Szymon from Custom K9 teaches police dogs to bite deeper using back pressure that triggers their opposition reflex. When you sling the dog backward, it drives forward into a fuller mouth contact with the suit. This helps green dogs learn the expected bite and handle suspects pulling on their ears or body.
Chapters
Welcome to today's short set. My name is Simon. I'm the head trainer here at Custom K9. Today for our short set, we're going to be going over some re-bites. During the bite process, when we're teaching dogs to bite, we want to encourage them to bite deeper to get that full mouth bite. We do this using opposition reflex. When we're developing the bite with our bite dogs, the target behavior that we are trying to instill in the dog is to bite deeper, get a full— that full mouth bite. What it should look like when you actually look at the profile of the dog on the actual bite, there should be no sunlight or space between the back of the dog's mouth and the suit. So to do this, we use oppositional reflex to help develop that oppositional reflex. It's the dog's natural reflex to fight any pressure that's being applied in the opposite direction. So if I'm slinging the dog back this way, when I— what his instinct is to do to do is to drive forward to counterbalance himself so he doesn't topple over his hind legs. So we use that to our advantage when developing the bite, to teach him to drive in by applying that back pressure, slinging them back, um, initiating that opposition reflex. And then once we got that dog stretched out nice, we go ahead and release and allow them to bite deeper. Into the prey. So that's the behavior we're trying to instill in our bite work, especially with green dogs. We use this to help them learn what we expect out of them, for them to learn how we want them to bite. And then also we use those re-bites as a way to, for the dog to learn how to handle pressure. So when he's got a suspect that's pulling on him, pulling on his ears, The only way to overcome that is by driving in and biting deeper and harder. That's our short stuff for today. If you guys got any questions, leave them in the comments. Um, check out our podcast as well, The Source, for our full-length episodes on Friday. And I hope to see you guys again next week. Thank you. Aah! Woo!
