confidential nature of the work these MPCs per- LFFS analyzed the data. JC wrote the first draft, and all au-
form. Further study focusing on preventative injury specific to thors read and approved the final manuscript
SOF MPCs would be beneficial to reduce the burden of injury
in these highly trained and extremely valuable MWDs. Disclosure
The authors have nothing to disclose.
This study is the first application of the DoD’s MTMR process
to review traumatic injury in an MWD population. Nonethe- Disclaimer
less, this study has some important limitations. First, the sam- The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the au-
ple size was rather small and only included 195 injury events thors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the
for MWDs who were deployed to the CENTCOM AOR be- U.S. Army Medical Department, the Department of the Army,
tween 2001 and 2018. The total number of dogs injured in DoD, or the US Government.
combat zones and the total number of dogs deployed during
this time is unknown. Yet, the sample size of this study was References
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128 | JSOM Volume 22, Edition 4 / Winter 2022