A guide to selecting and training a personal protection dog, starting with evaluating prey drive, defense drive, and an on/off switch. Training progresses from bite development with rags to realistic protective suits over six to nine months, with ongoing work needed to maintain skills.
Chapters
All right, bang bang!
Welcome to our short set today. Uh, today we're going to go over personal protection dogs and building and developing them. So when we go through the personal protection dog process, The first key step is evaluation. I want to ensure that the dog that I'm training for this specific task fits the characteristics and needs of that task at hand. So we want to evaluate a dog and find a good candidate. Some things that we're looking for is prey drive, some defense drive, and obviously sociability. That dog needs a good on and off switch if we're going to be using him for personal protection dog. Reasons for this being is because this dog is going to be expected to be a house pet. It's going to be expected to be able to roam around the house, be around family, be around small children. We don't want that dog to essentially look like it's going to bite someone or accidentally bite someone. It needs a very high level of control on it. So once we find our candidate and we find that prospect, we go into bite development. With bite development, we just want to make it a game, make it fun, make the task of biting fun, developing, teaching the dog exactly how we want them to bite, teaching them that full mouth bite. So from there, we take that and we start transitioning. And, uh, once we get it built to the area that we need and we start transitioning them, we go from simple tools like a rag or a puppy sleeve, and then we build it to eventually a suit and starting to work them on a hidden sleeve. From there, we start working scenarios and working obvious control. Some of that is dependent on what the client necessarily wants. Some dogs, people just want them to bite on command. Some dogs want them to react to aggressive behavior. And this can be done through aggressive barking or to bite someone if they were to be aggressed by someone. So we go through the processes of teaching the dog to read body language and also to read aggression as well. So it's a long process that could land, that could land you anywhere from 6 to 9 months for a fully finished product. But as we always say, there's always continued training afterwards. So expect to do training throughout that dog's career to keep them in shape and to maintain that training as well as progress that training. So thank you for joining me on this short set and enjoy our clips. Check out some more of our short sets and check out our podcast on Friday.
