Can A Rescue Dog Be Used For Protection Work?

In the UK, a number of Staffordshire Bull Terriers have been rescued by police forces and retrained as search dogs. As well as attracting significant media interest, many of these rescued dogs have been highly successful and shown that shelters can be viable places to source working dogs from. While this may have worked with police search dogs, it is not an approach we would recommend or attempt for personal or family protection dogs.

When done properly, personal and family protection dog training is – by definition – highly controlled, deliberate, and exacting. Nothing can be left to chance, and responsible trainers will carefully design every aspect of this training process. While rescuing dogs is an admirable endeavour, it almost always comes with an element of the unknown. This unknown may render a rescue dog unsuitable for personal or family protection work, and by definition cannot be resolved through training. The stakes are simply too high for us to take chances, and this is not an area we compromise on.

We are meticulous in only selecting the most appropriate puppies and young dogs, and then carefully controlling the environments they live in as well as the stimuli they are exposed to. We ensure that our dogs are as prepared as possible to face the threats they may need to defend their new families from, whereas doing so with a rescue would be almost impossible due to their unknown past.

While rescuing dogs with difficult or tragic pasts is a worthy endeavour, it is not one to be combined with protection work or training. The risks are simply too high, and are wholly eliminated by instead using dogs with a dedicated protection or security background whose life and training histories are fully known from the outset.