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I have a question regarding e-collar training and was wondering if it is use in obedience training of a protection dog for off leash control?
Although e-collar training is not necessary to train a personal protection dog, it is a very good tool for training obedience and control with any dog regardless if protection trained or not.
The main reason why is when teaching discipline on-leash to a dog in highly charged environments you can use less physical force to more easily motivate the dog. Also, there really are not any alternatives for formally teaching off-leash discipline. Old tools like throw chains and even sling shots with bb’s are what used to be commonly used for reaching out to a disobeying dog before the modern ecollars came into use.
The challenge, however, is to use the ecollars properly or else you cause more harm than good. Right now, most of our videos concerning ecollars are found here: https://www.dogtraining.world/video-instruction/dog-training-videos-phase-3/ and these should all be updated within the coming year.
It sounds like you have a naturally very compliant dog and/or a dog that is also highly motivated to obey to you for the rewards of your affection. You will know your dog best and what situations you can safely have your dog in where no problems will happen. You will know you and your dog’s limitations.
As a professional, for liability and ethical reasons, i never allow any of the clients to do REAL personal protection training beyond the foundation tug and prey work without finishing “phase 3” obedience with the ecollar. If i do not do this, i have my hands tied when trying to humanely teach off-leash and even on-leash control in many highly charged environments. Also, from a legal standpoint i have done my part to demonstrate the dog has formally learned discipline off-leash and the handler has the ability to reinforce the rules that dog has learned. This is what i do to have in the training records for personal protection dogs, security, and police dogs.
But, as i said earlier. Is it possible to have a personal protection dog with training without ecollar..absolutely. The handler just needs to know there own limitations as to what they can back up in different situations, and not put the dog in a situation where an accident can happen. Once a dog is considered a “personal protection dog” that has had formal training, there will be less mercy on the handler from a legal standpoint if an accident were ever to happen.
My other query is the trainer uses capturing the dog natural instinct to teach the commands as well as doing control training of the commands with a prong collar in civil agitation while dog is learning in real life scenarios . I was wondering if this method is the usually way a personal/family protection dogs are train?
This is a basic formula of many trainers: to capture the behavior of protection separately from the control work, and then eventually combining the control work with the protective behavior in scenario work.
As far as using a prong collar, it will depend on the trainer/dog/handler combination. For some combos it may be a good choice, for others the prong can sometimes stimulate the dog too much and cause handler aggression in the form of redirecting.
I generally use a starmark collar for a milder correction that will not overstimulate the dog and then escalate to low level “nicks” on a dogtra collar if the dog challenges the Starmark. from there i can always continue to gradually escalate since these collars have 127 levels to fine tune.
This is probably the best video we have that shows how we start to combine the control with bitework although the dog at the end is working for the tug: https://www.dogtraining.world/video-instruction/protection-training-videos/#foobox-1/3/148249213
This video shows some of these concepts on a suit: https://www.dogtraining.world/video-instruction/protection-training-videos/#foobox-1/15/148249298
this video here a bit more of a finished product: https://www.dogtraining.world/video-instruction/protection-training-videos/#foobox-1/22/yaGfF3Nk9_E
I hope i answered your question. If you need any more info let me know.
