Pet or Protector?

I had an interesting encounter a few days ago, while walking with Clint (my rescued Lurcher).

Nearing the end of our walk we popped into a local exercise area, where we met a young chap with a beautiful, young Belgian Malinois puppy. He let the dog of his lead to socialise with Clint but appeared to want to impress me with his knowledge. He told me, he had done a couple of courses and was training his charge to be a protection dog.

The first point to make is that there is a proliferation of ‘courses.’ and they are growing in number. I have my doubts about the quality of many of these courses.

This pup’s recall was demonstrated to me several times. Each time, this dog returned to his owner and crawled on his belly, very slowly and he was, clearly, cowed by his owner. For me, there was evidence that this dog was being trained with aversive techniques (in fact, Sue, my wife, had seen this chap, behaving aggressively towards the pup while walking him on the lead). This, sadly, is not an uncommon occurrence.

The main issue of concern for me is the difficulty in training a dog for protection duties and, expecting it to also be a family dog - in this case with a partner and a young child. For me, these two things do not co-exist well together. In fact, there is a real risk of setting a dog up to fail. All it needs is the dog to misinterpret a situation incorrectly and for it to behave, out of context, resulting in a tragic outcome.

Of course, there will be those that argue that it is, perfectly feasible to accommodate both requirements - pet and protection. I am not one of them. Certainly, my father-in-law (a retired Met police dog handler) would never mix the two. In the hands of a highly skilled and experienced trainer a compromise might be met. Unfortunately, individuals adopting this approach are, often, just not experienced or qualified to do so.

The individual I met was intending on entering competitions with his dog. This again, for me, points to the dog being viewed as a trophy animal; something to show-off with. It is difficult to curtail this kind of approach. I would just stress that, responsible, potential dog owners should think, carefully, about the type of dog best suited to family life before acquiring one.

behaviour assistance and training

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Does your dog find it hard to mix with other dogs? Is it scared? Aggressive? Or destructive?

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