Introduction:

If courage for a patrol K9 is a measure of how much torment the dog is willing to endure
before it gives up the fight, then a test for sufficient courage will necessarily cause serious
injury to the dog, given the demands of the job. Such a “test” is administered by a violent
criminal suspect, not a decoy.

A protection sport cannot provide a test for sufficient courage, but judgments of sufficient,
and even pronounced courage are made at sport trials anyhow. This is done by judging
confidence in the face of imaginary threat/torment. Protection sport scenarios generate
threat only in the minds of people because, realized or not, the end goal when training a dog
to perform sport exercises must be to remove the perception of threat from the dog’s mind.
Threat imagined for sport and entertainment purposes allows a dog’s confidence to be
called courage, but the imagined threat is obviously not perceived by a dog if it is confident.

Threat is recognition of another’s intention and ability to inflict pain/injury, and confidence
is a state of being certain. A sport dog is confident specifically because it is not threatened -
because it is certain that the decoy will not inflict pain/injury beyond what it has already
experienced and expects. Thus, training a dog to perform sport exercises instills an
understanding in the dog that is opposite the proper understanding for a patrol K9. Proper
means that a K9 candidate learns not to expect risk-free engagements, before it is
deployed, not after. This does not mean that a K9 candidate must be hurt by a decoy.

Comparing what occurs during a protection sport exercise to a violent engagement between
a patrol K9 and a desperate criminal, is like comparing a professional wrestling match to a
real fight to the death. Protection sport fans, like wrestling fans, tend to resist the notion
that the combatants of their sport are just playing a game; in fact, some misguided trainers
claim that sport exercises could require courage if only the decoys could/would go harder on
the dogs.

That this claim is wrong and bound to encourage illogical and inhumane sport training is
not apparent when one buys into the standard protection sport dogmas that are debunked
in this article. These dogmas lead sport trainers to believe that the work performed by a
sport dog and a patrol K9 is similar, and that protection sport exercises can be used to
prepare a dog to do the job performed by a patrol K9. Wrong, and seriously wrong.

Is the work performed by a sport dog similar in some ways to that of a K9? The answer is
yes … except that instead of a violent criminal swinging a pipe or bat, the sport dog
engages a decoy that obeys rules, never wins a fight, and never inflicts pain and injury on
it. But other than that, the K9 and sport dog do similar work - as in: “other than that Mrs.
Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

Michael Schmidt

Packworks 3/18
Pronounced Nonsense: Common Protection Sport Dogmas
Michael Schmidt 3/18

dogma: something held as an established opinion; especially, a definite authoritative tenet.

1. The following are dogmas that are used to support claims that a dog has demonstrated
courage during an engagement with a decoy:

a) Courage is indicated by willingness to assume a close/vulnerable position when guarding.

b) Courage is indicated by willingness to directly engage when attacked.

c) Courage is indicated by willingness to absorb stick hits or other types of limited/humane

physical punishment.

2. When courage is evaluated at a sport trial, each dog is presented with the same
scenario/stimuli, and dogs that perform confidently are judged to be courageous. This
approach sidesteps the question as to whether courage is required to perform the trial
exercise, and it redefines courage via one or more of the above dogmas to be a quality
needed to perform the exercise. In reality, what is seen when a dog performs a trial exercise
with a decoy, is confidence, not courage. Confidence can be seen and judged, while courage
is an imagined/assumed reason for the confidence.

3. A judgement of courage has no application outside of sport if it values confidence without

considering how the dog perceives the decoy. Confidence is connected to a perceived level of
threat that is not high enough to create uncertainty in the dog. If the perceived level of
threat increases, confidence goes down and more courage is required for the dog to engage.
This fact regarding the relationship between confidence and courage gets to the heart of the
matter with courage - the question as to how the dog will respond when it is hurt by a
suspect - when the expectations supporting its confidence are suddenly replaced by pain
and uncertainty.

