I have a 6-month Doberman that isn’t protective of the house or family. When people he barks at come close, he runs. What should we do?

There are a couple of points to this question. First, it is evident that you do not know anything about canine temperament and drives. I recommend that you visit the training article section on my web site. Read about the drives of protection training and drive thresholds.My initial comment when I am asked this type of question (which is not that uncommon) is to explain that you would not expect your 6 year old to protect your house, so how can you expect a 6 month old pup to do any protection work? The answer is that it is impossible for a pup to show signs of aggression. The fact is that if a pup of this age is aggressive it has a temperament problem. Dogs that are aggressive at 6 months grow up to be either crazy or very very dangerous to be around.Puppies have to go through bite development to learn to become aggressive when they are adult. You can learn how to train this in my video The First Steps of Bite Training. At 6 months pups should be playing tug of war with their handlers. They should be learning the skills of bite work in a play environment where they do not feel threatened. I compare this to wolf cubs playing rough games. The games they play prepare them for later life. Their games develop the skills they need as adults. The same is true in bite development with our dogs. I teach you how to do this in my training videos.Another point is that you mention that your Dobe came from police and schutzhund lines. In over 20 years of police k-9 training I have never seen one Doberman police dog. There may be a Dobe somewhere that is a police dog but it certainly is not one I would care to work the street with. Since 1974 I have seen less than 5 Dobes that were good schutzhund dogs. My point is that Dobes have had the working ability bred out of them. This started in Germany 17 or 18 years ago when they changed the breeding requirements to allow dogs without a schutzhund title to be bred. So if you want to train your dog in protection work you will need to do everything right. There is no room for error.

The fact is that you may not even need your dog to do protection work. Most bad guys are never going to challenge a fully grown Doberman. The dog still carries the reputation it developed 40 years ago.