3
An Overview of Schutzhund Training
Although techniques of dog training have evolved rapidly since the early days of Schutzhund, the basic philosophy of the sport has not changed dramatically in many years. The flavor of von Stephanitz’s writing from the 1920s expresses our attitude even today. He reflects, “This training, then, must know how to awaken the inborn capacities, and to develop them, and must in addition tone down what is superfluous, strengthen what is weak and guide what is erring into the right path.”
The meaning of this passage is apparent. The role of the trainer is to develop the innate behavior and tendencies of the working dog. In tracking he develops the animal’s natural urges to follow scent and to eat. In obedience he exploits the dog’s need to interact with and “belong to” other social beings. In protection he intensifies and makes use of the dog’s most volatile and powerful urges, those of an aggressive predator.
A working dog must bring with it to training a number of qualities of character. In the previous chapter we discussed briefly how the handler can select the right dog for the work. However, at all times the dog and handler are a team. Good results are the product of both their personalities. What a pity that a fine young working dog is not also in a position to select whom it will work with, to test its handler for character!
THE TRAINER
A good dog trainer is patient. He understands that training takes time and is willing to spend the time. He is intelligent, and he thinks clearly about what effect his actions will have upon the dog. Also, he has “feeling,” an accurate intuition for what makes dogs do the things that they do. He is decisive—fasthanded and effective in all that he does. He is not dogmatic, but flexible—always ready to reexamine his beliefs and methods and adapt them to the particular nature and endowment of his pupil.
A good trainer is emotionally disciplined and has an even disposition. He is not prone to temper tantrums and can administer both praise and punishment appropriately. When he physically punishes the animal, he does so impartially—he punishes as the result of a thoughtful decision to use force in order to get results, rather than from wrath and the desire to relieve some of his frustration by taking vengeance upon the dog.
The trainer must have integrity, in the sense that he is his own person and does not depend upon his dog’s behavior or performance to give him a sense of worth, identity or importance.
Finally, the good dog trainer has a worldly understanding of his pupil, and knows it for a dog and only a dog. He realizes that the animal does things for its own reasons and does not necessarily live its whole life in order to please its trainer. He accepts that sometimes his dog will be less than completely brave, that the animal has no sense of fair play or honesty, that it does nothing for spite and that its basic nature is that of an opportunistic predator.
The trainer must respect his dog not just as an asset or possession, or as a way of gaining recognition by winning trophies, but as a living, breathing and utterly unique product of nature. After all, each and every dog is an event of biology that will never happen again.
From the trainer’s respect for his dog should arise the capacity to selfexamine. Let the trainer examine himself when his dog makes a mistake or does not understand an exercise, and ask himself, “Where am I at fault?”
THE METHOD
Whomever shall find the answer to the question “How shall I say this to my dog?” has won the game and can develop from his animal whatever he likes.
The fundamental task in Schutzhund training, indeed in any form of dog training, is getting the animal to understand what it is we want from it. Successful trainers are successful because they make their dogs understand what is asked of them. Those who are not successful do not.
One of the basic tools for making a dog understand what we want from it is consistency. If we set for the animal a rule, a limit on its behavior, then that rule must remain invariable. For example, if we decide that after the command “Out!” the dog will be allowed two seconds in which to release the sleeve before we will correct it, then we must always expect no more and no less from it. The dog must be able to predict what we will do in any given situation so that it can make a sensible decision about what to do. If we are inconsistent, then we are unpredictable. Unpredictability confuses the dog, and confusion makes it weak.
Practice, simple repetition, is another way that we make the animal understand what we desire. A dog is a creature of habit. If we can induce it to do something correctly several times, then we begin to form in the dog the habit of always doing it that way. This provides us with the opportunity to praise and reward the animal so that it will begin to understand precisely which actions bring it reward and which do not.
But if we allow the animal to practice a skill incorrectly, habit can also be our enemy. For example, if the dog begins to quarter while tracking (weaving back and forth across the track instead of following it closely), we must immediately find a way to modify what it is doing so that it stops quartering and begins tracking correctly. Otherwise quartering can become its habitual strategy for working out a track. Similarly, if the animal is allowed to come around the jump instead of over it or to bite the agitator during the hold and bark, these faults can become habits, even if they occur only occasionally.
It is not that practice on an activity makes perfect, but that perfect practice makes perfect.
Last, and most important, we get the dog to understand what we want by breaking what we have to teach it down into small, easily comprehensible pieces. In education this practice is called task analysis, and it involves analyzing each lesson to be learned, dividing it into “key” ideas or movements and then teaching these concepts or skills one at a time. Throughout this book we have made a task analysis of all the exercises that the dog must perform in order to pass Schutzhund I, II and III and broken them down for the reader into “Goals” and “Important Concepts for Meeting the Goals.”
This approach is progressive, involving small steps, and is pyramidal in its effect. Each concept builds upon what the dog has learned from the preceding one, and each concept must be fully mastered before moving on to the next. Furthermore, if the dog is experiencing confusion or making errors on a particular task, it is the responsibility of the handler to once more break that task into concepts and skills and begin instruction again at the specific point where the dog is having difficulty. He must ensure that the dog is successful and confident in each of these lower steps before he returns to the original task.
The job of making the dog understand what we want from it is best accomplished without the use of force. Not only are we concerned that it understands its work, but also we want the dog to enjoy its work. Therefore, in the initial stages of training the animal for a particular skill, we avoid if possible the use of any kind of pain, correction or intimidation. We call this no-force phase of training the teaching phase. If, during the teaching phase, we must employ force to introduce a skill (as we often must do in protection work), then we take great pains to use the least force that we can.
Only once we are absolutely certain that the dog knows what we want from it will we begin the correction or training phase, in which we use some kind of force or compulsion to punish or prevent the animal’s errors.