What brave new world is this where genetically engineered military work dogs are not the stuff of science fiction but, soon, the stuff of science fact? That is one of the upshots from news that Forbes first broke Thursday evening about American billionaires Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey collaborating on a new startup titled Warhound, and already it has in stealth raised $200 million in seed funding. The stated goal is to use some of the same technology of Lamm’s Colossal Biosciences to clone military work dogs that can be genetically altered to serve the U.S. military, a client Luckey’s Anduril Industries is intimately afmiliar with.
While Lamm and Lucky dreamed up the company, and Lamm will sit on its board, Warhound has tapped former U.S. Marine David Spirk as its CEO, and it is positioning itself as fulfilling a very real need for the U.S. military. As of press time, the federal government acquires more than 80 percent of its work dogs for the various military branches from European firms, only about half of which are ever actually deemed fit for service. That is to say for every 100 puppies recruited from European breeders this year, maybe 50 will be deployed in the field in 2029. These are the dogs used to sniff out explosives and narcotics, guard parameters, and track suspects.
There has been a perhaps unsurprising skepticism online to the idea of using some of the same methods as Colossal—the company Lamm co-founded and which made global headlines last year when it announced it had brought back the dire wolf (or a functional version of the dire wolf)—to genetically enhance living breeds of dogs like German Shepherds. It is likely for this reason that Warhound stressed in a press release that it is also working with the American Humane Society, the famed animal welfare organization that has agreed to certify Warhound’s training program and the unification of military working dogs with their former handlers and adoption protocols.
Still, the thing that gave this writer pause is exactly how the science of genetically-manipulated canines would be used to enhance and improve the health of lab-created work dogs—and are there larger, perhaps more benign, applications for this technology beyond military use? In an exchange of text messages with Ben Lamm, the Texas entrepreneur insisted that the north star is expanding the quality of health of these dogs… and potentially making it available one day to the civilian population’s pets as well.
