I wanted to take just a minute to cover some typical dog training mistakes that occur when dealing with working dogs. We often see failure or poor performance from working dog teams because of a failure to properly train. It is usually pretty simple to correct these mistakes by simply thinking about what it is exactly that we are conditioning the dog to do.

For example, all too often I see police patrol dog teams training for building searches incorrectly. They set up scenarios to mimic a building search of a house or other structure by hiding a “suspect” inside of the building. The dog goes into the building, finds the suspect, gets the apprehension and the dog is placed back in the patrol car. End of training session. As many of you know, in this day and age, burglaries and break-ins are rarely committed alone. Generally, there are multiple suspects to be dealt with when searching buildings that have been broken in to. The problem arises when we have two or more criminals hiding inside a building and we are attempting to search it with a dog that is trained in the manner described above. Typically this dog team can successfully locate and apprehend the first suspect, but the handler will often have a very difficult time redirecting the dog back into the building to search for any other criminals that are hiding. That’s because the dog has been conditioned through training to locate a suspect, apprehend them and the exercise is then complete. In order to correct this we should constantly vary the number of “suspect” that we have hiding in buildings during training. This will keep the patrol dog proficient and will have them wanting to continue to search even more during actual deployments.

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