Warhound Just Gave America’s Military Dogs a Powerful New Ally: The Country’s Oldest Humane Organization

American Humane will oversee every Warhound dog from its first day of training to its homecoming.

Every leash has two ends. For most of the 84 years America has sent dogs into harm’s way, the country has paid far more attention to the handler’s end than to the dog’s. Warhound, the Texas startup conceived by Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, intends to balance that. It emerged from stealth last week with a $200 million seed round, a plan to build a healthier, homegrown generation of working dogs, and a partner whose name bears real weight: American Humane Society. The nation’s first national humane organization, American Humane Society, will certify Warhound’s training programs and help reunite retired dogs with the handlers who served beside them.

The numbers explain the immediacy. The U.S. military fields more than 2,200 working-dog teams. Yet more than 80% of those dogs come from European breeders, and fewer than half make it through a roughly three-year pipeline. To field 100 dogs, the country buys and trains about 200. That’s a lot of animals put through intensive training only to not make it. Warhound’s fix starts with cell lines from proven performers, mostly Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds. They’ll be cloned through Colossal’s ViaGen, with edits aimed at reducing inherited health problems. The first puppies are expected in early 2027.

On Oct. 26, PETA called Warhound a “stunningly old-fashioned idea,” arguing that robots and AI can perform dangerous missions without putting dogs at risk. Warhound agrees that machines should take over wherever they can operate safely and effectively. But dogs remain on duty today—detecting explosives and searching rubble alongside military personnel, police and first responders. The question is not simply dogs or robots, but how to make the dogs still serving healthier, more likely to complete training and better protected. As Lamm emphasizes, Anduril’s eye and ear protection and situational-awareness technology will go on the dogs, not inside them and help make them safer.

That’s where the other end of the leash comes in. The American Humane Society was founded in 1877, and it already runs a Military Working Dog Reunification Program that brings retired canine veterans home to their former handlers. It will hold Warhound to its standards from the first day of training to the last day of service. “We owe these dogs a commitment to their well-being that matches their service to us,” said American Humane CEO Dr. Robin Ganzert. Warhound has also brought in bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And its CEO, David Spirk, is a Marine Corps veteran who knows what a working dog means to the person holding the leash.

The debate over how America should protect its working dogs is healthy, and it isn’t going away. Warhound didn’t start or invent the working dog program, but aims to make it more efficient. For the first time, someone is building the answer from the dog’s end of the leash, all the way to the day a gray-muzzled veteran hops into the back seat of an old handler’s truck and finally goes home.