Because fitting the prong collar to the dog is complicated, the reader should have an experienced trainer demonstrate how this is done. The most important consideration is that the collar be snug, so that the yoke does not hang loose. When fitted in this way the pinch collar is intentionally rather severe, and requires in its use not crude strength but sensitivity and good timing. This sensitive touch should also be demonstrated by an experienced handler.
The blinds must be portable, yet very durable because they are subjected to tremendous amounts of abuse. They should be large enough to conceal a person, and there must also be a means of staking them to the ground so that the wind will not fell them (a constant nuisance otherwise). Several vendors in the United States sell ready-made, light and compact versions.
In the case of well-trained dogs, there is little danger that they will bite the helper anyplace other than the arm. (It is the agitator’s job to ensure that it is the sleeve arm!) The animals soon become attuned to the sleeve, and come to regard it as their prey, their goal. However, accidents do happen, especially in the blind, after the outs and when making the acquaintance of new dogs.
Accordingly, the agitator should make a habit of wearing bite pants, which are really a sort of overall. These pants will stop teeth, but they will not save one from the considerable pain of a bite and an appalling bruise. It is normally after his first bite in the legs that a brash young decoy learns respect for the dogs.
Even when the agitator estimates the chances of a leg bite at nil, he will still find the pants necessary because of the surprising amount of damage the dogs will do both to his clothes and his body with their claws.
Sacks or Rags
Burlap feed sacks work very well as a biting surface for puppies and novice dogs. They can be rolled and stitched to preserve their shape.
A very good dog that is well prepared and bites the sack eagerly will also bite the sleeve without hesitation. However, for the majority of dogs of less than outstanding quality, it is often useful to have a puppy tug in order to prepare the animals to move to a harder, more unyielding and bulky biting surface.
The same goes for puppy sleeves (soft, pliable and easily bitten sleeves designed for young and novice dogs). Very good or well-trained dogs do not need puppy sleeves and can move directly from the rag to the hard sleeve. However, in training the typical dog a puppy sleeve is normally necessary, if only for a few transitional bites before the animal advances to the hard sleeve.
In addition, puppy sleeves have the advantage that, because they are relatively soft, they are easily bitten and present little hazard to the teeth, jaws or spine of a hot-blooded young dog that is perhaps on the sleeve early and working itself hard. The puppy may be quite willing and eager to bite the hard sleeve, but it is best to protect the novice dog from impacts and accidents until it is older and physically more rugged. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible, no matter what mistake is made, to break a dog’s canine tooth with the soft sleeve. Accordingly, we restrict novice agitators almost exclusively to the use of soft sleeves until they have become competent.
In competition, Schutzhund dogs are judged specifically on the quality—the fullness and the power—of their bite, and awarded point totals and courage ratings accordingly. In trial, the animals bite what is called a bite-bar sleeve. This sleeve is made of plastic or leather, has a blade or bar that provides a V-shaped biting surface, and, when uncovered, is nearly as hard as a piece of wood. To give the animal’s teeth purchase and to protect the sleeve an expendable jute sleeve cover is used with it. This bite-bar sleeve allows the dog, if it has the desire, to bite with its entire jaw, all the way back to the molars. Thus, it allows the judge to evaluate the animal’s quality of bite.
There are schools of training that employ a great number of techniques and devices in the effort to teach the dogs to bite full. Accordingly, these trainers use several different types of progressively harder sleeves, often concluding with an enormous hard barrel sleeve which theoretically gets the dog in the habit of using a huge, mauling mouth to bite.
This approach views the bite as a fundamentally mechanical event, a skill or habit that must be meticulously taught. We disagree. To us the bite is an emotional event. The basis of a crushing, full-mouth bite is in spirit, not in mechanics, and a correct bite is not a function of how the dog is “taught” to bite and what sort of sleeve is used in order to involve the maximum number of its teeth. The bite is a function of the dog’s basic motivation for biting, whether defense or prey, and of how badly it wants to bite in the first place.
If the animal only half wants to bite, then we can expect it to bite with a half mouth. If, on the other hand, it is consumed by its desire, so that neither hesitation nor prudence exist for it, then it will engulf the sleeve (no matter what its form, shape or hardness) and no one will have cause to doubt its courage.
We urge the prospective Schutzhund enthusiast to see to the dog and its spirit, not some arsenal of sleeves, devices and techniques.
The stick is a section of reed. It is light, flexible and approximately thirty inches in length. In training we also use other sorts of sticks in order to harden the dogs. Rattly split-bamboo batons, riding crops, whiffle-ball bats filled with handfuls of noisy gravel and other devices can all be used to inure the animals to challenges and intimidation of any sort.
15
Protection: Drive Work
In some ways bite work is the least artificial and most interesting of the three phases of Schutzhund training, because it is here that we see raw dog behavior at its purest. In protection we observe the dog doing what comes naturally to it. Obedience, by contrast, is primarily inhibitory in nature. Obedience is mainly concerned with teaching the animal to restrain impulses to roam, explore, hunt animals and try its strength against other dogs. Tracking is certainly founded on the animal’s natural behavior, but Schutzhund tracking is so stylized by the necessity to determine a winner that it little resembles a hunter searching out prey.
To our mind, nothing distills the essence of what a dog is, nothing smacks so much of the predator, as the sight of a dog coursing in full stride downfield after a person, heading for a collision that it wants with every fiber of its being. The animal is momentarily unfettered, free and impelled solely by its own desire.
In bite work we see the character of the individual dog most clearly. Good trainers can and do “fake” dogs of deficient character through obedience and tracking. It is much more difficult to counterfeit a dog in bite work. On the protection field, as the dog copes simultaneously with the challenge posed by the agitator (whose job it is to test its nerve) and pressure from its handler (who demands that it obey), we can steal a quick look into the dog’s heart and see what is there.
We look for courage, because without courage the animal is empty, hollow. We also look for a dog that is “in hand,” that obeys the handler utterly, in spite of an urge to bite and forget all else.
But what we look for first in the dog is raw power. Power arises from desire, and we look for a dog with a desire that drives it to use its body to the utmost—an animal that hurls itself with a crash into the agitator. This kind of desire arises first from genetics (the dog must be born with a full complement of vigorous drives) and second from the first few months of its training. We call this initial stage of schooling drive work.