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.   

The Changing Police K9 Environment

In the ever-evolving and challenging environment of police K9 work, scenario-based training for police canines is crucial in preparing these specialized units for law enforcement's unpredictable and dynamic nature. The landscape of law enforcement is involved, with new threats and scenarios constantly emerging. Unlike repetitive certification exercises, scenario-based training immerses canine handlers and their dogs in lifelike situations that closely mimic real-world scenarios they might encounter on duty. The primary goal is to enhance the team's ability to respond effectively to diverse challenges, fostering adaptability, decision-making skills, and teamwork.

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Police dog training is a complex and challenging process that requires a significant amount of time and effort from both the dog and its handler. One of the most important components of police dog training is reinforcement. Reinforcement refers to the use of rewards or positive consequences to strengthen a dog's behavior and increase the likelihood that it will be repeated in the future.

Reinforcement is critical in building and maintaining a dog's proficiency in specific tasks, such as scent or odor detection or tracking. In these tasks, the dog is required to use its natural abilities to detect specific scents or odors following them to their source. By using positive reinforcement, handlers can help enhance the dog's natural abilities and create a strong association between the task and the reward. This association helps to ensure that the dog remains motivated and engaged in its work, leading to a more effective and reliable police dog.

We'll be holding a roundtable discussion on why core competencies are more critical than training to hours. This is a great opportunity to learn how you can get the most out of your training by focusing on core competency development. You'll hear from experts in the field who have been working with organizations of all sizes for years. If you're a canine handler, trainer, or supervisor responsible for training or improving police k9 performance, this is an event you can't miss!

To reserve your seat, contact Executive Director Don Slavik, [email protected], to hold a place for you.

We are only as good as our training and if our training is flawed, so too is our response in times of duress. Training must include simulated responses of armed suspects in high-risk trails. We train for the situation in every other facet of police work, why not in high-risk trailing?

A K9 handler should never be alone. When handling the dog on a trail, the handler has no real ability to defend him or herself. Handlers are not tactical assets other than as a means to locate the suspect (s). Contrary to popular belief, even when handling a patrol dog with apprehension capabilities, when the dog and handler are attached by means of a trailing lead neither are capable of reacting fast enough to counter a threat. The handler is hampered by the lead in his hand while being focused on the dog's trailing behavior, thus completely negating any possibility that he or she might draw and employ a weapon with any effectiveness. The K9 is attached to the handler, who cannot even begin to move fast enough to keep up with the dog's reaction if there is one.

The Key to reducing this disadvantage is not in equipping or training the handler in better ways but in giving the handler a cover man who becomes the eyes, ears, and gun of the handler.

Whether you are a trainer or a handler, understanding dog training theory is best before working with a dog. Knowing how dogs learn, classical and operant conditioning, and reinforcement are a few essential tools for teaching and training handlers and dogs. Communication skills will improve, and a noticeable improvement in your training goals will increase.

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.

The day a K9 officer meets his or her partner is a day a lifelong bond is formed. It isn’t hard to under­stand why—though they’ve got a badge and a set of crucial skills, at the end of the day, K9 officers are waggly-tailed, lovable companions that just so happen to be pretty big badasses, too. It’s for all of these reasons that K9s are growing in demand in police departments in the United States and throughout the world.

 Police dogs have a long history in law en­forcement, used since the Middle Ages. To­day, these brave officers are trained in vari­ous high-stakes police jobs, from protecting their handlers to sniffing out drugs, to identi­fying explosives. Of course, these dogs are also vital in searching for missing people, with German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois are among the most common breeds employed for human search applications.

When selecting a school for initial canine training, make sure they offer everything you need for your agency. There are several options available for schools. They are, the handler goes through a course and is involved with all the training. Or you get a trained dog and attend several weeks working with the dog. It used to be all about the quality of the dog, and that is still important. Over time we have realized that handler knowledge is essential to a successful canine team. It is especially vital when your needs involve a patrol dog. The school curriculum must have enough time allotted to understand the training the dog has or will receive. Practical deployment training is also critical for the handler to see how their canine works in different contexts.

If you have questions, please contact me: [email protected]

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

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.