An Overview of Schutzhund Training

Although techniques of dog training have evolved rapidly since the early days of Schutzhund, the basic philosophy of the sport has not changed dramatically in many years. The flavor of von Stephanitz’s writing from the 1920s expresses our attitude even today. He reflects, “This training, then, must know how to awaken the inborn capacities, and to develop them, and must in addition tone down what is superfluous, strengthen what is weak and guide what is erring into the right path.”

The meaning of this passage is apparent. The role of the trainer is to develop the innate behavior and tendencies of the working dog. In tracking he develops the animal’s natural urges to follow scent and to eat. In obedience he exploits the dog’s need to interact with and “belong to” other social beings. In protection he intensifies and makes use of the dog’s most volatile and powerful urges, those of an aggressive predator.

A working dog must bring with it to training a number of qualities of character. In the previous chapter we discussed briefly how the handler can select the right dog for the work. However, at all times the dog and handler are a team. Good results are the product of both their personalities. What a pity that a fine young working dog is not also in a position to select whom it will work with, to test its handler for character!

THE TRAINER

A good dog trainer is patient. He understands that training takes time and is willing to spend the time. He is intelligent, and he thinks clearly about what effect his actions will have upon the dog. Also, he has “feeling,” an accurate intuition for what makes dogs do the things that they do. He is decisive–fasthanded and effective in all that he does. He is not dogmatic, but flexible–always ready to reexamine his beliefs and methods and adapt them to the particular nature and endowment of his pupil.

A good trainer is emotionally disciplined and has an even disposition. He is not prone to temper tantrums and can administer both praise and punishment appropriately. When he physically punishes the animal, he does so impartially–he punishes as the result of a thoughtful decision to use force in order to get results, rather than from wrath and the desire to relieve some of his frustration by taking vengeance upon the dog.

The trainer must have integrity, in the sense that he is his own person and does not depend upon his dog’s behavior or performance to give him a sense of worth, identity or importance.

Finally, the good dog trainer has a worldly understanding of his pupil, and knows it for a dog and only a dog. He realizes that the animal does things for its own reasons and does not necessarily live its whole life in order to please its trainer. He accepts that sometimes his dog will be less than completely brave, that the animal has no sense of fair play or honesty, that it does nothing for spite and that its basic nature is that of an opportunistic predator.

The trainer must respect his dog not just as an asset or possession, or as a way of gaining recognition by winning trophies, but as a living, breathing and utterly unique product of nature. After all, each and every dog is an event of biology that will never happen again.

From the trainer’s respect for his dog should arise the capacity to selfexamine. Let the trainer examine himself when his dog makes a mistake or does not understand an exercise, and ask himself, “Where am I at fault?”

THE METHOD

Whomever shall find the answer to the question “How shall I say this to my dog?” has won the game and can develop from his animal whatever he likes.

–Max von Stephanitz

The fundamental task in Schutzhund training, indeed in any form of dog training, is getting the animal to understand what it is we want from it. Successful trainers are successful because they make their dogs understand what is asked of them. Those who are not successful do not.

One of the basic tools for making a dog understand what we want from it is consistency. If we set for the animal a rule, a limit on its behavior, then that rule must remain invariable. For example, if we decide that after the command “Out!” the dog will be allowed two seconds in which to release the sleeve before we will correct it, then we must always expect no more and no less from it. The dog must be able to predict what we will do in any given situation so that it can make a sensible decision about what to do. If we are inconsistent, then we are unpredictable. Unpredictability confuses the dog, and confusion makes it weak.

Practice, simple repetition, is another way that we make the animal understand what we desire. A dog is a creature of habit. If we can induce it to do something correctly several times, then we begin to form in the dog the habit of always doing it that way. This provides us with the opportunity to praise and reward the animal so that it will begin to understand precisely which actions bring it reward and which do not.

But if we allow the animal to practice a skill incorrectly, habit can also be our enemy. For example, if the dog begins to quarter while tracking (weaving back and forth across the track instead of following it closely), we must immediately find a way to modify what it is doing so that it stops quartering and begins tracking correctly. Otherwise quartering can become its habitual strategy for working out a track. Similarly, if the animal is allowed to come around the jump instead of over it or to bite the agitator during the hold and bark, these faults can become habits, even if they occur only occasionally.

It is not that practice on an activity makes perfect , but that perfect practice makes perfect.

Last, and most important, we get the dog to understand what we want by breaking what we have to teach it down into small, easily comprehensible pieces. In education this practice is called task analysis , and it involves analyzing each lesson to be learned, dividing it into “key” ideas or movements and then teaching these concepts or skills one at a time. Throughout this book we have made a task analysis of all the exercises that the dog must perform in order to pass Schutzhund I, II and III and broken them down for the reader into “Goals” and “Important Concepts for Meeting the Goals.”

This approach is progressive, involving small steps, and is pyramidal in its effect. Each concept builds upon what the dog has learned from the preceding one, and each concept must be fully mastered before moving on to the next. Furthermore, if the dog is experiencing confusion or making errors on a particular task, it is the responsibility of the handler to once more break that task into concepts and skills and begin instruction again at the specific point where the dog is having difficulty. He must ensure that the dog is successful and confident in each of these lower steps before he returns to the original task.

The job of making the dog understand what we want from it is best accomplished without the use of force. Not only are we concerned that it understands its work, but also we want the dog to enjoy its work. Therefore, in the initial stages of training the animal for a particular skill, we avoid if possible the use of any kind of pain, correction or intimidation. We call this no‑force phase of training the teaching phase. If, during the teaching phase, we must employ force to introduce a skill (as we often must do in protection work), then we take great pains to use the least force that we can.