4. With the sport approach to evaluating courage, the same dog will be judged differently if
its perception of the decoy changes. If the dog is certain that it can perform the exercise
without being hurt by the decoy, the dog will perform the exercise confidently but not
courageously, and it will be awarded the rating pronounced courage. But if the dog truly is
courageous and it is not certain that it can perform the exercise without being hurt, it will
perform the exercise cautiously but courageously, with a legitimate/appropriate lack of
confidence, and it will be awarded the rating insufficient courage. This explains why the
methods used for sport evaluation and training have nothing in common with the methods
used to evaluate and prepare a patrol K9 candidate.
5. Confidence can be linked to fighting and exhibited as willingness to engage and not quit,
but the question with regards to courage is answered by determining whether a dog will
fight and stay engaged, when it is not confident. To see why this is the case, the concept of
defense drive must be recognized as relevant to a scenario where a K9 is being hurt by a
violent suspect. A dog absorbing injurious physical punishment cannot be expected to be in
a confident state, especially not the first few times the dog experiences real violence. A K9
candidate should therefore be evaluated in defense drive and be prepared by its training to
work in defense drive when it is deployed. This requirement, in itself, does not create a
need for a decoy to hurt a K9 candidate when it is evaluated and trained.

6. A patrol K9 has a proper understanding of a suspect after the dog has been shot, stabbed
or hit with a pipe or bat. If a K9 with such experience recovers and proves eager to pursue
and engage suspects, there are grounds to claim that the dog is exhibiting courage with
every engagement. There is no such thing as false courage, but false confidence is a
possibility. The willingness to pursue and engage exhibited by the example K9 indicates
legitimate confidence because the dog has a proper understanding of its adversary.

7. A sport dog can act confidently without being courageous while engaging a decoy because
sport protection training teaches a dog that it will not be hurt when it engages - even if it is
hit with the decoy’s stick. Sport training also teaches a dog to guard from a close/vulnerable
position - a place where an untrained dog will refuse to go initially due to a completely
legitimate concern about being hurt. If a dog were to bring situational confidence gained
from sport protection training to the example engagement where the K9 was stabbed or hit
with a pipe, the confidence gained from sport training would be revealed to be false
confidence. Confidence gained from sport protection training is false confidence with
regards to the work being simulated, because dogs get hurt doing the work being simulated.

8. To utilize the concept of defense drive productively when evaluating and preparing a K9
candidate, the dog must be made uncertain about something specific - not about whether it
will be “attacked”, which happens predictably all the time in sport training and trials;
rather, the dog must be uncertain/concerned about being hurt.

9. A sport dog is not being courageous when it offers a decoy an opportunity to hurt it; for
example, when it guards from a close/vulnerable position where the decoy can hit it. What
can be determined from such a test is that the dog believes it will not be hurt when it gets
in that position - the place where a real suspect can most easily hurt it.

10. With guarding or any task that requires a dog to inhibit itself while engaging the decoy,
the indicator for defense drive and the gage for the level of threat perceived by the dog, is
distance; more specifically separation. If a dog operating in defense mode is not fighting, it
is continuously monitoring and maintaining separation. A K9 candidate should never be
expected to go to a specific place when performing such tasks; rather, the dog must be
allowed to establish the place - a position where the dog believes it can satisfy the
requirement to inhibit itself without getting hurt. The separation decided upon by the dog
is the gage for how well the decoy has done the job of instilling a proper understanding in
the dog. When a dog is required to inhibit itself, it should offer the suspect an opportunity
to escape, not an opportunity to hurt it, obviously. It is acceptable for a dog to give a ten-foot
head start to a suspect who cannot run half as fast.

11. Methods used to train a dog to behave stupidly in the face of danger teach the dog in
steps that a dangerous entity is less dangerous than the dog thought. Even the harsh, 2-
line, prong collar exercise used to train the sport guard & bark exercise is a good example
because it is simply a modified version of the so-called “friendly decoy” approach. With the
two-line method or other methods employing physical corrections, the desired guarding
performance is achieved when the dog figures out that the decoy hurts it less than the
corrections it gets for backing away or attacking. Given the limitations of the method,
eventually the dog learns that the decoy causes no pain at all - even when the dog moves in
and offers the decoy a clear opportunity to hurt it. Thus, the goal for sport guarding is
achieved when the dog learns that it is playing a game with the decoy, not fighting for its
life. Until a dog learns this lesson, it cannot act confidently while giving the decoy an
opportunity to hurt it. This explains why guarding from a close/vulnerable position does not
indicate courage and why dogma 1.a is wrong.

