Brian Dennis, a Marine fighter pilot stationed in Anbar province in Iraq, took immediately to the 60-pound German shepherd– border collie mix he found one day while on patrol. The dog had been stabbed with a screwdriver or an awl and had had his ears cut off, the latter apparently in the belief that doing so would make Nubs, as Dennis dubbed him, more alert. Dennis had Nubs treated for his injuries and then had to leave him behind when he was reassigned to a base 70 miles away. Nubs set off after Dennis and somehow found him. His tour of duty in Iraq over, Dennis spent $3,500 to send Nubs to Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in California, where the two are now living.

Special Forces Sgt. Maj. William Gillette happened upon three men beating a German shepherd at a checkpoint on the border of Iraq and Jordan. Brandishing his rifle, he rescued the dog, whom he named Yo-ge. At a cost of thousands of dollars, he took Yo-ge home with him to Clarksville, Tenn.

Staff Sgt. Jason Cowart found an emaciated puppy under a garbage container at his command post and nursed the dog, whom he called Ratchet, back to health. Ratchet sat beside him as he patrolled the streets in a Humvee. When it came time for Cowart to return to Fort Hood, Texas, he wrote to the World Society for the Protection of Animals to ask for help. The Massachusetts-based organization connected him with a Samaritan who paid the costs of shipping Ratchet halfway across the world.

Dogs and soldiers have always forged strong bonds, and the war in Iraq has afforded many opportunities for them to do so. The present conflict, though, has seen unusual efforts on the part of soldiers and civilians to take those dogs back to the States—efforts that sometimes come up against military regulations. One is the standard rule that military equipment, Ratchet’s ride notwithstanding, may not be used to transport nonmilitary animals. Pets are eligible for transportation, but only when a soldier is being permanently assigned to a new post; posts in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered temporary tours of duty, so pets acquired there are ineligible.

Furthermore, it is against regulations for individual soldiers to keep “mascots,” as they are called. Many commanders overlook that point, reasoning that the boost in morale is reason enough to do so. Others do not, though, and put official obstacles in the way of soldiers determined to take their friends home despite the red tape and high costs. To get around the injunction against mascots, Sgt. Peter Neesley built a doghouse just outside his base in Baghdad to house a stray Labrador mix and her pup, whom he named Mama and Boris. Neesley died, and his family worked with a Utah-based animal rescue group to transport the dogs to their home in Michigan. An executive at a private airline volunteered to ship them home, and local government officials helped maneuver Mama and Boris through the military and civilian bureaucracies.

Bonds form officially too. The U.S. Army, for instance, had 578 dog teams in the field in July 2007 when 20-year-old Corp. Kory D. Wiens was killed by an explosive device along with his dog, Cooper, who had been trained to sniff out weapons caches. The two were buried together in Wiens’s Oregon hometown. The military also maintains “official” dogs whose task it is to simply keep soldiers company as a means of reducing combat-related stress. Said one soldier, Sgt. Brenda Rich, of a dog assigned to her unit, “I felt more relaxed after being able spend some time with her. For a few minutes it was just me and the dog, and nothing in this environment seemed to matter.”

In previous wars, military dogs were usually killed at the end of their working lives. Today, however, many of them return home and are adopted by former handlers, police departments, and, as in a few well-publicized cases, the families of handlers killed in action. Such was the case with Lex, a German shepherd whose trainer, 20-year-old Marine Corp. Dustin Lee, died in a mortar attack in Falluja in 2007. Lex, who had played with and slept alongside Corp. Lee throughout their service, was also injured in the attack; the dog at first refused to leave his side and had to be pulled away. Lee’s family lobbied extensively for the Marines to retire Lex before the customary age of 10, and Lex is now living with the Lees at their home in rural Mississippi.

An Iraq-based blogger working in the reconstruction program observes that it often seems that dogs adopt soldiers, not the other way around. “Maybe the dogs just like to be around people. Maybe it is a mutual protection racket. … We are conditioned to support and reward the dogs, just as the dogs are conditioned to guard us. It is primeval. Something in our Pleistocene genes compels the partnership.”

And so it is that the bonds of friendship in war extend across species lines. Yet, even after having successfully skirted the regulations that forbid that friendship, many soldiers simply cannot afford the cost—typically $3,000 to $3,500 per dog—of bringing their partners home. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International reports that at any given time there are a dozen or so dogs awaiting rescue from Iraq and Afghanistan, their passage hindered only by lack of funds. Another organization, Vet Dogs, an offshoot of the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, Inc., is active in training service dogs to work with injured veterans; it too is in constant need of funds to support its efforts.

Since it seems that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will go on and on, those bonds will continue. And so too will the need for public support for the dogs and soldiers caught up in it.

—Gregory McNamee
Images: Marine Maj. Brian Dennis and his adopted dog, Nubs, near the Iraq-Jordan border, February 2008—courtesy Maj. Brian Dennis/AP; Jerome Lee, kneeling, father of slain soldier Marine Corp. Dustin Lee, officially receiving Lex in adoption ceremony, Marine Corps Logistics Base, Albany, Ga., as Dustin Lee’s wife, Rachel, looks on.—Walter Petruska/AP.

How Can I Help?

• Support Baghdad Pups, a program of SPCA International
• Support Vet Dogs, a project of the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, Inc.

As humans cluster in ever-larger cities, and as those urban areas spread into the countryside, we have remade night into day. Creatures of the day, fearful of what the darkness holds, we have extended the sun with untold billions of lights, engineering the hours to extend in turn the time available to us. Whereas the farmers and gatherers of old were awake with the sun and asleep soon after nightfall, we now need sleep only when we absolutely must; for the rest of the time, we move down well-lighted streets into bright homes, shops, restaurants, and schools.

