Training Family Protection Dogs

Training all dogs is more of an art than a science, and specialising in family protection work is particularly intricate. Given the complexity of what is needed before a dog can both live with and protect a family, a higher level of training planning and delivery is required. This is our speciality, and we have years of expertise in training some of the best family protection dogs in the world.

Our first step is identifying the most appropriate puppies and young dogs before we purchase them and begin their training journey. Even if we have bred a litter ourselves, it is not a foregone conclusion that all the puppies will be suitable to take forward for our advanced protection training. We look for puppies and young dogs who are bold, intelligent, take well to training, and above all demonstrate temperamental stability. Poor breeding has resulted in many “classic” working dogs simply being too nervy or anxious to be relied on stressful situations. Proper temperamental screening is the best way to prevent this, and never an area we compromise on.

Once we have found appropriate dogs, their first real training bloc focuses on obedience. Obedience is the foundation of all protection work and enables the high levels of control which set our dogs apart from untrained and lesser trained guard dogs. We only progress obedient dogs to protection training, and being relied on to do what they are told immediately is of paramount importance. Protection training must be realistic and reflect the kind of threats a customer and their family may face, or have faced in the past. One step we take to promote realism is training our dogs to bite on “covert” sleeves concealed under clothing such as hoodies to ensure they will protect for real rather than only perform when offered prominent bite sleeves.

Good protection dogs also need to be ready to live and work in a variety of settings without being scared or unsettled by new stimuli. To safeguard against this, we ensure that all of the dogs we train are fully exposed to a broad range of environments and stimuli, both in and outside the home. Kitchen appliances, town centres, and other animals can be unsettling if they are unfamiliar stimuli, and are just some of what we expose our dogs to during their comprehensive environmental training packages. Similarly, socialisation with other dogs and humans is another priority.
We are confident that our family protection dogs are some of the best trained and prepared in the world. To find out more, please contact us via DM on any of social media feeds, or email [email protected].