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Introduction
It's impossible to imagine life today without professionally trained guard, sentry, and police dogs. Dog sports like Schutzhund and Ringsport also champion reliable protection work, and there are many privately owned companion dogs that work as protection dogs.
The successful training of a reliable protection dog doesn't start, as is often thought, with bite work, but rather with a good education and obedience exercises. People who don't agree and who don't have a good relationship with their dog and have not valued obedience training, sometimes start training very young dogs to do bite work and thus spoil their dogs forever. The dangers that accompany bite work are so great that we emphatically advise against starting this type of training with dogs younger than 12 months. If a dog starts bite work at too young an age, he will invariably be a frightened dog or a totally aggressive dog that is impossible to control. Therefore, bite training should begin only when the dog is physically and mentally ready for it. As mentioned, the proper age for bite work is almost never younger than 12 months and often as old as 18 months.
While you wait to implement bite work into your training schedule, thoroughly teach your dog obedience exercises until he is a year old. During this period, you can also start training him to perform the preparatory protection exercises, as mentioned in Chapter 17, “Raising for Protection.”
Every dog that is safe in and suitable to our communities—definitely including reliable protection dogs—must have mastered certain basic skills. For instance, dogs must: not pull the leash; on command: sit, lie down, stand, stay, and come; and display normal behavior with humans and other animals. To help you ensure your protection dog has these basic skills, we clearly describe how to train for them in the Obedience section of this book, before we write comprehensively about protection training. As in the real world, obedience comes before protection.
We have also presented the PH-1 test of the Royal Dutch Police Dog Association (KNPV) because it is intended to assess dogs trained not only for the police service and police tasks but also for their potential to be reliable protection dogs. In Chapter 16, “Decoy and Dog,” we discuss, among other things, the behavior of the decoy and that of the dog, as well as the important warm-up and cool-down exercises that don't take much time but prevent injuries.
However, before you get into the details associated with training, start at the beginning of this book with Chapter 1, “Conditions for Success,” and Chapter 2, “Breeds for Protection Work,” in which you will find a discussion about the most likely breeds to train for protection work based on our comprehensive training experiences with those breeds.