The result is that the planet is now shrouded in a haze of polarized light—that is, light waves that radiate in a single plane, a feature of reflected artificial light, as opposed to natural rays, which usually vibrate along many directions. The vast amount of artificial light humans have added to the environment obscures even the bright path of the Milky Way around the globe. This light pollution, as it is called, has remade the human world in the course of just over a century. But more, it has altered the world of countless animal species. Lights on land and at sea—the latter on oil rigs, fishing fleets, cruise ships, and other vehicles—lure migratory birds like artificial suns, distorting their ability to interpret sensory clues. An estimated 100 million birds die each year in collisions with tall buildings. Untold millions more drop to their deaths exhausted, having flown far beyond their capabilities, their circadian rhythms betrayed by the artificial day.

Across the planet, the availability of so much artificial light has altered the habits of many animals. Nocturnal rodents such as packrats, opossums, ringtails, and even raccoons move more warily under observant lights, exposed. Songbirds of many kinds sing late into the night, unaware that the sun has fallen. A few animals may have even benefited, at least in the short term: bats, for instance, find plentiful prey in the swarms of insects drawn to all those streetlights.

Many animal species are tricked by all this light into migrating early or late, for the signals to move from one place to the other are almost always visual in nature, conditioned by sunlight. Newborn sea turtles use reflected starlight and moonlight to find their way from nest to ocean. Artificial lights instead lure them inland, where they in turn become the prey of foxes, dogs, and automobiles.

Dragonflies and other aquatic insect species normally lay their eggs on the surfaces of ponds or slow-moving streams, their behavior triggered by an instance of natural polarized light, in which light reflects horizontally from the water. Increasingly, researchers report, those creatures are confusing that natural light with artificial sources, laying eggs on the shiny glass and metal of buildings that give off the same light, now human-caused, and even atop car hoods and the artificial lakes of puddles beneath street lamps. Outside of the aquatic environment, of course, the eggs do not survive. This is no small matter; given the importance of aquatic insects to the entire food web, any reduction in their number is cause for concern. Bees, too, have been known to be confused by artificial polarized light, though they can interpret the natural variety and rely on signals from it for environmental cues.

The world is increasingly full of such “ecological traps,” as scientists call them, to which animals have not yet adapted. These traps are implicated in the decline of many animal populations. Even humans are caught up in them—and we are animals, after all. Some scientists have hypothesized that night light disrupts the production of melatonin, which, among other things, plays a role in suppressing the spread of cancer cells. Light pollution is particularly implicated in breast cancer, for reasons that are not well understood. There may be a connection of artificial light to stress levels as well, with consequences for relative rates of heart disease.

Scientists have taken the lead in seeking solutions, though most of them are not ecologists or conservationists but instead astronomers. Their Dark Skies Awareness program, mounted in concert with the International Year of Astronomy 2009, aims to reduce light pollution. One aspect of the program, for instance, is to reduce the sky-bound glare produced by ordinary house lights. “One of the easiest ways to reduce unwanted glare and light trespass is to use fully shielded fixtures,” notes the Dark Skies Awareness Working Group’s Web site. “When you use a fully shielded fixture you not only reduce these side effects of light pollution, but you can also reduce the wattage of the lamp in the fixture. The Great Light Switch Out program encourages homeowners to remove and replace their residential light fixtures to ones that are energy efficient and dark sky friendly.”

The astronomers’ efforts, which, admittedly, are made in the interest of their science, have borne some fruit beyond outreach to individual homeowners. Large cities such as New York have amended ordinances to require large buildings to dim their lights at night, while Toronto has encouraged (but not mandated) that office and commercial buildings go dark after hours during bird migration season. Fast-growing Tucson, Arizona, has reinforced existing programs to “provide standards for outdoor lighting so that its use does not unreasonably interfere with astronomical observations,” as its code mandates, with the side benefit that bats and other nocturnal desert wildlife are doing better than in previous years. A report released by the U.S. Department of Energy in October 2009 recommends that LED exterior lighting fixtures emit no light above 90 degrees and that this be a requirement for Energy Star and LEED certification; meanwhile, the government of the Veneto region of northeastern Italy has prohibited upward-pointing lights, with the result that the night sky over Venice and environs has immediately become less polluted.

Such structural improvements—and much light pollution is an easily solved problem of design—have had the helpful effect of better illuminating the ground, against the objection of those few opponents who argue that a darker sky will encourage crime. In coordination with other efficiencies, not least of them adopting the simple habit of turning off lights in rooms that are not being used, these improvements will have the economic effect of saving billions of dollars in light that otherwise would be directed into the sky. And they will almost certainly result in the saving of millions of lives of animals whose lives under the bright lights are full of peril, a rescue effort that, in the end, may prove to be the greatest benefit of all.

—Gregory McNamee

Image: View of Washington, D.C., at night, showing light pollution—International Dark-Sky Association.

To Learn More

• Dark Skies Awareness Project
• International Dark-Sky Association
• BBC News report, “Light Pollution Forms ‘Eco-Traps’”
• Article by Connie Walker, National Astronomical Observatory, “A Silent Cry for Dark Skies”

How Can I Help?

• See the International Dark-Sky Association’s Directory of Assistance.
• Use fully shielded light fixtures around and outside your house.
• Participate in and help publicize lights-off events such as Lights Out America and Earth Hour.