Magnus,

I disagree with Pete on this. There should be a couple of Lou's "bomb proof" commands. The more of them you have the the flexability you have in an emergency. Fuss/heel is a good one, Plotz/down is another good one, and any other straight obedience command will do it. If the dog is so conditioned on them to do it with out thinking about it you have 2 advantages: 1) You can break the train of thought and refocus the dog, 2) In an emergency you have 2 choices call the dog back or have it maintain it's position. If the dog is across the street and a car is comming you don't want to call the dog.

Focus/compitition heeling is a method of increasing an obedience score. Because the dog is so intent on you they obey the commads faster and then lose less point in obedience. They have been taught to ignore everything other than the handler. This is part of what Lou describes to help control dog/people aggression by having the dog be so focused on the handler that it ignores everything else in the enviornment including the normal target of their aggression. In many cases the dogs that do this type of obedience are dogs that are basicly competition dogs only. They train or compete and spend most of the rest of the time in a kennel. If you want to keep the dog as a pet you need to teach both compitition and "normal" obedience with 2 additional commands, a focus command and a release command to go in to and out of Compitition to "normal" obedience. The other method of switching between obedience styles would be to use different commands for the 2 styles of obedience.

Hi Richard,
My 'come' and 'down/stay' are my 100%-24-7 commands. The others are important, but those two will get my and Zeke out of most binds.

I have a 'heel' command and a 'roam' command. The first means Zeke must keep within 3" of my left knee, between his shoulder and nose. The 'roam' means he can do whatever he wants in a 20 foot radius from me. They are working well for us so far. I don't think competition heeling is in our cards.

Thanks for the help.
Magnus

Lou,

Poorly worded, but I knew you would fix it. Glad you are around to repair my misstatements of you ideas!!!

So what works best to obed train a SAR dog without squishing drive? I know the old way of using a pinch or training collar to get the desired results by forcing the dog or else, but am trying other options right now.

Who said anybody did not believe this was occurring. I just thought is was a funny and worthless practice. He even sent me a picture of a helper taking a bite in the groin along with the training steps necessary (If anyone wants a laugh send me an email and I'll send you the picture. I will not send the instructions for obvious reasons).

Haven't quite got the hang on this thing they call the computer yet. Don't tell anyone though since I'm a Web Project Leader for a fortune technical 500 company.

To answer this post..Pick up a book Ed sells titled Purely Positive. It is my bible.

Originally posted by Stubby'smom:
So what works best to obed train a SAR dog without squishing drive? I know the old way of using a pinch or training collar to get the desired results by forcing the dog or else, but am trying other options right now.

I think you need only two bombproof commands for a SAR dog, the rest are mostly permissive. I use Ecollars to train the recall and the down as those two commands. That’s really not much of a help because I use the Ecollar to train all the other commands as well, but these two I enforce with whatever corrections the dog needs to perform. Those commands are “life savers.”

I use a “soft recall” if I just want the dog to come near me, usually it’s so I can send him out in another direction.

Before Ecollars I used whatever correction collar that the dog told me that he needed to get the behavior.

I like the Ecollar because, even when training these movements as “must do” commands, it doesn’t cause the conflict that often occurs with conventional collars when training “must do” commands.

Thanks Lou. I will try the ECollar. Never have used one before. Sounds like it is very effective at the right time.

I see this is an old thread but my question pertains to competition heeling. I bought Ed's Training the Competition Heeling with Tom Rose, in which Tom teaches to reward from the mouth. Then while watching one of Ed's free streaming videos, I noticed Cindy working with Rush on heeling with a ball under her arm. Then I watched Ivan Balabanov's Clear Communication DVD, where he teaches the dog to look into the handler's eyes, then transitions to the side of the face. So we have 3 similar, but potentially very different methods. The club I belong to all use the ball under the arm technique, however, I have been attempting to use Balabanov's technique and it is coming along, albeit slowly. I do this because he states that to do otherwise (with the ball) you end up with something very different than true attention. So my question to the group is, which technique(s) have you used and had the best results with?

Thanks,
Al