How in the world do they train dogs to parachute? Even Rin Tin Tin or Lassie didn’t parachute.
Very cool picture. I can only imagine whats going through that dogs mind. 
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/06/when-a-dog-isnt-a-dog/?hpt=hp_t3
I once saw a youtube video of someone parachuting with a cat. It didn’t go nearly as well.
“I’m with my master, doin’ what I’ve been trained to do. Life is good.”
I seem to remember a quote from an army trainer along the lines of “They love it, the first time you have to push them out the door, after that you have to hold them back.”
I don’t think those military dogs are parachuting, I think the helicopter is hovering over the water. The soldier next to the dog is not wearing a parachute, just a flotation device, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the dog is wearing. The waves don’t look to be that far below the chopper.
Also, the soldier and the dog are not tethered together. I’m reasonably sure that a dog can’t pull a ripcord so they would never put a dog out solo like that.
That being said, dogs have been skydiving in tandem with their owners and they seem to enjoy it.
How else would the blind skydive?
One of my old skydiving buddies was legally blind. He would ride to the airport on his Vespa with his white cane in front of him (I’m pretty sure he did it as a joke, only getting his cane out when he was close to the airport). He had thick Coke bottle glasses and couldn’t legally drive, but he was quite competent in the air. He had a t-shirt made of a skydiver under a parachute, holding a leash attached to a seeing eye dog under its own parachute.
Enjoy - woof!:
http://www.albrittain.com/working-dogs/military-working-dog-makes-historic-tandem-parachute-jump/
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/09/rebeccas_war_dog_of_the_week_its_a_bird_its_a_plane
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/05/dogs_in_the_news.html
If you’ll tolerate a sorta related story…
A few years ago I landed my plane at a very small field next to a river (I had my fly-rod and wanted to get in a little fishing). As I was taxiing to the parking area a big Lab bounded out and jumped on the wing. He apparently knew airplanes well enough to get on the door* side, and he stayed on the wing slobbering on my side window until I parked and shut down. When I left he repeated the same process, hopping onto the wing and riding all the way to the runway threshold with me. He only jumped off when I powered up for takeoff.
*note the walkway on the wing in this pic. He stayed obediently on that and never got on the paint.
Now those are parachuting military dogs! Pretty cool.
While scrolling through the third link (the boston.com one), I saw a picture of a robot dog that looked very interesting. Here is a video of BigDog in action (warning- audio has loud buzz). Here is a description of the robot from the manufacturer, Boston Dynamics.
Military dogs parachute regulary.
I’ve always thought that they get the same pleasure from jumping as they do sticking their head out of a moving cars window.
Not long ago I read one of Norman Vaughan’s books (My Life of Advenure) where he relates his experiences leading a army search-and-rescue team during the Second World War. He was among the first to parachute dogs (both sled dogs and pack dogs) into remote crash sites. When he first proposed the plan, his CO insisted over Vaughan’s objections that he test it on a dog-shaped dummy before using real dogs. That’s why he was the CO and Vaughan wasn’t. It turned out dogs weren’t heavy enough to deploy the parachute without modification and the dummy crashed. The issue was solved and he dropped dogs many times thereafter.
Man, my dog won’t even go down the stairs unless you’re standing beside her.
In jump school, there were photos of Geronimo in the company common area.
Relatd question, do trained dogs swim exactly like untrained dogs? In other words, do dogs swim naturally in the best possible way, unlike humans?
Yup, they do it all the time. Military working dogs go everywhere their handlers do, including out the back of a plane.
The dog is on a very long leash. When the leash goes slack, the blind skydiver pulls his (own) rip cord.