Several of my students have asked how to manage a dog that jumps on the counter when the owner is either in or out of the room, and clears all the contents. Owners try to put the contents on the counter to the back but the dog finds a way to remove anything that is …
I wouldn’t dream of raising a puppy without using a crate. Crates are a great tool to use when you can’t actively supervise your pup. And you know how much trouble puppies and young dogs can get into when they are not supervised! A crate will also make the job of housebreaking much easier. The …
The following outline will hopefully make the protection phase for the Working Class dogs in the show more consistent and allow handlers to know exactly what is expected. Melanie Rupp and I have discussed this exercise at length. Thanks Melanie. We would like your input and ideas. Please feel free to contact Melanie or myself …
Unlike most dog events, working dog competitions are not so much a test of how well a dog can do a particular exercise, but a more fundamental examination of the dog’s temperament. Whether it is Schutzhund, Ring Sport, herding or service dog trials, the points may be determined by how well a dog does each …
In the last two articles I had the opportunity to discuss Prey Drive Promotion. I feel that protection training should always begin there. If dogs have been trained in a similar way, we can start to incorporate defense drive promotion as part of training. At this stage I would like to see at the very …
After my last article I was really stumped for my next topic. There are so many things one can write about. But with a lot of topics I found that a magazine article would either be too general and not of any great value or way too long and detailed to go into a magazine. …
Electronic fences (also known as “invisible fencing”) have become popular in some areas. One advantage is cosmetic– you can’t see the fence, so it is allowable in housing areas that prohibit regular fences. Electronic fencing is relatively low-cost compared to regular fencing. And some dogs do well with this type of fencing and learn to …
It’s club training day, phase B training is coming to an end. Time for the good stuff: Protection. Once the helpers, training directors and handlers set their mind on protection, obedience becomes a distant memory when it comes to training concerns. Obedience is over with the end of phase B. Or is it? Again, I …
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 …