An Overview of the Obedience Phase

^{The Schutzhund dog must make an impression in obedience. It should show in every line of its body its delight in being at work with its master. (Lou Woolridge on trial day with Belgian Groenandael “Brio,” Schutzhund II.)}

The Schutzhund obedience phase is continually compared to the American Kennel Club obedience competition. The reason is perhaps that many American trainers view Schutzhund from a perspective developed during many years in the AKC obedience ring. Unfortunately, this perspective sometimes leads to less than insightful comparisons between Schutzhund dogs and AKC dogs.

Viewed from the diehard AKC enthusiast’s standpoint, Schutzhund dogs often lack precision, and some of them are too lighthearted and boisterous about their work. Superficial comparisons of this sort overlook the fundamental differences between the two sports.

The most obvious is the difference in scale. The Schutzhund dog does not traverse a twenty‑by‑forty‑foot ring during the obedience routine. It traverses an entire playing field. It has far more ground to cover, and the routine is more flowing and faster paced.

More important, the Schutzhund dog is a working dog, not just an obedience dog. It is not a specialist but a generalist that is expected to display all‑around talent and utility. On the same day that it competes in obedience it has two other phases in which to perform that involve many hours of training, a great number of skills to learn and some rare qualities of character.

The most important distinction between Schutzhund and AKC trials is that Schutzhund is not only a training test but also a breed test. The obedience phase is used not just to examine the dog’s schooling, but its character as well. For this reason, the Schutzhund’s obedience program includes two tests of nervous stability that do not appear in AKC competition: response to gunshots and heeling in a group of people.

Because the trial is a breed test, the Schutzhund judge looks as much to the dog’s attitude about working as he does to the animal’s precision during the exercises. The Schutzhund dog must make an impression in obedience. It should show in every line of its body its delight in being at work with its master.

According to the old German saying about obedience, “The fast dog loses points slowly, while the slow dog loses points fast.” We wholeheartedly endorse this ideal. From our perspective as breeders of working dogs, the obedience phase is primarily a character test for willingness. Some of the old‑time German breeders and trainers knew willingness by the term pack drive. They saw eager obedience as the product of the dog’s intense need to belong to and associate with other social beings. We believe that all the useful work that dogs perform all over the world–from search and rescue to narcotics detection, from herding to guiding the blind–is founded upon the dog’s bond to its people and its willingness to subordinate its own desires to theirs.

Furthermore, willingness is a genetic trait that is by no means automatically bestowed upon a dog when it is born. Willingness, like other character traits, is variable. Some dogs have a great deal, other dogs little or none. And it is a sad fact that, no matter how brave or beautiful or clever, a dog that is unwilling is useless to us. It is without value because we are of little value to it.

Precision is also required in the obedience phase–but not to the extent seen in the AKC ring. In AKC obedience competition trophies are won and lost on the basis of minute differences in exactitude–on inches and fractions of inches. There exist countless ways to be suddenly disqualified from competition. For example, in AKC competition it is a serious fault for the dog to bump or rub against its handler while heeling. Bumping is also a fault in Schutzhund, but a much less serious one. Furthermore, if the dog bumps through eagerness, its spirit will delight the judge and move his pencil to leniency.

Precisely because of the spirit and energy demanded on the Schutzhund field, obedience is arguably the most difficult of the three phases of the sport. In addition, every season the obedience phase becomes increasingly important in deciding the outcome of competition. For the last few years, the major trials in both the United States and Germany have been won and lost in obedience. Because many of the dogs in the top ranks of competition are nearly perfect in tracking and protection–scoring 98s, 99s and 100s–and are therefore basically equal in these phases, now it is in heeling, retrieving or jumping that championships are decided.

Why? What is the difference?

Tracking and protection training are based upon the dog’s powerful and instinctive urges to eat, to hunt and to fight. The trainer’s role is merely to activate the animal’s urges and shape its innate behavior.

Obedience, on the other hand, is primarily inhibitory in nature. Obedience is mainly concerned with preventing the animal from acting like a dog; it restrains its impulses to roam and explore, to hunt and to try its strength against other dogs. It is much more artificial than either tracking or protection, and for this reason it is difficult to train obedience really well.

Good obedience depends upon creating motivation in the dog. Therefore, the animal’s willingness, its eagerness to please us, is absolutely essential. We cannot do without it. In addition to this basic requirement in the dog, the animal’s handler must take care to:

• use, at the proper moments, a great deal of vigorous, sincere and unselfconscious praise

• practice emotional restraint and self‑control

• be patient and meticulous

• have the sense and the skill to apply the least amount of force to the animal that will accomplish his purpose

Used together in a thoughtful way, these guidelines will help to produce a dog that is lively and free‑moving in obedience–a pleasure to look at and a pleasure to work with.

The great challenge is to bring to obedience something more, something of the intensity that the dog carries in bite work. We do this by harnessing the animal’s prey drive . Later in this book we will see that a great deal of Schutzhund bite work is founded upon prey drive–the dog’s urge to chase, catch and kill prey. Retrieving a ball or toy is founded on precisely the same instinct. The strong retriever does not chase a ball simply because it pleases its master, or because it has been taught to retrieve. The animal does it because it is a hunter, and the act of chasing an erratically moving object and biting it is intensely satisfying to an impulse very deep within.

Actually, the term play retrieve is something of a misnomer. For many dogs, especially those bred for work, retrieving is a serious endeavor, much closer in nature to hunting or aggression than it is to play. These dogs pursue the ball with an awesome intensity of purpose. This is the sort of animal we need for Schutzhund obedience because, when it chases the ball, it experiences an intensely strong physiological rush of excitement. The dog comes alive with spirit.

We call this process arousal , and our basic method of motivating the dog for obedience is to associate arousal with the obedience exercises, so that they are infused with its energy. We make the association through extensive use of a prey object like a ball in training, using it to reward well‑performed exercises and also to help establish eye contact between handler and dog.