OK, on to the bite work. I guess we should start with the most important part of bite work, the out. They start teaching that at a very young age when the puppy is still playing with the rag. They tell the puppy to out and stick a piece of food in front of its nose. When the puppy opens its mouth they more or less push its head back with the food. They want their dogs to look like they are almost spitting the sleeve out. So this drawing the head back from the toy is very important to them. Again, lots and lots of repetitions until you have a pretty nice out.
However, they do some things that are quite a bit different than many of the people that I know in the sport.
1. They discourage an automatic out and train the dog in a way that avoids it
2. They rarely out the dog when it is in front of the helper
3. They rarely out the dog when the helper is locked up
4. They almost actively teach the dog to increase their fight when the helper is locked up
5. Teach the dog to out in almost any phase of the engagement with the helper so that it doesn't matter what is happening when the judge signals you to out your dog
They practice with the dog on both sides of the helper, while being actively driven. It is quite impressive. Especially with the international rules changing it seems likely that dogs will be penalized for an automatic out soon.
Fixing a bad out was not something that they had any patience for. Though, I don't know if they would do the same thing at home. I think clinicians feel pressure to show results with the dogs at the clinic and if the dog won't even reliably it is hard to get very far. They just corrected the crap out of the dog and reprimanded the handler for not teaching it properly in the first place. Age might have mattered, there weren't really any young puppies there. But they seemed to want to go thru the entire list of dogs and just correct every one for outing problems.
They asked me to demonstrate Gata's problem with the out. I replied that she doesn't have a problem with the out and they told me to put her away. I was told by the host to get her out, that it was her turn and that we could work on other things. Gata could use some work on her out when under drive, etc. but that is about training and exposure to stuff I haven't done with her before and not a justification to correct the crap out of her. She certainly would have had a problem with her out, and maybe even her biting, if I had just turned them loose on her. The look on my face must have been pretty frustrated because they at least tossed me a pillow to give her a few bites on. Her outs were beautiful, as usual for her. Didn't win any extra points with Peter on that one either. But I didn't have my dogs there to demonstrate their training methodologies, I had my dogs there to advance their training in one way or another. Unfortunately, I can't say that they did anything at all worthwhile with Gata. She didn't even get to have a good time on a helper over the two days.
I would have been happy to let them work on her out under other conditions, she does auto out a little sometimes. But I think I will feel safer about working on that stuff on my own.
Anyway, enough about that. They do some very interesting work on the bark and hold. They do a number of things very differently than any other group that I have observed. However, I should also mention that I walked away thinking that using their method with a less experienced helper, or one that didn't read dogs as well could lead to disastrous results. So, I'll try to summarize a few of their rules first and then add in more nuance at the end.
1. The dog never gets a bite on the helper for the bark and hold. The toy, ball or pillow or wedge, or a sleeve is always thrown away to the helper's right hand side and the dog is allowed to grab it there. NEVER a bite from the helper!!
2. They work the dogs in true aggression for the b&h. They start the puppies very young, while they are still being socialized in other environments and/or under other conditions. They have someone approach from a very significant distance acting distinctly suspicious. When the puppy reacts at all in a confidently aggressive/assertive way the suspicious person moves away. This will vary by individual puppy. For some, it will be as little as looking at the bad guy's face for an instant for other puppies they will want more. Initially, the reward will be that the bad guy goes away but at some point they will add in the toy/puppy sleeve. They do all of this outside the blind. They will continue moving it along until the puppy is showing perfect bark and hold behavior outside the blind on a loose back line. Then they will move it into the blind.
For many of the dogs there, they started this work by taking advantage of their natural tendency to resource guard. They threw a puppy sleeve on the ground in front of the dog and then tried to sneak up and take it. When the dog barked they kicked the sleeve to him. It worked very well for many of the dogs including Tor. As the dog becomes more and more confident in their aggressive assertiveness they show them more and more aggressive displays from the helper.
The key element is only moving forward in aggression when the puppy is confident and not overly stressed out. Rewarding the frantic or hysterical aggression is not what you want.
I plan to take advantage of the technique that they demonstrated with Tor to build on what they started. With me, he will not be showing any true aggression. So, I will essentially be pattern training him, which I don't mind. Tor shows plenty of natural aggression and already has a very powerful bark whether he is demand barking or showing aggression. For this particular dog, I'm not really worried, I think he will show plenty of aggression anyway. Though, I realize that this is another place where my approach would differ from theirs.
OK, I'm going to stop here for now. I will do the rest of the bite work stuff later. One thing that I did want to mention - they pattern train almost all of the bite work exercises using a big ball first. I did that with Gata and people made fun of me but it certainly worked well with her. Anyway, more on that later.
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