Ok guys after emailing back and forth with the person in charge of my local shutzhund club i am at an impass.. up until now i havent had a doubt in my mind that all i want was personal protection. my schutzhund contact however says personal protection is mostly bogus and most dogs wont save your ass wen push comes to shove, no matter wat training they have. she also claims to know know of anyone in the state who does personal proteciton. i really dont know what is better all i know is what ive read. and that is that schutzhund is purely sport and doesnt apply to real life situations nearly as much as p.p. Am i misled? im lookin for oppinions here boys and girls so any that you have are most welcome. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

She sounds a little misinformed, but not a big deal.

This is what I did. You start working in Schutzhund with your dog and title or not. Then as you are making contacts with others interested in taking protection training to the next level you form your own informal group that trains on the side with finished/titled Schutzhund dogs, or other dogs.

Get yourself some of Ed's videos, and maybe try to draw in some of your local K9 handlers that may be interested in training their personal dogs. You can have some good trainers come out and do decoy seminars as well to help you guys expand on your protection work.

Schutzhund is a good foundation for later training as long as you keep your goals straight.

Don't make the difference in training adversarial between you and the club.

And a good dog can be very effective within certain limitations.

Your going to see this a lot. There's not near as many REAL personal protection trainers out there.

Also like VC states, many in the sport of Schutzhund don't know, don't believe, don't care, etc. It takes awhile to get in contact with people. It's easier to spend about $3-5k from a PP Dog person that you trust. Sometimes that's easier said then done.

You may want to trial your dog in Schutzhund first to get a good hands on experience. Get the tapes, etc. experience, etc. Then you may want to get another dog to do PP work with. You'll meet people off here, and other boards perhaps make contacts and friends a long the way.

The tapes are going to give you a good perspective, more than the books. Most books you see on the subject are either outdated or false.

If you don't mind just putting down the money though, and forget the sport stuff you can get a good PP dog for probably five.

Only someone that doesn't know HOW to train in PP and that has never even read about police dogs can make such a statement. I've trained many dogs here in Greece in personal protection always using a minimum of 3 different decoys in various environments. A good dog can be an incredible body-guard. But pp has its down sides too. Dogs trained to bite in a real life situation can be very dangerous in the wrong hands. They are like a gun with brains -and that isn't good if the owner has less brains than the dog. Because there are a LOT of dumb neighbors out there, pp dogs need constant supervision when out doors for example -they are not as forgiving as dogs only trained for sport.
If you think you'd like to own such a dog I suggest you meet a couple of trainers with experience in the field and most importantly: Meet their dogs. If a trainer's own dog isn't a model personality (at least!) don't listen to anything they have to say on the subject. A pp dog should let you touch him in neutral territory and show relatively little or no change in disposition unless you threaten his owner.
And don't think the overly alert dog is the better guard -they are usually the more fearful guard. Dogs properly trained in pp should be calm but incredibly fast when duty calls and MUST be better socialised than ANY other type of dog in order to have good judgement.
This is hard work -and even the best expert can't do it all for you. Are you sure you are up to it?

i am positive i am up for it my main concern is getting started. for me dogs are like a lifestyle.. but im young; i havent had a whole lot of experience... in fact none. ive been reading about pp training for 3 years now.. everything i can get my hands on. so i know what you are all talking about and i know what my goals are. i also know owning a pp dog is one of my ultimate goals and as for the amount of time i put in, the more the better. i dont have many other hobbies; id like to make this my number one way to spend my free time. i just dont know if schutzhund is right for me. i also dont know where to start and i dont want to screw up my dog by doing it wrong. the person i talked to about schutzhund seemed fairly hostile towards pp. i dont know if its just her or all schutzhund people. what i do know is that i would rather have a dog that has real life ability as opposed to say sports skills where everything is staged and set up and if i understand it correctly, the dogs are supposed to run up, stop, bark, then bite? you see what i mean.. i really know nothing about shutzhund. so thats why i started this post. i dont know if i should put up the money and buy the equipment to do it myself or wat. cost is a big issue here. also, i dont know if im even eligable to participate in schutzhund b/c my dog isnt registerd with ukc/akc/any other registry.

Well yes and no......

There are many bad, dangerous traininers in PP. I have worked with PP dogs for over 20 years. In that time I have found only 3 trainers I would work with, and only 2 were really good. The third was just willing to stay out of my way and let me use their agitators. I have talked with dozens of trainers and watched some work dogs. Many have no clue about reading a dog or what a PP dog is, many are flakey, many are just so egomaniacal that they can not fathom that they may be wrong and they may need to adjust the method they are using on a particular dog. Since traditionaly PP training has not been really tested, it is easy for a trainer to say the dog will protect and in 99% of the cases the dog will never be tested and no one will ever know the difference.

In almost every discipline working with biting dogs there is a significant amount of the feeling that "What I do is the only way". It doesn't matter the sport or PP training. So almost anybody you talk to will tell you that no other method of training has any value. That is a crock. The foundation for all bite training is very similar. There may be some minor changes, like the area targeted, the equipment used, the level and type of pressure used at what time, and when to start. With a good trainer almost any method is capable of turning out a good dog.

SchH is the oldest of the protection spors, as well as the best known. When I first became aware of SchH it was brand new in the U.S. For a lot of reasons I never got involved with it. I have worked with a couple of dogs that went though SchH as foundation work and then moved in to doing PP and Security work. Great dogs. Some attitudes about SchH seem to have changed from that time. One of the differences is that SchH is often seen as an end point in training rather than a begining. Combine the poor training in PP with the attitude that SchH (Ring, ASR, or any other "sport") is the only important thing there is, and anything else has little or no value.

Whether or not your dog will protect you is a function of the dog more than the training. There are dogs involved in all types of training that won't protect you, there are dogs involved with all types that will. There are untrained dogs that will protect you. It is much more a function of the dog than the training.

Originally posted by blake haunsperger:
cost is a big issue here. also, i dont know if im even eligable to participate in schutzhund b/c my dog isnt registerd with ukc/akc/any other registry. Cost... well, either way it costs.. SchH or PP.

So far as the unregistered dog, you can train and trial your dog in SchH.

well thats good news; uh can you guys tell me some good ways to test my pup and see if i should even consider him for schutzhund? im still confused on what you think about both of the typse of training. would it be best to train him in schutzhund, then move to pplater? is that possible? i gather that it is but is it easier or harder to move to pp from schutzhund than to just start pp>? ne ways thatnks eveyrone. oh the pup is a 4month old APBT for those of u who dont konw.

You can consider Schutzhund, there’s show dogs that compete frequently so I’m sure it can go through the work even if the dog isn’t as good as some. You’ll still learn a lot if that’s what you’d like to do I think.

Generally it’s best for PPDog to be trained in just that, but you can do some things for both. Schutzhund first if you’re going to do both I’d think. You’re going to really be informed from seeing the tapes on here.

I have been around Police Patrol and Dual Purpose Police dogs all my life, but for the person new to bite work, i would suggest starting with SchH work, then get the hang of it, and start meeting people with PP dogs. Get to know the dogs, and get advice from thier owners. Listen, listen, listen. Reawd on PP dogs. Ed has a wonderful book called 'protection dogs for you and your family'. read that. hope this helps.