I'm new to the forum. Introduction: I'm a Customs officer/dog handler and work with a drug dog in the ports of Rotterdam. Our dogs are rewarded with 4 inch stainless steel tubes. The tubes are put in a glass bottle with drugs. The tubes are scented by the drugs. We teach a dog the odor by making him retrieve a tube several times and than hiding it for him. We often hide the tubes and when the dog finds it,he can pick up the reward himself. The advantage of this system is that the dog will not walk away from the source easily. When we hide real drugs the dog is rewarded by the handler who gives him the tube coming from the source. The advantage of stainless steel tubes is that they have very little odor of themselves,they can easily be transported in a small glass pot,when used we clean them in boiling water and they can be scented again. We have little problems with dogs not willing to retrieve iron. Maybe this is because we usually use Mals and GSD.
Is this system also used in the USA. I understand that you often work with small scented towels. Is that because you often work with different types of dogs like labs.
Is a primary reward when you hide a towel and the dog can retrieve it himself? Is a secondary reward when the handler gives the reward to the dogs?
I'd like to hear your opinion about the pro's and con's of the two methods

Jan,
Thanks for jumping into the forum!
I'll try to answer your questions. I'm a police dog handler for a local Sheriff's Department in the Southwest US. We do a lot of narcotics work because two main routes for drug smuggling cross in the middle of my city(Inerstate highway 40 and interstate highway 25).
I have had the priveledge to observe training at the dog school in Rotterdam as well as the other school and watched both doign the work with the steel tubes.
In the USA there are many many ways of doing the training. The small white towels are often associated with the US Customs school in Front Royal Virginia. These dogs come from the animal shelters mostly. Many of them are labradors and golden retrievers. This method works for the dogs they use. But, in contract the US Border Patrol uses a method that uses metal pipes of aluminum, copper, wooden and plastic pipes, and rubber hoses. This technique is often called primary reward here, the dog thinks his prey smells like narcotics and the use of varied toys loaded with narcotics or the odor of narcotics facilitates this.
There is another way that was made popular by the military. It starts by giving the dog food for smelling of narcotics (or explosives) and later a ball. In this technique the dog looks to his handler for a toy for smelling the location of the narcotic. We call this a secondary reward system. There are also varietion of each of these among businesses which sell dogs to the police and among police departments that train dogs.
I am partial to the approach used by US Border Patrol, it is one that they initially learned from the Germans at Stukkenbrock and have modified to work best for them.
The key to such work is good selection testing of the dogs. They mostly use malinois and german shepherds imported from Europe.
This is a brief and fairly incomplete discription of the styles of work done here. It is not nearly so consistant as you will find in Holland. It can be very very good here and very very bad here.

Jan,
How do you build drive in the dog for the steel tube? Does finding the tube mean the dog has earned play or is the tube itself the reward?
I was just picturing a session of Flinks drive building with a metal pipe....

Kevin,thanks for your very clear answer. It's much easier to understand the things that are said about the subject on the forum.
Scott, the dogs that pass the tests for drug dogs usually have no problems with the iron tubes. They like to retrieve it.If they don't like it at first we use aluminium tubes or we put some tape or plaster on the tube. Once the training has started the dogs get more crazy for the tubes every day. The tube itself is the reward. We play with the dog once the search is finished. Then we throw away the tube a few tmes. The dog than knows that his work is over.

hello this is my first post.
I am second in charge of the k9 section in the <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />bahamas <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />. I was reading this post with great intrest because we are dealing with a change in our section. some of our officers were train under the us custom system in front royal. when they came back they were using towels as the reward and were getting very good result at the ports. But our o/c trained under matt deveaney c/o u s boarder patrol and they used the pipe. so we had a training issued because we saw the sucess with the custom dogs and the dogs that train under the boarder patrol system with the pipe.
which system is the best, base on result the boarder patrol net us more result wat do you guys think <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />.

Hi! I'm new to the forum too. I was a K9-officer of Ukraine frontier service. We use so-called “alarm-behavior”, and do not make dog retrieve object. Alarm-behavior maybe various: scratching, barking, sit- or lie-position. The choice of behavior depends on individual character of a dog and its practical use. So, dog for testing the cars mustn’t scratch, cars are high price things :-) But scratching can be used in the port, why not?
Dogs are trained in such a way that they are rewarded at the moment when they’ve found out the smell tub and demonstrate alarm behavior. Dog doesn’t have to bring you the tub with narcotic, but just mark this place. You can use as a reward any standard motivational object, for example, the ball. So the type of the tub doesn’t matter in this case.

Howdy Andrew,

We call your "alarm behavior" aggressive or passive. Aggressive meaning the dog scratches etc at the location of the target, passive meaning sit, down etc. Aggressive response is used by many for drug detector dogs, although it seems more and more departments are going with the passive response. Explosives detectors, for obvious reasons are always passive. We (meaning most the trainers I know) don't have thier dogs retrieve the targets either. Good to see you on the forum. I'm sure we are all interested in the different ways of training and even the terminology from one across the big pond.

DFrost