12. The proposition that a sport dog guards or otherwise works in defense drive because the
dog is taught to anticipate an “attack” from the decoy, is wrong. Sport protection training
systematically teaches a dog to become less and less concerned about simulated attack
actions made by a decoy because the attacks never hurt. With most sport training exercises,
including the two-line guarding exercise mentioned above, the “attack” and subsequent
“fight” with the decoy occur at the end of the exercise to reward the dog for inhibiting itself.
If the dog did not perceive the “attack” from the decoy to be a reward or at least something
less problematic than a correction, the dog could not learn the desired lesson from the
exercise. This explains why the response of engaging when attacked does not indicate
courage and why dogma 1.b is wrong too.

13. Having a decoy hit a dog in a humane/non-injurious manner with a trial stick is not
helpful with regards to evaluating a K9 candidate, nor will it help prepare a K9 candidate
to engage a real suspect who has a pipe or a bat and no plan to act humanely. Hitting a dog
with a trial stick is how a decoy moves a dog out of defense drive and instills false
confidence in the dog for sport purposes. The necessary ingredient for defense drive is
uncertainty and this is what makes a dog unwilling to experience a result that the dog can
be trained to experience easily. Hitting a dog with the stick eliminates the uncertainty for
the dog by answering the question as to how much it hurts to be hit by the decoy. Over the
long run, a decoy can probably generate a greater sense of threat with a stick by not hitting
the dog with it. In any event, absorbing stick hits or other types of non-injurious physical
punishment certainly does not require a significant degree of courage; thus, dogma 1.c is
wrong too.

14. It is not true that a K9 candidate must be hurt by a decoy to properly test or prepare the
dog to engage real suspects. True, a decoy can begin the process of instilling a proper
understanding in a dog by hurting it; but this step is not necessary if the dog has not gained
false confidence from sport training. The optimum K9 candidate will have no sport
protection training and especially no experience with a bite suit.

15. A dog can confidently offer a decoy an opportunity to hurt it, but not if the dog expects
that the decoy might hurt it. Regardless of how it is trained, a sport dog inevitably stops
considering the possibility of being hurt by the decoy, and after this occurs there is no
natural motivation driving the dog to engage the decoy in the first place - unless the dog
expects to play a game of some sort with the decoy. Games can be played very seriously, but
a K9 candidate should not be playing a game when it is evaluated.

16. Nothing is likely to be more important to a dog than dealing with a decoy it perceives to
be dangerous, but many things can be more important to a dog than engaging a decoy to
play a game. This explains why a training decoy might decide to hurt a sport dog and why
an additional dogma exists to support the practice. The additional dogma is that courage
evaluations made at sport trials are valid, if the dog being tested has been hurt by a decoy.

17. If a K9 candidate is hurt by a decoy for training purposes, the dog can absorb and carry
the lesson through all its training until it is deployed to engage real suspects. This result is
possible when preparing a K9 because the training the dog receives after it is hurt will be
functional training that can reinforce and instill the proper understanding the dog gained
from being hurt.

18. A sport dog that is hurt by a decoy in training cannot carry the lesson through to a trial
performance, because the dog will not be able to perform sport exercises confidently if it
believes that the decoy will hurt it. After it is hurt by the decoy, the sport dog must re-enter
the same training process that ended in it being punished/hurt for not paying attention.
Hurting a dog in training cannot restore a requirement for defense drive and courage to a
sport guarding exercise because the result produced by hurting the dog must be undone
before the dog can perform the exercise satisfactorily.

19. The task of training a sport dog to be cocksure is a completely different task than
training a K9 candidate to engage real suspects - and sport trainers pull sport into
inhumane territory when they confuse these tasks. One should not force a dog to follow
rules, then punish/hurt the dog because the rules produce an undesirable result, and then
force the dog to start following the same rules again. The results are predictable if one stops
to think. Actions carried out in the name of sport do not need to make sense, but they
should be humane.

PACKWORKS Gretchen Schumacher & Michael Schmidt

Western Washington State
Email: Cooperate@Packworks.org
FB: www.facebook.com/Packworks