Ep. 22 - What's Wrong with Sport Training??

Many dogs are trained with sport training methods and then go on to do law enforcement or are sold as protection dogs. From my perspective, I don't recommend this approach because sport training is about teaching the dog in a consistent, repetitive and predictable environment where they know what is going to happen. In real world conflict, it is dynamic (ever changing), unpredictable and you never know how it is going to end up.

We do not like the prey/play drive approach because we want our dogs to have a very high tolerance for stress. In a real fight, the dog is defending and so we operate in serious/defense drive, teaching the dog to stay in the fight and win no matter what happens.

We take the approach of high stress training, moving the dog in the direction of high stress performance, rather than low stress training.

Check it out to get my full thoughts.