Posted by Butch Cappel
on October 27, 2009, 8:55 am
99.174.201.23
Any discipline someone tries to master, is going to have several facets on the way to being skillful. If you are going to be a fighter, you absolutely must get on the roadwork and get in physical shape. But you also better learn and practice how to throw a punch, or kick.
If you're playing football(American)you better get in shape and also learn the fundamentals of ball handling, as well as getting your strength up in the weight room. But, you see where I'm going with this?
Why do we think we can train a dog to defend us, or our property, by just teasing them into biting a sack and then going to a jute sleeve?
If you get them all excited and have them biting in the typical prey drive way, so very popular today, you get dog with a full mouth bite that doesn't have a clue of what to do if someone tries to bash his head in with a brick, while he is biting, and if push comes to shove, just might head for the hills and leave you all alone. Well, alone except for Bubba and the gang, that is.
Of course you could go what seems to be the opposite way and work on a very defensive, very aggressive dog that is really PO'ed.
Then you get a dog that has worked under stress and shown they will stay in a fight. Of course a dog in a fight for it's life, will naturally bite with very hard bites, also very shallow bites that will not hold Bubba, but will instead slash and tear. But a dog fighting for it's life is more about running the threat off, rather than stopping it cold. After all the sooner you run the threat off, the less likely you are to get hurt yourself.
So just as in any other combat sport you have to train for the complete fighter. You must teach the dog to respond under stress with a forward motion and attitude. But only the dog with his prey drive high, will grab the rabbit AND carry it back to the den.
BUT! Even if you have the dog going into the fight with the energy of prey and the intensity of defense, (as I say in my "Training Without a Decoy" DVD) you still have to know what to do in the middle of the fight, to get successfully to the End of the fight.
Don't understand what I mean by getting to the "end of the fight" successfully? Go back and look at the video in the post "K9 Martial Arts the basics". You will see Cochise, my GSD, not only engaging, but disabling, each strike the bad guy try's to make.
I am not sure this type of training knowledge is available anywhere else in the world today, but it should be. If you are interested in the complete PP dog remember there are three segments you must train; 1. The Alert, should be aggressive and threatening, Defense drive. 2. Engagement, should be confident and controlling, Prey drive. 3. The Fight and Finish, should be clear headed and quick, with both drives balanced.
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