I was just going to let this go, but I really feel the need to make a convincing stand here.

Certainly you can train most any dog to go through the motions of just about any task, whether sport or real-life work related. However, for real working dogs, merely going through the motions can be disastrous. The means by which these dogs are trained and how they perform are sincerely a matter of life or death. I'm sure you can relate to that from your experience in training assistance dogs.

Perhaps it doesn't matter what drive the assistance dog is in when it must bark. It may not matter how the dog learns to bark. Certainly you could train a pet dog to bark using your method and it wouldn't matter. However, it does matter very much for a bark alert SAR dog. You don't want the bark prompted by and tied to an auditory cue like this (the knocking). Imagine a dog who is trained by your method working under a lot of stress (perhaps a disaster SAR environment) and it hears a knocking noise. What do you think it will do? Based on the fact that dogs tend to revert to initially trained behaviors while under stress, I'd be willing to bet that it would bark. Maybe not such a big deal. However, worst case scenario, the dog is under stress, finds somebody and doesn't bark because the auditory cue isn't present. We've seen this happen in training scenarios.

You want the bark to come from and be learned through frustration while in prey drive because his toy/play is being witheld. The end result is that the dog finds, he becomes frustrated because he wants to play with his toy and the first thing he thinks to do is to bark. He's not waiting for an auditory cue. The presence of the person he finds(who is the source of the toy/play) is the cue. When a dog finds in a real scenario (or training), the cue will always be present (unlike the knocking noise). He barks because that was what he was initially taught to do when he is frustrated and wants his toy.

If you look at all of the methods I described in my first post, you'll see they are all related to frustration while in prey drive. And, I'll have to take back what I said about there not being a "right" way to do this. I guess there is generally a "right" way, although there are many variables to that "right" way.

In my opinion, using the method you described will cause reliability/training problems that might not be "fixable" and can be completely avoided in the first place by using a frustration/prey-drive based method.

The knocking & the verbal cue are bridges, that's all. I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

 Quote: susan tuck

The knocking & the verbal cue are bridges, that's all. I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

My first thought when I read this was "Eek, bridges can take you to some mighty bad places".

As a complete and utter novice in all things dog related, I had hoped to hear more from you as to why you take the position you do. I gather Konnie won't respond again because she already made her point.

Don't mean to corner you Susan. I'm really, really curious about this topic. From my very uneducated perspective, Konnie's explanation makes sense. So since you disagree, I was hoping to see more from you as to why.

The longer I'm on this board, the more I realize how much education goes into correctly raising a dog (working or otherwise). I'm fascinated by the ways experts raise their dogs and why they do what they do and to what degree they are successful.

Hi Mara,
Konnie is actually involved in USAR, i'd take her advice.
And remember, this is the internet and people with zero experience with working dogs can throw advice out there......

Hi Judy,
I didn't respond because we both said what we wanted to say, and I defer to her expertise in the SAR field!

Fair enough !