I have to agree with you both,
There is a huge amount of KNPV trainers who spend no time at all at puppy training, this is for two reasons:
1) they don't wanna mess with a pup's selfimage, they wanna let it form himself
2) They don't wanna invest time and effort in a dog that has not yet proven himself being worth to try and make a policedog out off..they only start training obedience AFTHER a dog has proven to posess a good nbite and a good drive
Personaly, i think a lot of good dogs go to waist like that

I'm glad to see there are more and more KNPV'ers who , -like myself- start working with an 8 or 9 week old puppy.
Regarless iff they train with a clicker or with an other method, they at least try to "form " the pup's caracter and they teach them some basic commands at very young age.
I work with a clicker, and my experience is that this way a pup will learn the basic commands very fast without any pressure or stress. With basic commands i mean sit, down, heel, come here, bark, and even some searching and fetching.....
I hope i cleared things up a little....

Patrick,
I am trying to get a better understanding of the general philosophy of foundation bitework with the majority of KNPV trainers. My sense is that most do not subscribe to Helmut Raiser's approach, which is prevalent in most schutzhund clubs in the US, where he advocates starting prey drive promotion in bitework with 12 week old pups. I believe Raiser's approach is very effective in training a pup to come into drive when he sees the helper, as well as building a good foundation for a solid grip and strike. The potential downside of this approach is that the pup is imprinted with the relationship of the prey object being the target of the bite instead of the man. In waiting for the dog to mature and working more with a suit, the dog is more likely to see the man as the target rather than the equipment. I am wondering, since KNPV is really more of a test for police work, if that is part of the reason you don't see a lot of early prey drive promotion with young pups who will be trained in KNPV when they are more mature. With early prey drive promotion, the pup learns to see the helper as a buddy who carries a prey object. In waiting for a dog to mature first, the dog is more likely to see the helper as an adversary who he wants to fight.

Hi Chip,
First of all sorry for the late reaction but for some misterious reason i get no email warnings when a topic is replied ..
Personaly i believe in building up the prey driven bite with young pup's, but most KNPV trainers do not because they think iff you have a service dog that is very prey driven, a suspect could let the dog bite on a jacket or a rag, and while the dog is happy with his prey, the suspect could get away....

I think, and i've proven that it's very well possible to train a dog to PH1 on prey drive, and then afther certification to make the dog what we call "man sharp"
A fully trained dog that is teased by a civillian on the same way as by a decoy in KNPV training will soon get man driven, it's not even nescesairry to let the dog bite ....
You have to understand that the KNPV is an allmost 100 year old programm , and with that history there are a lot of 100 year old techniques and believe's.
As a renewer of those techniques and ideas, and as promotor off teh new techniques i have had a lot of resistance in my 15 year KNPV membership, but by certifying 3 dogs for so far i try to prove my right, and to spread the new style....
Luckily there are many people like me who do the same or it would be a lost cause....

Thanks Patrick. It sounds like with KNPV being limited to one small country, that the sport has its own training culture that is resistant to changing to modern training techniques. I have also heard that a fair number of KNPV trainers are extremely hard on their dogs, which would be consistant with heavy handed, old style training.