May 11, 2011

I have a 4-month-old boxer. Is ‘Building Drive and Focus’ a good video for me to start with, or is that for people in police service work?

Full Question:
Hi,

I have a 4 month old (on Nov 1st) boxer puppy, Judah, who has just completed puppy kindergarten and is about to begin beginner obedience at my local dog training facility. He's doing exceptionally well in his general behavior as well as obedience, however in reading through some of your articles, you speak about a dog working obedience with drive instead of compulsion. You defined working with compulsion as a dog who appears to at best tolerate obedience training. I see so many dogs who are like that and Judah is becoming that way as well. He does really well, he's a quick learner and is very responsive to my verbal commands, but he just doesn't seem to enjoy it. I haven't done an extensive amount of work with him yet as he's still a baby, I keep sessions very short and end them with play, but as we progress in obedience I need to work harder with him and I don?t want it to become something he hates.

I have read through quite a few of your articles and as you have so many different training videos?

First question:

I have a pretty good handle on establishing leadership and basic obedience training, aside from how to make this fun for him instead of drudgery. Is ?Building Drive and Focus in Working Dogs? a good video for me to start with, or is that more suited for folks who have a dog headed for police dog training?

Second question:

I would like to learn the proper way to train Judah for personal protection, but in order to do that, would I have to put him through full fledged protection training? I'm sorry for my ignorance here, I don't really need an attack dog, but I would like to know the best way to teach him how to protect me and protect the home, if I ever needed him to. Is this something I can do on my own with him?

Thanks,
Jaime
Cindy
Cindy Cindy's Answer:
I would recommend you work with Judah with markers.

You will see my young dog in a lot of the trailer for our new video The Power of Training Dogs with Markers. I think if you start using this system, you will see your puppy’s enthusiasm really increase. I won’t ever train a dog without this system.

I think Drive and Focus is great if you want to build prey drive in your dog, and if you do plan on protection work I would definitely recommend it.

We have a Q&A section on personal protection training, and protection training pups.

Here are the videos we recommend for Personal Protection:
It’s not really possible to do all the training for a protection dog on your own, there will come a time that you would need to work with a trainer. You can do a lot of the preliminary work yourself though, and that is actually better and less stressful for the dog. They learn the mechanics and techniques with you, and then when the dog is mature (usually 18-30 months old) you can work with a decoy/trainer.

I hope this helps.

Cindy

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