NO I am Originaly from Czech Republick.. people are not so happy to sue.. I had white collar on my dog.. it meant leave alone and dont touch.. nor shoot. It Used to be pretty common there. Not these days, My friend still trains the same quality dogs.. Well I call it quality, maybe for you guys it is in sane, and I dont blame you

Idaho.. exactly. And I am kind of wondering what is going to happen to my 5 mos old pup..he is already pretty promisible. I dont want to just keep him and train for sport. My officer friend is comming to visit me and help train my pup in 3 mos.. maybe we can start little training.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

I dont think it would happen here.. I assume from your shocked face. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

There have been an awfull lot of statements about how civilians aren't qualified to give opinions on K9 topics.
So, where and when do all you become experts? Is it right out of the Academy? After 3, 6, or 9 months on the job?
Is a cop with 20 years on the street BUT 2 months as a
K9 handler, an expert? What about the Auxiliary or Reserve
Officer, who got a badge because he's friends with the local
Sheriff. Is he an expert. The Civilian who's been training
PPD's dogs for 25 years, he has nothing to add to the subject? If Bernhard Flinks wasn't a Police Officer but had only been tot he Bundessiegerprufing 5X's would his opinion and advice be dismissed?
IMHO Dogs are dogs. Biting is biting. Good advice is good
advice, no matter where it comes from and bad advice is bad
advice.

I agree and I have to say for mysel in all honesty..I have long ways to go when it comes to training.. I have a lot to learn about sport training.. I know so little, I had a chance like not that many people have to do something with Alec. But i do have to say.. I was kicked out of competition trials.. and not only once.. twice.. And also my dog was far from a dream dog for many people on the street, but he was good enough to do some tipe of jobs. And I was lucky enough that my father helped me with him, he searved at the border (PS) .. and he helped with some training. Police officers, k9 people have a lot of respocibility and I got to see that. I dont blame them that they just want to stick with things, and people they trust, know. They need to provide us security and hard work..and believe me it is hard.

Thomas,
You are right, not everyone who is a LEO and had soem experience w/ dogs is qualified to speak about the application of dogs in police work.
But, you comment that biting is biting shows that you dont have a clue youself. This is the probelm. The focus on biting in law enforcement is dramatically different than in sport work..any sport work.
Are there some dogs that just seem to fall into the work without extra training??? A very few, and knowing which ones will, and which ones need particular types of work to get the job done, and which ones just will not do is where the law enforcement experience comes into play.
I have done sport for 25 years and law enforcement dog trainign for 20. How little I knew after 5 years of sport training was amazing. I suspect I'm falling behind in the catagory of sport training vs. law enforcement work now after all the years of greater emphasis on the later. I still title my dogs as it seems to fit into my service dogs work appropriatly but it comes second.

For the discussion at hand. The idea of transfering bites as a training endeaver w/ a PSD is just wrong. Providing experiences where the dog is not confused when it looses a bit is correct. As a goal the modern police dog in America should grip with one strong full bite. Of course the number of variables in the real world are unlimited and this training ideal is not always acheived in a deployment environment. Suspects don't hand ya an arm most of the time and clothing, fighting suspects, drugs and alcohol, environemnt all play a role as well as K-9 temperment and experience.
As an expression of fight drive (or fighting instinct or combat behaviors or none specific aggression, or active aggrssion, or genetically proper prey/defense interactions, or what ever the hell you want to name it) bite transfering as a training experience is pretty much not involved.
It could occur because a dog is falling into self-defense, because the dog is unsure due to lack of training, maturity, or because the dog was trained to let go under an attack (see Most's book and the old Zoll training in Germany).
Fighting instinct has been beaten to death, mostly by people who have had success without seeing evidence of it either becasue the training they performed did not accentuate the trait or becasue within the context of most sports it is not a necessity to do well.
The occurance of this trait more frequently seen in malinois is propbably due to the fact that at the top levels of competition it is necessary to possess and the gene pool among the malijnois is pretty damned small capitalizing on a few stud lines that have acheived success int he production of competition dogs as a very narrow criteria for breeding. The GSD has suffered in this area due to very high demands on looks (kor'ed at the least) as well as hips and elbows, and titles that include eliminating a large number of sharp dogs from the gene pool in the last decade or so and some dogs that were pretty intractible. A gentler kinder approach (or maybe a dumbing down of the GSD).
In a lecture done by Stewart Hilliard here last year we were able to go through videos of dogs and identify the characterisits of this type of dog. It's not mystical and with experience and a little testing it can readily be seen. It has been recognized for a long time (remember the old 10 point system in the old scorebooks...no one wanted a stud dog that didn't rate a 10 in courage and fighting instinct and finding a 10 bitch was like finding a gold nugget!).
Raiser now speaks of the modern German Shepherd. A dog that is really a prey/defense dog. He also speaks of training the defense to only show in the barking and not letting it leak into the prey biting in the sport (though he admits he likes it when a little is brought into the biting). This style of work really buries the trait of fighting instinct. It is an artifact of the way the sport is currently trained and scored.
In law enforcement we must train with dogs that have a varying amount and diversity of drives but must have a threshold for what is acceptable. Unfortunatly there is just not enough of the great dogs to go around and in the same breath maybe there are few handlers/trainers that could capatalize on them any way.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna close this thread.
If people want to read a long and thourough discussion about fight drive look it up with the search function. There was a great thread some months back that really put a finger on the trait this commonly called fight drive.