Should I Buy a Puppy for Personal Protection?

By Ed Frawley

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Over the past 25 plus years, I have been asked about my ideas of buying a puppy to raise as a personal protection training. See the most recent email below. I have written articles in the past on why I felt this is not a good idea. Then I started to think about all my dog friends who have trained dogs, which made me write this blog post.

Here is the email that triggered me to write this post:

Well, to start with, you need to walk away from the person that is telling you their WORKING LINE GSD puppies are $5,000.00 to $6,000.00. I can tell you that in my opinion, anyone who is selling puppies for that much and telling you they are going to make good personal protection dogs is a scammer.

I say this with the knowledge that no one in this country has bred as many good working bloodline GSDs as I have. I bred working GSDs for 35 years and I retired from breeding 10 years ago.

I can't begin to count the number of people like yourself who came to me over the years and bought dogs for the exact reason you're considering. They all got a dog that had the genetics to do the work if their dog got the right training.

The problem was not many of them ended up with what I consider a truly great personal protection dog because the owners didn't make the effort needed to do the training. Don't get me wrong, they all ended up with a nice dog but there is a difference between a nice dog and a well-trained personal protection dog.

I used to get that point across by using Michael Jordan and his kids as an example. Michael's kids have the genetics to be great basketball players. But would they be able to play in the NBA without training? We all know the answer to that question. The same applies to people who buy a nice puppy and hope for a personal protection dog.

The problem is people just don't know what they are getting into. They don't understand the amount of work and time it takes to train a dog in bite work and the obedience that's needed to go along with that training. The fact is new owners have 100 times more to learn than their new dog. That training starts when the pup is 8 weeks old and it never stops.

A dog can't be expected to do serious defensive protection work in a non-training environment until it's mature. That varies from dog to dog, but it is somewhere between 18 and 24 months of age. To prepare for that requires a tremendous amount of work both in obedience training and bite work training.

Then once the dog is mature and pretty much trained it will always need maintenance training, and that should never end.

Moreover, the owners need to learn how to manage this dog that is now trained to bite humans. Mistakes made in management result in accidental bites. Accidental bites result in losing homeowners insurance.

So, we come back around to the question. What to do?

For me, that's an easy answer. Get as much training as you can before buying a puppy. Find out what you don't know so it doesn't come as a surprise when you realize how much work it is. There is also a good possibility that you will run into a lot of people who are not qualified to offer advice on protection training.

Here is what I now tell people: invest in your dog training. We have DVDs, streams, and online courses you can study from. Don't just watch these resources once. Watch them again and again and again. Get that information drilled in your head and practice daily. Here is where recommend most people to start:

1. Become a student of marker training. Read the extensive article I wrote about it and get The Power of Training Dogs with Markers (DVD || Online Course).
2. Learn how to use food as a motivator with The Power of Training Dogs with Food (DVD || Online Course).
3. Learn the correct way to use 'tug play' as a motivator and as a step to prepare young dogs for bite work with The Power of Playing Tug with Your Dog (DVD || Online Course).
4. Learn the correct way to introduce a puppy to bite work with The Foundation of Puppy Bite Work (DVD || Online Course).
5. Learn how to raise a working puppy with Raising Your Puppy with Michael Ellis (DVD || Online Course).
6. Have a look at the online course (self-study) I did on how we manage the 5 dogs we live with, two of which are protection-trained dogs.

If you are prepared to do the work in these training videos, then you will be in a better place to answer your question on "Should I buy a puppy for personal protection?"

But finally, there is one more important reason you need to know and be able to do the work in these videos. You will be doing all the foundation tug work on your young dog, at some point, you will need to pick a decoy to let work your dog.

A decoy can either make or break a young dog. You need to know who is good enough to do decoy work on your dog. More importantly, you need to know who to walk away from and say, "THANKS but NO THANKS".

There are "training decoys", "trial decoys", and "bad decoys".

There are very good young physical "trial decoys" who don't have enough experience to be called training decoys and there are a lot more bad decoys that in my opinion should not be working any dogs.

Bottom line is, the more training you have the more you're going to be able to answer your own question on buying a puppy for personal protection.

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About Author

Ed Frawley

Ed Frawley is the founder of Leerburg. He has been training dogs since the 1950s. For 30 years, Ed bred working bloodline German Shepherds and has produced over 350 litters. During this time, Ed began recording dog training videos and soon grew an interest in police service dogs. His narcotic dogs have been involved in over 1,000 narcotics searches resulting in hundreds of arrests in the state of Wisconsin. Ed now solely focuses on producing dog training courses with renowned dog trainers nationwide. If you want to learn more about Ed, read about his history here.

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