Five ways to provide a safe home for your protection dog

Congratulations! You have just purchased one of our elite family protection dogs to keep your family safe, and are about to bring it home for the first time. It is most likely to be one of our highly trained German Shepherd Dogs, Giant Schnauzers, Cane Corsos, or Dobermann Pinschers, and will have gone through a number of our extensive conditioning and training programmes before reaching you. However, it must always be remembered that a home should be a safe environment for your dog, as well as yourself and your family. The following are some tips on the best ways to provide a safe home for your protection dog:

1. A relatively easy, but useful way to keep your home safe for a protection dog is ensuring that any potentially breakable or dangerous objects are kept well out of their reach. Glasses, knives, crockery, and even certain foodstuffs and cleaning products all have the potential to harm a dog, so all these items should be stored higher than a dog can stand or jump. Elite trained German Shepherds are extremely intelligent and capable of far more than we can imagine if they become bored. To this end, it is well worth erring on the side of caution when dog-proofing your kitchen! Good ways of doing this include (but are not limited to) fitting child locks on floor-level cupboards, and ensure that dustbins cannot be knocked over and eaten out of.

2. Dogs can be very sensitive to temperature change, especially with heat during spring and summertime. In fact, a large number of dogs are accidentally killed by heat stroke each year, which their owners were simply unaware of, and why it could be dangerous. To prevent your protection dog from suffering from heat stroke during hot weather, it is important to ensure that your home contains certain cool areas, as well as enough drinking water. Automatic water dispensers can be purchased off Amazon, and we highly recommend investing one for your dog’s wellbeing and safety in the summertime.

3. Dogs should be allowed to play freely in and enjoy your garden, but certain precautions need to be taken to ensure that they cannot escape from it and become lost. Fences at least six feet high are a must to prevent your dog from jumping over them, and if your dog is prone to digging, then they should extend underground as well. Slug pellets are highly toxic to dogs, so these should be avoided, along with cocoa chips (a common variant of decorative bark).

4. Much like humans, dogs experience mental as well as physical health. To promote mental wellbeing in your family protection dog, it is important to ensure that has access to appropriate sources of engagement and stimulation. The most normal way of providing this is with regular walks and exercise, but playing with your dog, and providing it with toys can also be useful.

5. It is important that certain boundaries are established with your protection dog from the moment that it first enters your home. Although our dogs are trained to a high level of obedience, certain breeds, and individual dogs may try to dominate and assert themselves over a new owner. As such, you should seek to establish clear boundaries that your dog will understand. This can be achieved through consistent reward-based training, where your dog will learn to associate certain activities and behaviors with enjoying certain toys and food-based treats.