Continued from Part 1 The dog needs to learn to accept guidance from the handler. The key word here is guidance. The way many dogs act the first time an obedience exercise is asked of them in protection, I would say it is not disobedience that is happening. Often the dog can’t even hear the …
Prey-drive, defense-drive, fighting-drive, etc. are the catch phrases of modern protection training. They are thrown around at every seminar we attend, they are the subjects of countless articles, but rarely do people agree on what is being said about these “drives.” About 20 years ago Helmut Raiser revolutionized Schutzhund protection training by identifying which inborn …
The SV celebrates 100 years this year, so for all intents and purposes Schutzhund training has been around for close to 100 years as well. In that time countless books have been written, and even more seminars have been taught, and let’s not even start on how many conversations and discussions were held late into …
Continued from Part 2 I believe that reading dogs is one of the most important parts of dog training. In part one of this article I tried to address general qualities in dogs that we hear often when dogs and their training are discussed. I deliberately limited myself to traits that deal with perception and …
Continued from Part 3 There are a few more points I’d like to mention regarding defense drive. I strongly believe that these three defense drive categories are pre-determined and that this predetermination sets limits to how much we can change through training. Comments like “we need to put more defense into this dog” make me …
Continued from Part 4 Fighting “Drive,” Conclusion This brings me to the end of the discussion of fighting ?drive?. The major contributing components I have been able to isolate are the six I just described: prey drive, defense drive, frustration aggression, social aggression, dominance behavior, and rage. All dogs will have these components in some …
A good foundation is where everything starts. I’ve covered foundation topics over the past few months and looking back, I think I missed something. The reason for that is probably because what I will discuss in this article may not become an issue until later in a dog’s career. But I think it should be …
Continued from Part 1 The Hold and Bark I would say that the easiest exercise to practice with an arm on the right is the hold and bark. It does not involve a lot of mechanics from the helper. The picture of the helper with the sleeve on the left is a familiar one. The …
… Previous Restraint, tapping, sniffing, platz, reward. Be sure to maintain the restraint part of the set up. Handlers sometimes get a little rushed and let go of it too fast. Hold the dog back a bit and control the situation. You can do the same thing alone, without an assistant. But you have to …
… Previous Part 1&2 of this article was a discussion of the fundamental concepts of tracking and teaching tracking. I’d like to focus part 3 on a crucial part of Schutzhund (or VPG) tracking, articles. I believe that this is also one of the fundamentals. After all, the description of the task in the trial …