025 Benito Olson

About this video

Mike Ritland interviews Benito Olson, a 10-year Navy veteran who served nine years as a K9 handler, including six years at SEAL Team Six. Olson recounts his path from growing up in Minnesota with an incarcerated father to joining the Navy as a master-at-arms, discovering his calling in military working dogs during his first deployment to Bahrain, and working his way up from volunteering at the kennel to becoming a certified handler. The conversation covers his early training experiences, the challenges of learning dog handling with minimal instruction, and his journey through handling multiple dogs including his first detection dog Brent and a green Malinois named Leo.

Key takeaways

• Olson attributes his path to service partly to his father’s incarceration for drug dealing and money laundering, initially aspiring to become a police officer before joining the Navy
• According to Olson, basic military dog handler training at Lackland in 2004 focused heavily on compulsion and corrections rather than dog behavior, bonding, or motivation-based methods—teaching handlers just enough to handle dogs operationally but not enough to truly understand canine learning
• Olson recounts being fast-tracked through the Navy K9 program unusually quickly (attending handler school only seven months into his Navy career), facing resentment from more senior sailors who had waited years for the same opportunity

Episode details: published March 1, 2019 · 78.7K views · 2:34:39 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Stories told by Mike Ritland’s podcast guests are the guests’ own accounts, attributed to them — not independently verified. Commentary is Ritland’s, presented as his analysis.

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