What is Maintenance Training anyway?     

We see the term maintenance training a lot these days when it comes to police k9, and in the police field in general.  Lets talk about how to "Maintenance train" in police K9.  What is the definition of maintenance?   Webster defines the word "maintenance" as the act of keeping or continuing something, among other definitions.  What about the word "training'?  That word is defined as the activity of learning or teaching the skills and knowledge needed for a particular job or activity.  With the words together,  we are then implying that we are not only keeping our skills,   but IMPROVING those skills.   

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Consider this...

 

Proper maintenance training requires planning, preparation, and execution

Planning is deciding what your dog needs, along with training that will develop the desired result. In real Law Enforcement canine deployments, teams never know what challenges their next call for service will contain.. Every deployment will include different combinations of time of day, weather, landscape, tactical issues, actions by suspects and civilians, legal issues, distractions, packaging (Detector Dogs), and the number of things to search. Learning is a process where scenarios are deliberately presented to the team producing obstacles or distractions for the handler to solve and the dog to overcome. Progress depends on the canine team’s ability to complete the exercise.

The majority of Law Enforcement work involves the use of canines in some scent-driven tasks. Tracking, Building Search, Area Search, Evidence Recovery, Narcotics, Explosives, Arson, and Game detection are some of the ways we use the super-sensitive noses of our canine partners. Proficiency in all areas is necessary for operational readiness. Accuracy determines how fast the canine should work. Training doesn’t stop when the team becomes certified; that’s just the beginning. Functional training is the next level of achievement and is based on possible scenarios you could see at work.

Have you ever said or heard “but he does it at the training area” when your dog fails to respond correctly in an environment that is new to him? You have just acknowledged that your dog has not yet generalized the behavior to all contexts and lacks Fluency. Fluency is when your dog knows how to search for odor or human scent, knows how to track, knows obedience, and agility, and will do that anywhere, anytime, and under any circumstances.

Residual Odor

Several court cases I have been involved with centered around residual odor prompted me to explain what it is and how you define it. Canine handlers have used residual odor for years to identify an odor plume followed by a K9 to a source, where nothing was found. The judge wanted to know how a canine could smell something not present in one case. In the second case, an expert from the other side was testifying that it is a dead odor, and we should be training our canines to a threshold so the dog would ignore odors that are no longer there.

Police dog handling requires more ongoing mindfulness than any other law enforcement discipline.

With the exception of horses, all other police tools are inanimate objects. As the only law enforcement tool that continually interacts with the environment, police dogs’ behavior changes over time.  As a result, the dog’s training is never “done.” Since a canine handler and the police dog spend most of their waking hours together, the canine handler is the person solely responsible for that dog’s performance.  That is not just a matter of policy, it is a pure behavioral fact. Even in units large enough to have dedicated trainers, their span of control and administrative load mean they cannot begin to approach the degree of influence over the dog the individual handler has.

What follows in this article teaches us what causes odor and scent to remain after the source has left or has been removed. It is chemical in nature, and therefore just knowing what happens is likely all you need. I included the whole article as there some other interesting facts. The reason for this article was a recent court case where the judge wanted to know how a narcotic odor could remain after the product was removed. 

Advances in the use of odor as forensic evidence through optimizing and standardizing instruments and canines

Have you checked the Canine Resource Quick Link on the right side of this page? There you will see a snapshot of the articles we have available to a member of the USPCA. Check back, as we change the information regularly.

I often hear handlers say their dog is bored when displaying less than enthusiastic interest when searching. One problem humans have when training dogs are, they may not understand what a dog is doing or misinterpreted the body language. Ask yourself, is a dog bored when they do not show interest or are they bored because of many deployments without receiving any stimulus or reward? An example of a dog that is disinterested while searching a vehicle might show a dog not searching the productive areas, just walking straight ahead. The only odor they will detect is what comes across their noses. We know that available odor depends on the packaging, vapor pressure, and air movement. It is possible for a dog that is not actively searching to have a high probability of a miss.

Likewise, we know that dogs will include the environment in which they work and train. This includes understanding patterns and places where they have had success and where they never find anything. An extraordinary example of this is an area where I observed dogs that searched hundreds of vehicles a day. Once during a dog's shift, a vehicle, the same type of vehicle and the same color each time, came through the search area or parked nearby. This vehicle contained an odor, and the dog was rewarded with a successful indication. This same pattern was presented every day to the dogs. The dogs soon realized that the only vehicle that they could receive their reward was that vehicle. They showed boredom or disinterest in every other vehicle. Additionally, every vehicle that came by that was the same type as the target one often produced an indication of odor. The dogs would give a final response where there was no odor.

Looking at how canines learn, we include routines, patterns, body language, and should also include context-specific and generalization as part of their learning process. The introduction of context and generalization should give each of you, thoughts on how your training is delivered and changes you should make.

Context-specific suggests that when you are training, your dog not only learns the desired task but incorporates the surroundings as part of the learning. Or, you could say the dog includes the environment in which the training takes place. Generalization is the ability to take lessons learned and transfer them to a variety of scenarios. Dogs are inferior at this and often fail deployment challenges when presented with a behavior learned only in a training environment.

How do context and generalization influence and change police canine training? We should think about how we transition from one environment to the next, knowing that dogs won’t automatically transfer an established behavioral pattern to a new practical context. Handlers must have a clear idea of what a finished dog should look like during deployments before training begins. Exposing your dog to all possible environments during training will erase most generalization issues.

Why We Use Points in our Certification

The United States Police Canine Association believes that certifications are a first step in recognizing a canine team's capabilities for actual scenario-based deployment training. The second step is to transition the team into actual deployment training that their agency provides. Those may include specific applications of canine scent or odor detection. Like most police canine training, it is a step by step approach to becoming an operational canine team. Many canine handlers do not have a certified trainer close by but still require some validation for their training. We provide that validation using points to reflect a scale of performance on each exercise. Lower scores encourage the improvement of training and ideas. Our test requires seventy percent or higher to pass. What makes our tests seem difficult is not the test itself, but the fact you must earn it, we do not lower the bar. Lowering the requirements for a canine team gives them a false impression of what they have. While the handler may know they did not pass within a few weeks, they will act like they passed and not train to improve or correct the issues. Teams failing to certify will not immediately be given a second chance. Multiple tests of the same team will not be conducted. The team must undergo a period of retraining, documenting successful performance, before any attempt at re-certification. You may question why we do not immediately retest, and it would be a good question. Our job is to evaluate a canine team. Correcting mistakes on the field will not solve the fundamental errors and may leave a more profound problem. A more permanent solution is to go home and train or retrain over some time, modifying the training to resolve the issue.

Interprets

The word or variation of the word interprets is most often used by canine handlers in reports, training records, and testimony. They describe how they interpreted behavior changes or a final response given by the dog upon sniffing a trained odor.

Does Your Dog Refuse to Release the Toy Reward?

Many handlers have issues with this. While it might drive you crazy, this is also what makes the dog work harder when detecting substances. To the dog, this reward is a high-value item, and to get it, they must find what they have been trained to locate. Once they get the reward, they want to possess it and not give it back. They have worked hard and want to satisfy themselves with it.

Making a good K9 Handler or Trainer