Kansas Police Dogs and Dodge City Community College
Police Service Dog Program
How to properly Train a Police Service Dog through drive and make proper corrections
By Retired Canine Supervisor Richard Tom Brenneman
Your dog training will be a direct reflection on how you train dogs. First and foremost as a dog trainer you must be a problem solver, and be able to understand all the drives of dogs and channel each and every drive through your training. There are many ways, and you will hear all kinds of definitions by dog trainers and how dogs should be trained. The most effective dog training today is to take the natural instinctual drive of the dog you have selected and use drive to train you dog. Does this training take a little longer yes it does, but you have a happy and more reliable dog when done.
The days of poorly timed correction and or not understanding the drives of your dog are obsolete.
You will hear dog trainers talk about force training and or compulsion training, these type dog trainers you want to stay away from. Force Training is not reliable in the police service dog, and will only cause you issues of avoidance from your dog. {Example you have been having problems with your dog chasing bunny rabbits while you were either tracking and or doing an area search for a bad guy. So your answer to this is to correct your dog by force, or even abuse your dog for this behavior. So you are called upon to deploy your dog in a residential area. The bad guy had robbed the local 7-11 and no car was scene and the clerk states he ran south and was wearing blue jeans and a white t-shirt and blue baseball hat. You began your track and go about three blocks away from the 7-11 and your dog smell's the bad guy hiding in a person back yard, and also smells a bunny rabbit hiding in the same back yard. Your dog now has a decision to make, do I want to really find the bad guy after my handler has kicked my butt over going after bunny rabbits, or do I want to just go into avoidance and ignore the bad guy and just keep acting like I am tracking for my handler and move on.} This has also now become a police officer safety issue and someone could get hurt over force or compulsion training, instead of training and channeling drives through the natural instinctual drive of the dog.
I have seen this happened to police officer with no patients, and then they wonder why their find rate is very low and the handler and dog are not being very productive for their respective department.
Some of the above training by a handler is the cause of selection testing a dog not suitable for police service work. Also not receiving the correct training and or refusing to pay attention to the correct training, and learning about drive and channeling the dogs drive to work for you.
We do not want our police dogs walking around with their tail between their legs and slink around when they here you give a command. We want the dog up and temperament high and ready to work for us. This means we utilize numerous training aids through drive to make sure our dogs a working correctly and having a good relationship with their handler. There is a line like so----------------, and any time you make a correction that causes the dogs temperament to go below that line you must bring your dog’s temperament up to that line or above that line to channel the drive and temperament in good faith.
Training aids can be the food they eat each and every day, {Not Treats}, a special toy your dog likes, {such as round ball rubber, Kong ball rubber, rubber hose, pvc pipe, ropes, a ball attached to a small rope and so on, but no tennis balls are allowed in this training.
To work and have a trained police service dog you the handler must be in some type of physical shape. This work will require you to perform different type of physical work, Such as in tactical situation. Carry your dog on your back with a special designed vest we have made for Active shooter and or tactical entries with Special Response Team.
The training we do on an everyday bases is demanding in its self, but all of our training is slow and understanding for the handler to learn correctly and deploy his or her dog correctly and with proper corrections if needed and not force training.
A proper correction is defined as this: if you have channeled the drives of your dog correctly and taught your dog to sit and down and come when called and the dog totally understands these commands.
The dog refuses to come when called after totally understanding this command, you may than give a proper correction to your dog, by correcting your dog with your leash and training chain. One point to remember in channeling drive once the dog has been corrected and is performing the command the dog was asked to do, remember not to be mad, be happy and praise your dog for being correct, after it is correct.
A improper correction for the above refusal to come when called, would be a handler losing his or her patients and correcting the dog as hard as they can and then maybe when the dog gets to the right position striking at the dog or yelling at the dog. This type of work is not even called training; it is called abusing your dog.
We at Dodge City Community College are not in the business to abuse or miss correct our dogs.
We are learning the proper way to work through natural instinctual drives of the dogs and channeling that drive for proper work.
When we do need to correct are dogs we will teach them and show them it is not personal from the handler, the dogs will learn to respect their handlers through drive training, and proper channeling of drives.
In your career as a police officer and or running your own training center you will see all kind of things that trainers have produced or called it special names in an attempt to make themselves look good.
Be aware of this type of training and or theory's they call the best and the new. I have seen training and drive training that is for real and you should be paying attention to this type of training. Common sense will help you learn what is best and what is not best for your program.
When you graduate at Dodge City Community College you can be assured you will have a great working police service dog, or narcotic detection, explosive detection dog, arson detection dog, and Search and Rescue dog. These are goals here at our college. And when you are going through certification you should not need a leash on your dog. Proper drive training and channeling that drive will allow you to work off leash.
Part One
Retired Canine Supervisor Richard Tom Brenneman Date: 05-12-2012