Only once we are absolutely certain that the dog knows what we want from it will we begin the correction or training phase , in which we use some kind of force or compulsion to punish or prevent the animal’s errors.

Throughout this book we use the term correction for this compulsion. A good correction serves two purposes. First, it punishes the dog for doing something that we do not want it to or prevents the dog from doing it. Second, a good correction encourages or even forces the dog to do what we want it to do. Thus, when the dog ignores a “Sit!” command, a slap on the rump both punishes it for refusing to sit and also causes it quickly to assume the desired position.

Corrections can be made with the hands, feet or leash, or in a number of other ways. However they are accomplished, corrections should always be administered quickly–in close association with the undesirable behavior–and sharply enough to make a definitive impression on the dog. Nagging the dog with many light corrections is detrimental because it perpetuates the animal’s errors.

We must take care that training does not become abusive, both for ethical reasons and because abusive dog training does not bring the best results. Therefore, corrections must not be made too strongly or out of anger. For each handler, each dog and each particular error, there is a suitable level of intensity of correction that discourages the animal from repeating its mistake, but does not damage its spirit and its basic love for the work.

In addition, abusiveness should not be defined solely by how strongly the handler corrects his dog, but also by whether the dog understands what it did to bring the correction and how it can avoid another in the future.

Our main concern is to employ force effectively when we have to, but without having it show in the dog’s attitude toward its work. In training we seek to create a spirited and useful companion, not a cringing slave. The German general Erich Ludendorff said in reference to soldlers, “The training of men should not kill, but strengthen character.” Much the same principle applies to dogs.

Therefore, the more strongly we are obliged to correct a dog in order to bring about a desired result, the more strongly we must reward the animal when it finally does it correctly. There are two main secrets to the use of force without diminishing the dog’s character:

• The animal understands what it must do in order to avoid being corrected a second time.

• When it readily does as we ask, thereby avoiding the correction, we enthusiastically give it something that it wants very much–praise, play, a run after the ball, a bite on the decoy, etc.

According to Konrad Most, a service and military dog trainer of von Stephanitz’s era,

With a powerful form of compulsion we must also ensure that the initial discomfort subsequently turns to pleasure. We have no wish to see a panic‑stricken slave doing what we want in fear and trembling, but a dog that enjoys life and is happy in his work, putting all his heart into it. Just as the art of human education is to substitute desire for obligation, that of an animal training requires a disagreeable activity to be changed into an agreeable one. This aim is achieved, in the first place, by the limitation of compulsion already prescribed: it must stop the very instant the act required begins. Secondly, it is essential that as soon as the disagreeable experience ceases, an agreeable one follows immediately, as a regular consequence. The result of this liberation from the pressure of compulsion is that the dog quickly learns how to escape from his disagreeable experience and, in addition, finds that the act, though in itself disagreeable, is soon transformed into an agreeable experience. This causes him to develop an amazing zest for his work.

The final phase of training is proofing. At this level we check for understanding and increase the strength of the dog’s habit by asking the animal to perform in unusual circumstances that are actually far more difficult than those it will face in a trial. In doing so we cause the dog to generalize the lessons it has learned on the training field to other situations.

Dogs are context‑specific learners. Skills and concepts that we teach them tend to be unique to a certain set of circumstances. For example, if a dog is taught to track in a grassy pasture and indicate leather articles, it is likely that the animal will be unable to perform when asked to work in a weed‑covered field and indicate cloth articles. Similarly, just because the dog bites well on a decoy who wears a leather sleeve and bulky protection pants, we cannot be sure that the dog will bite in an actual street situation in which the assailant wears no sleeve or protection pants.

Therefore, once we have taught the exercises and then trained them, we take great pains to proof them in all manner of bizarre situations. We perform obedience routines in busy parking lots, run tracks with a noisy crowd of people walking along with the dog as it works and perform hold‑and‑bark exercises in the beds of pickup trucks, inside houses and closets or on the tops of haystacks. When we have proofed our dog extensively in these demanding situations, anything it might see on trial day will seem elementary.

In all fields of endeavor, people seek the best, the most ideal approach. Unfortunately, there is no ideal approach to Schutzhund training. There are as many different ways of creating a competitive animal as there are trainers and dogs. All methods and ideas that produce results have some merit and can be drawn upon to supplement the program chosen to train the particular dog.

Whatever the approach, it should take into account three points. First, the program selected should consider the way that animals learn–initially by pleasant and unpleasant experiences and then by repetition. Second, the training program must provide a means of soliciting both motivation and repetition. Third, the approach should be progressive and pyramidal in its effect–each step in training should develop from the previous one.

^{“Every dog has a nose, that is to say, every dog has a sense of smell and without it, he could not live at all … but it is something quite different when this dog knows to turn his powers of scent to good account for us.”–Max von Stephanitz}

Tracking: Requirements of the Trial

TEMPERAMENT TEST

Before the tracking test each dog in Schutzhund I, II or III is closely examined by the judge for stability and impartiality. Impartiality refers to an aspect of the dog’s character which is neither hostile nor fearful of strangers. Every judge has a slightly different way of evaluating temperament. Most judges insist on touching the animals and watching their behavior while walking on a loose leash amid a group of people. If the judge detects a sign of shyness, timidity or any indication of inappropriate aggressiveness, he will disqualify the animal in question from further participation in the trial.