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Understanding Police Canine Training Records

How do I "maintenance" train?

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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The Changing Police K9 Environment

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 K9 Videos


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You Fight the Way You Train, So Train the Way You Fight

You Fight the Way You Train, So Train the Way You Fight

The profound principle of "You fight the way you train, so train the way you fight" extends seamlessly into the intricate dynamic between police dogs and their handlers. In police dog and handler training, this saying encapsulates the symbiotic relationship between the two, emphasizing the critical need for a cohesive and harmonized training approach that mirrors the challenges they might encounter in real-world scenarios.

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Scenario-Based Training

Scenario-based training for police K9s involves setting up training scenarios that simulate real-world situations that the K9 and its handler may encounter on the job. This type of training aims to prepare the K9 and its handler to respond effectively to a wide range of situations and develop their skills and confidence in handling high-pressure situations.

During scenario-based training, the K9 and handler may be exposed to a range of stimuli, such as different scents, sounds, and environmental conditions. The scenarios may involve locating hidden suspects, tracking, de-escalation techniques, deployment strategies, and detecting explosives or narcotics.

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Tactical Tracker Teams

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.

Jeff Schettler - Tactical Tracker Teams

Training Theories

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!

Consider this...

 

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Proper Maintenance Training requires...

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.

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What is Fluency?

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.

Police Dog Handling

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.

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Canine Terminology

Glossary of Terms often used in Police Canine Training, Deployments, Depositions, and Court Room Situations
The document is located in Canine Resources

Building a Bond with Your K9 Partner

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.

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How your Dog's Nose Knows so Much

 

How Your Dog's Nose Knows So Much

My dog is Bored, What is the problem

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.

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How Dogs Learn



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.

Interprets

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.

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Dog issues with release of Toys

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.

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Making a good K9 Handler or Trainer

Making a good K9 Handler or Trainer

 

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