Kristie, take Will's advice. He's given you nothing but excellent advice and has quite a bit of experience in what you're looking for in a dog and the situations you might face.

Also, unless you've been taught how to think through a massive adrenaline rush in a do or die situation (a few here I'm sure have had this type in their military careers, but will admit it still doesn't always help), you forget things and run on pure instinct. Language is learned, instincts are not.

I'll also pose the question to Gene, who does 99% of his breeding/training for police departments, and see what he has to say as well. If all goes as planned, I'll be making a trip to his place on July 30th. The main thing I want to find out about him at the moment is about his training methods. The first time I spoke to him he mentioned using a table - but didn't really explain what he meant by that, so I'm curious to find out what he uses the table for. He did say he teaches the dog using treats and praise to begin with, so that's good - the table comment just put up a red flag that I'd like to find out more about.

Will, you are right - Wayne is a sport trainer. He probably hasn't ever used his dogs in 'real world situations.' I understand exactly what you're saying and that you aren't trying to knock Wayne.

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If your dog is obeying another person in an attack episode, you have the wrong dog for a ppd. That's a temperament and training issue.

What about basic obedience commands? For example, my 12 year old cousin likes to take Gypsy through her paces, so to speak, when she comes down to visit. She runs Gypsy through heel, sit, down, come, etc. and gets a big kick out of it because her dog doesn't listen worth a crap and it makes her feel like she's important because Gypsy will mind her. She's probably going to want to do the same with the GSD as well, though I can always just tell her that she isn't to tell him to do anything.
But how do you train a dog to obey a command only if YOU issue it?? Do you start out from the very beginning and not allow anyone else to work with the dog (which to me seems like it would be difficult if you're working with a trainer), or do you take it through the learning phase and then start teaching it to obey only you once you get to the correction or distraction phase? Then, how do you go about teaching it to obey only your voice? Won't correcting him for obeying be confusing for him, even though it was because he obeyed someone else giving the command? I'm confused again. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

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Trust me, when your life is threatened and you're working on pure adrenaline - you *will* have trouble remembering a foreign command.

So what commands do you use for protection - in English? I know the obedience commands already (duh! lol), but I've never heard any of the protection or tracking commands in anything other than German.

I use German commands, but I've done so for over 25 years so it's second nature for me. I've given commands in that language ten's of thousand's of times by now.

Plus I grew up with my grandparents who spoke mainly German in our household. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

And as far as your dog obeying others, we've had that discussion several times in the past and a lot of posters made good points in those threads. And it's primarily a temperament issue - why should my dog obey a stranger he doesn't know or respect ( the SAR folks had some discussion about being able to hand off their dog to a stranger as opposed to what the requirements are for most of us ).
It'd be worth it for you to review those threads.

SInce you are talking with so many people you may want to talk with Mark Connely at http://www.k9command.com/home.html

He IS LE for the Mt Holly PD (I believe he is the K9 training director) --

I had talked with him on a good reference when I was looking for someone to help me with training and I wound up with someone else as Mark only uses low stim ecollar (but you like that, no?) and I am not ready to make that jump for all my routine obedience training*

* even though I do think it is a great tool in the right hands - just don't want to train with one.

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I use German commands, but I've done so for over 25 years so it's second nature for me. I've given commands in that language ten's of thousand's of times by now. Plus I grew up with my grandparents who spoke mainly German in our household.

I didn't mean what commands do YOU use, Will. I knew you used either German or Czech. What I meant was 'what are the English commands for protection'? Sorry for the mis-communication there. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

I'll do a search for the obeying other people stuff. Thx

Oh...well, you can use whatever you'd what, really. I'd chose a distinctive but easily pronounceable word.

"Get'em" is popular, and I still hear "sic'em" now and then.

Of course.....I train in the deep South..... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

For what it is worth I trained both my dogs in english for just the reasons Will mentioned. Plus when I'm not home my wife needs to be able to command the dogs so I thought I'd better keep it simple. I've never had a problem with my 3.5 yr old male listening to anybody he doesn't know. When he recieved his PDC cert. at a PSA trial they say out your dog so it would suck if your dog outed before you told him to. My 8 month old Czech Shep already doesn't listen to anybody but my wife or me so I would agree with Will that it is a temperament thing or lack their of that they would listen to someone they didn't respect or know.

Also I use:

Watch = Begin Barking to ward off a person
Hold = Go into a hold in Bark up close, bite if they move
Get'em = To tear them a new a**hole <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />
Out = Stop biting and go into a hold

Brian, good reply from a competitor in a reality-based dog protection sport. Thanks for sharing your experience!

Kirsten,

In a real life threatening situation, untrained people work under important constraints like tunnel vision, fine movement is severely impaired, mouth is very dry, words said are often NOT UNDERSTANDABLE, and flight or fight responses are the norm.

Under a situation like that I seriously doubt most people will be able to give ANY command. Ditto for home breakins. Your dog should respond automatically.

If you walk around bad neighborhoods, or stand a chance of something bad happening to you elsewhere, use whatever you want to give fair warning. Just make sure you train each possible scenario and use the same terminology many, many times, because under stress you could get lucky and revert to fundamentals...and I don't mean to be glib. It's just that more often than not, what ends up happenning is a heavily metamorphosed version...followed by very faulty recollection.

That said, a dog is a very potent deterrent...in and of itself.

Frankly, you need to worry less about your commands and more about your training for a PPD.

When I consider a dog "finished", they should have been taken through a wide enough selection of realistic scenarios that they will respond without hearing the correct command.

Dogs learn a lot more from environment, body language, scenario and pattern training than we think.

I've done it a zillion times where I've set up an attack scenario and said something completely off the wall, rather than the actual command I use for bite, and my dog will bite. Nearly the same thing happens for most of my other obedience commands.




If you really really wanted to use foreign commands, and you drilled them over and over and over and over. . . . .they would probably become hardwired for you as they have for a lot of us. But it would take time and training, time and training that you could spend doing other things.

I use Czech commands, and I have to actively THINK of English words for commands I commonly use when talking to people or writing posts to this board. Czech is a second language for me though, so that might have something to do with it. Having drilled for damn near 20 years now using Czech commands for every interaction I have with my dogs, it's second nature.

It won't be second nature for most people till they've been doing it for that long as well, so I guess I agree with Willy and others. If you're going to jump into PP training you might consider doing English commands. You're going to have a helluva lot more to think about being a newbie than what commands to use.