Arousal not only can make a dog harder than normal, it can also profoundly change its basic reactions to stimuli. For instance, sometimes physical punishment escalates an already intensely stimulated dog instead of settling it down. All the handler’s efforts to control the animal only arouse it further.
What all these remarks mean to say is that obedience on the protection field is a special case. Just because the dog knows what “Heel!” means does not ensure that it will actually do it when anywhere near an agitator.
The traditional remedy for disobedience is simply to punish the animal until it does as it is told, decoy or no decoy. In the process the handler finds himself continually battling with his dog, going head-to-head against all the power that breeding and training have given the animal. For the handler this is a no win scenario. If the dog wins the battle, the handler loses because he cannot control his animal. If the dog is vanquished and forced to obey, the handler loses anyway—because in hammering the dog into submission he has wasted a great deal of time and energy, and probably killed some of his dog’s character as well.
There is another way. By teaching the dog the obedience for bites concept, we can save its strength for fighting the decoy, instead of the handler.
Just like our methods for training the hold and bark and the out, obedience for bites is based upon the concept of channeling—diverting the animal’s energy smoothly from one behavior to another while inhibiting it as little as possible. Quite simply, we teach the dog to “buy” bites with obedience skills. We make no attempt to force the exercises. Instead, we present the animal with a clear proposition: Do it, or you don’t get a bite.
GOAL 1: The dog will remain focused on the handler and responsive to commands on the protection field.
Important Concepts for Meeting the Goal
1. “Coiling” the dog
2. Teaching attention with heeling
3. Teaching the minor skills of protection
Up until now, we have never asked the dog to obey any obedience commands during bite work. Except during the very brief periods when we dropped the animal into the control phase for a hold and bark or an out, the dog has spent all its time on the protection field in the drive phase. The dog burned energy at a stupendous rate, barking furiously at the agitator and straining into the leather collar that restrained it. For the dog, agitation has come to mean not just biting, but also the opportunity to strive, to spend itself, to vent the drive that fills it to bursting.
During training for the hold and bark and the out, we stopped the dog from striving into the collar for a few seconds at a time, taught it to channel its energy and express it by barking. Now, in obedience for bites, we will teach it to suppress its energy instead and hold it in check for gradually longer periods of time, coiling it up inside as though it were a great spring.
We cannot accomplish this by force, because the sort of harsh physical punishment that would be necessary to control the animal does not store its drive, but rather kills it. Instead, we do it by frustrating the dog, winding it tighter and tighter, and only letting it unwind when it does precisely as we ask.
The handler stands on the field with his dog at his left side, using his left hand to hold the animal back with the leather agitation collar. The dog also wears a correction collar, and the handler grips the correction leash in his right hand. We are in the drive phase.
The decoy begins agitating the dog, and the handler encourages the animal to “Get him! Get him!” The dog lunges and barks, striving against the collar. Then, suddenly, the agitator freezes, and the handler releases his dog’s leather collar and at the same time tells the dog to “Sit!” Now we are in the control phase. But the animal is, of course, far too excited to sit, and the handler will be obliged to correct it sharply into position.
Because a sit that we have to correct the dog into is no sit at all for our purposes, we repeat the exercise. The handler seizes the dog’s leather collar with his left hand and commands “Get him!” The decoy stimulates the dog for five or ten seconds, freezes, and then the handler commands his dog to “Sit!”
When, after a number of repetitions of the procedure, the dog drops into a tight, coiled sit instantly upon command and without a correction the handler rewards it. With a quick, excited “Get him!” he drops the correction leash and sends the animal to bite the agitator.
The emphasis here is not upon brutally overcoming the dog’s excitement. The leash corrections are only strong enough to sit the animal, not punish it severely. The emphasis is upon persistently denying the dog gratification until it solves the puzzle and realizes what it is that we want. Rather than controlling the animal with severe force, we rely instead upon anticipation. After several repetitions, the dog knows that another is coming and its anticipation of both the “Sit!” and the correction makes it ever more likely to obey the command. When, finally, it sits automatically and is then instantly rewarded, it begins to learn to fulfill its desire by carrying its energy into another behavior, and restraining it briefly so that the handler will allow it to bite.
After a few sessions on this kind of drill, the animal will learn to readily channel its energy into sits and downs and other obedience exercises in order to win its bite.
We now have the animal a little in hand. It understands that the way to win bites is by responding to commands—even when it is terribly excited.
But we still lack something very important. In order to control the dog and maneuver it about the field, we need its attention. And this is precisely the problem because, as a result of months of agitation, the decoy has become incredibly “magnetic” to the dog. All the time that the animal is on the field its eyes remain locked on the man.
How can the handler possibly compete with the agitator for the dog’s attention? Again, the classic method is to inhibit the dog—physically shock it until its level of excitement drops. As a result its orientation response to the decoy will become weaker, and it can be made to look at its handler instead. Earlier in this chapter we described this procedure as a no-win scenario because it pits the handler against the dog’s desire to bite.
We have another way. Just as we taught the dog to pay for bites with sits and downs, we can also teach it to pay for bites with attention. Quite simply, if the dog looks in its handler’s eyes, it gets to bite. If it looks at the agitator, it does not.
The trick is to get the animal to turn its head and look at its handler when everything in it, all the force of its instinct and its training, point it at the decoy like a compass needle pointing north. We do it by making use of heeling, an exercise in which it has already learned habitual attention.
Just as before, the helper stimulates the dog and the handler sits it. Then the handler commands it to “Heel!” then pivots smartly 180 degrees and begins walking briskly away from the decoy. As he does so he corrects his dog sharply in order to break the animal’s hypnotic stare at the decoy and bring it around the turn.