In my obsevation of playing tug of war with my dog in the past... my dog seems to take this pretty seriously.

Has anyone had this type of experience with their dog? What are your thoughts on what you obseve watching your dog play this or watching others dogs? Do you think this could lead to problems between the handler & the dog in the future?

Catherine:

Wow I have such a hard time explaining myself with words. I know if you could pop into my head you would come out saying, “Now I understand”. Ok. Think of how we train our army. We send them to boot camp. We have drills to simulate war but we use blanks so as not to kill each other. This way we can learn all the basic skills of using a gun and staking out a building or hiding in a brush without worrying about killing each other. Now put real bullets in the gun and change one side to the enemy and while it looks exactly like boot camp everything changes. Your heart starts beating fast, you begin to sweat, you might even freak out and turn and run away. Not exactly the best learning environment is it. Well boot camp is like prey work. It teaches the fundamentals of biting (full and calm bite for Schutzhund) while defense is the real McCoy.

As to why we care about interrupting the training session. Well the helper is the stress so to take it away means the helper leaving the dog. That interrupts the session. This way we can slowly increase the level of defense until it’s highest threshold then bang bring it way down by working in prey all without ever taking the dog off the sleeve.

Rob:

Using my prior example. To an outsider watching the training drill in boot camp he might run for his life. To him it looks real but not to the soldiers. The same goes for intense prey training. To the beginner it looks like his dog is fighting for his life. While all the time it is just one big game of tug of war. Now to all you experts don’t flood my email with comments on prey guarding I’m not talking about drive interactions here.

You do explain yourself well Vince, I just have lots of questions...

I was in the military but being female, never went through combat training (thankfully). However, with the training I did go through (which I can't disclose) we never knew whether it was real or not. At times it was quite intense and scary because people's lives could be at stake with some of the decisions we made. Thats the best way to train. It kept us alert and sharp. Also, I don't know if you're familiar with the way the Navy SEALs are trained, but you can't get much more stressful training than that.

I realize the dog must be built slowly, but I guess I'm just doomed not to understand why dogs must be trained in this way. Why do we care if the dog is taken off the sleeve to relieve stress? How is that harmful in training?

>I've read much about the importance of prey drive and spoken to trainers about it but they haven't explained it - its almost as if they don't really know why they're doing it. >>>

You must consider the young dog only as potential. It must experience certain things to turn on those genetic abilities and this must be done early in the dogs life. The dogs genetics are only a frame work an important frame work but its experiences as it developes dictates a tremendous amount of the dog's capabilites later in life. Prey drive is the desire to grasp something that moves, chase, and hold, bite hold, bite and counter. It is the basis for retrieves, the basis for protection work, it is used to remove the stress from compulsion used in proofing obedience, it is used in training detector dogs and search and rescue dogs. Prey drive results in a dog whose training is durable and the dog is durable since stress impacts the dog at a lower level. Protection work done without prey as a foundation weighs heavily on the dog and produces higher levels of stress that allow the dog to slip into survival behaviors. Training dogs without a good foundation in prey work is tenous and the resulting dogs are fragile and unreliable.

Catherine:

Just my luck. Out of all the examples I could use I picked something you know first hand and could pick apart. I wouldn’t know a Navy Seal from a Navy Dolphin. The point is every dog has a different level (threshold) before it goes into avoidance. It is the helper’s job to find and work that threshold. He does that by bringing a dog right to the line and teaching him to fight his way out. If done correctly that line just increased. And next time it will take more stress to reach that line. Removing the helper is one way of doing this. You see this when a dog on a tie out barks aggressively at a decoy and he runs away. The dog learns that aggression not submission removes stress. On a sleeve you switch the dogs drive to prey to relive stress. This could be done over and over without the helper leaving the dog. After a while the dog gains confidence and no longer sees the helper as a threat but a fighting partner. Now he still has the same intensity as when he worked in defense but now has the calmness when worked in prey. This along with the right genes produces fight drive. Ed pioneered this definition. Before him you saw most trainees interchanging defense with fight. They are much different.

To Vince P-

That is a great explanation. It takes a person with a great deal of knowledge and understanding of a subject to be able to sum things up like that.-Ted

Thanks Ted. A mentor of mine once told me that learning how to train a dog was like reading a book. After 20 years experience he said that he was only half way done with the novel. Myself,I just recently opened the book and started reading the first chapter.

Excellent post, Vince. Surprise, you DO have a way with words :-). This is not an easy subject to explain with words and sometimes requires years of keen observation of interaction between a helper and a dog to understand the intricacies involved, i.e. the cause and effect. And it's true, Catherine, that very few trainers, even the best of them, can adequately explain the theory behind their training techniques.

Also, I think that the major flaw in your argument lies in: "If a dog has the drive to work, don't you just need to work with its natural talent and not shaping it?"

First of all, a dog does not have a natural drive to work, nor does a human for that matter. We do have a "potential" for work. No dog is born with a desire to find lost babies, sniff narcotics, bite the bad guy or herd sheep all day long. The only major drive a dog is born with (just like any other living creature) is the drive to survive. In a dog this translates into chasing, biting, and killing prey (hence the "prey drive"). Therefore, it's up to us humans who chose the dog to be our working partner to "shape" this drive into various working disciplines. So to your question:

"Some of the other things seem a bit superfluous to me - like worrying about how much prey drive your dog has. What does that really have to do with how well your dog will track or protect?"

The answer is: EVERYTHING.

As far as prey drive and defensive drive go, the best analogy I can think of is being the hunter or the hunted. In prey drive the dog feels more in control because it is the hunter, in defense it is the hunted. By being able to switch off on the two drives, the dog regains control over the situation and that is the goal. The dog now feels that he can convert the situation into something it can control.

Now I rember the rest of what I was going to say.

A dog can be trained in protection without the use of a tug. I have never used one. I have started to use one now. The issues stay the same, defense and prey, the sleeve or rag is just the prey item and the introduction to prey is done with that instead of a tug. This is usually done when starting older dogs as opposed to starting a puppy and getting them used to opening their mouth wider to accept a sleeve.