Puppies at Work 3: Bite Work Progression

Over the last two posts in this series, here and here, we've showed you various stages in beginning bite work. We showed you the 3 month old puppies playing tug-of-war, and then the 6 month old puppies increasing their confidence and prey drive. We use lots of games, lots of treats, and lots of praise to increase their excitement and drive to work. This week, we’re focusing on 2 dogs from our litter born last January, Broc and Pepper. Broc has been learning bite work since he was 2 months old, but Pepper started when he was 6 months old. They are both in very different training stages, which makes them an excellent example for this post.

Broc during daycare

The video below was put together by our own Kate, who is in charge of our media. She did a phenomenal job, so let’s take a look at how we progress with bite work techniques.

There are several techniques that we worked on in this video. As you watch, keep an eye out for the following.

With Pepper:

• We are working to increase his drive - by making him chase the tug, he has to fight for it, which makes him want it more. grab and bite without thinking

• We begin working more with the bite wedge and sleeve, rather than a rag or tug - this teaches him to focus on the person, rather than just to chase a rag around. playing tug, We had difficulty with this aspect with Broc at first. If the bite sleeve was on the ground Broc would ignore the decoy and bark at the sleeve on the ground. We had to teach him that the sleeve and the person went together.

• We take him out into new environments - will he still perform well if we are outside on the sidewalk, versus inside the daycare?

• We teach him how to turn his drive on and off - GSD’s are phenomenal family dogs when properly trained, because they turn on their drive when they are working or notice a threat, and then immediately turn it off when they’re done.

• In his last clip, Pepper is seeing the bite jacket for the first time. Since Pepper is so new to bite work, he still treats it as a game. For that reason, we want to assimilate him to as many of our training items as possible, so that later on everything is familiar when we begin to progress with training. For his first time, he does a fantastic job!

With Broc:

• We are teaching him to ‘bark and hold’ - Broc is learning not to attack until given the signal, but to maintain his position and warn the assailant to back off.
• We are teaching him to learn tolerance for physical pressure - an assailant won’t just stand there while the dog attacking them, so they need to be accustomed to the feeling of being rolled around on the ground and thrown around.

During this stage in training there are two very important aspects that mold the dog's attack behavior:

1. The handler and the decoy (person accepting the bite) can never switch roles - The dog learns to respond to their handler and to focus all their drive at the decoy, and so if you both handle and act as a decoy, the dog will begin to have trouble distinguishing which person you are at any given moment.
2. It is also important to have different people acting as the decoy during this stage. We don’t want to have the dog only associate having to bite with one person

Stay tuned for the next, and possibly final post in this series, featuring Alline. She is the mother of both Broc and Pepper, and is a competition-winning protection dog.