Willie, awesome info. I can totally see where that's going.

I taught my dog how to alert bark, in prey, using the Leerburg e-book and a little advice from Will. What you described sounds kind of like the recall games on the Basic Ob video, which my wife and I already do with him, combined with the focus exercise on the Flinks Drive/Focus video. Brilliant. I'm so doing this.

Okay, this may be a dumb question, but what is agitation gear? I think of harness/leash that the dog hits against and pulls, as he approaches the "prey." When I trained our lab mix dog many years ago, he would on command hit the end of his leash so hard he would rear on his hind legs, snarling and growling at anything to which I said, "Get him, Shorty!" He looked absolutely ferocious.... but drop the leash and slack off the pull, he was super dooper puppy tail wagging wanting some lovin'.

Is that sort of what I need to go for, or is that totally the wrong idea? Shorty would never actually grab anything or anyone, but he sure as h*ll looked like he would! And as someone said, if a stranger is willing to walk right through a snarling, barking pit/lab mix, I've got real trouble and need to be prepared.

The agitation gear we used for Jake was a special harness that he only wore when we were doing agitation work.
When he had it on he knew what he was supposed to be doing.
We used a harness because since he had low prey drive, a collar at first seemed to lower his drive.
H wasn't raised to be a working dog, so we had some retraining to do.
I had taught him not to pull on the collar, so he wouldn't.

Mason, (one of the MWD MPs) put him in a harness to help with this.


Scott, I'm glad that you are inspired.
A word of caution though...I had two professionals with me every step of the way, they would give me home work and I would go do it, then they would eval the dog and decide what we should be doing based on what the dog was doing.
The vids you listed are great, but I don't want people to think I'm advocating doing this sort of work without experience, or having someone who knows what they are doing help.
There is so much more involved int this process than what I was able to write. So much more.
You could end up with a really bad situation with the dog out of control, and locked in prey, or a dog that doesn't perform in a real life situation like Steve brought up.
I just don't want someone going off and trying this based on the few paragraphs I wrote.

I fully understand. Thank you for the wise word of caution.