In previous editions, the only time you'd mix tech (cyberware, to be specific) and guard animals would be if you wanted to create psychotic, hair-trigger, killing machines. While those are fun, they were better suited to use as a response weapon, instead of a patrolling deterrent.

There's a new possibility under SR4. With the right obedience training, a set of image-linked doggles (dog goggles) and a specially designed Augmented Reality Environment program, you could have a kennel's worth of roving patrol dogs that don't need handlers to accompany them, can be controlled from a central location like a drone, and will attack specifically designated targets to the exclusion of anything else.

While it's true that dogs have less visual capacity than humans, as long as the visuals of the ARE program are designed with this in mind, it'd be very easy to provide an Augmented Reality Environment that the dog can be trained to respond to.

Want to have patrol dogs and pressure pads in the same facility? You can have certain pressure pads disarm in timed sequence, and have the dog trained to walk just in the areas of floor highlighted on the doggles.

Need to get the dogs to follow randomized patrol paths? Give the dog some AR object that it's trained to follow, like another dog, an AR alpha dog, if you will. This'd also be handy if you needed to get all the dogs in the facility to one place quickly to counter a threat. Pack behavior instinct says when the alpha dog starts running somewhere, you run to follow.

Finally, when doing attack training, train the dogs that they see a person who's been highlighted on their doggles, that's who they attack. Then you set up the system so that if it detects a human silhouette that isn't broadcasting the right RFID, highlight it.

The nice thing is, you could have 20-30 dogs out on patrol, and only have to have one human on payroll in the security office monitoring the image feeds from the doggles. I suppose if you had a smart enough piece of software there instead, you wouldn't even need any human presence.

Brilliant.

of course, you must have a backup plan for when they jam the dogs commlinks. an agent program could handle it easy enough i think. and what if they hack the dogs? I can see PCs making the dogs attack eachother.

you would also need a pooper scooper drone. bonus points if it looks like a fire hydrant.

Of course, there's an even lower tech solution than jamming the commlinks: figure out a way to get the doggles off the dogs. Mage with telekinesis spell or a helpful spirit, perhaps? Even putting an onboard agent onto the dogs' commlinks can't help when the dogs are no longer wearing the AR doggles.

Still, I think it has potential to make for some fun complications to your typical B&E runs. Especially when you start putting doggles on hellhounds.

Hmm, Dogriggers...Perhaps even an adept with imp.ability animal handling, animal husbandry quality and a comlink.

Here's the problem from a character perspective.

1. how much is the cost for a trained guard dog?
2. How long would it take to TRAIN a guard dog with AR goggles?
3. How easy would it be for Lonestar to track down the characters own kennel of trained dogninjas by making a ritual tracking of some dog poo that one of my stealth dobermans left behind?

Fun equipment for trained animals:

Stealth suit & climbing gloves for your trained ínfiltrator monkey.

Haha, I swear people ignore my topics. I made a post about creating critters hooked up with cyberware (along with rules) a few days ago, and I guess it's still floating on the front page somewhere.

Anyway, this is a cool idea, though. I wonder about the plausibility of actually training dogs to respond to the images on their AR. I don't doubt that they would, but the problem is their "virtual handler" would simply be a complex AI program. So it's questionable whether the program can a) respond to all sorts of strange stimuli and instruct the dog accordingly or b) form that social attachment with the dog so as to work as a team.

IRL, rescue and police dogs are generally trained and used by the same person, right? It's not like you can "mass-produce" the trained dogs, then give them out to separate handlers and expect the dogs to follow complex instructions like jumping through hoops and avoiding colored squares.

Though that's all just speculation, so maybe I'm wrong. I know it'd be easy enough to train a bunch of dogs to be mean and attack anything that walks by, though. Just mass-producing/training smartdogs seems a little far-fetched, but anything's possible in Shadowrun.

Hell, maybe you could just implant "patrol" skillsofts into the dog's heads and have them work through that.

Either way, it sounds fun as hell to send a team of runners through a kennel of cyber-enhanced death hounds.