#bitesports

"Let's see them security dogs." The photos are all of dogs biting an arm sleeve in a field with a judge standing nearby.

The goal for this exercise is for the dog to find the hidden decoy, bark until the handler arrives, and then escort the decoy, only biting if the decoy tries to escape.

79.5!

possibly but what a battle to pick

while cats also have phenomenal senses of smell, what they lack that dogs have is a ten thousand year history of selection for communication with humans.

let me be clear: pet cats love their owners and communicate very clearly with them (e.g. today I got yelled at again for boiling water). but with scent work, you are asking your animal to go find and indicate on a specific smell--that you cannot identify in any way. with dogs, this already means many many reps where you know where the smell is--and then many, many reps where you don’t, so that you’re not inadvertently telling them something. that’s a lot of communication going back and forth, and it’s very nice to have an animal genetically inclined to both give you information and take information from you.

I don’t know that it’s impossible! I haven’t done enough cat training yet. but if you’re looking for a fun training project, I would look at cat agility or similar. if you want to enrich your cat’s life, try foraging (putting their food in open containers around your living space).

I, personally, wouldn’t want to really get serious about training a cat for scent work or bitesport until I’ve already got a dog titled in that, just because the odds are so much better for the dog.

Maverick got to do some bitework! Today was his first day working with the helper at our new IGP/Schutzhund club.

He did so super awesome and I was so proud.

It’s a pretty common argument in the SD community and I can understand why. People with disabilities are vulnerable, physically and/or mentally. One of the huge benefits of having a service dog, especially for female handlers, is the added safety of having a dog with you at all times. Criminals tend to avoid dogs. They bark and bring attention to the scene and if they are bigger they could actually put up a fight. For a well-trained service animal it would be easy to add on a little protection work.

But hear me out. Service dog work and protection work have an inverse relationship. Service dogs should be focused on their handler, not scanning their environment for threats (special exception for some PTSD tasks). They should be generally trusting of people so they are reliable in public access. We don’t want them thinking that the shuffling figure of an elderly person is suspicious or the quick movements of a teenager is a threat. We don’t want their immediate reaction to the unexpected to be defensiveness. It takes years to train a service dog and to then expect them to be able to handle dangerous criminals is just unfair. They give us everything, their entire lives revolve around us. The least we can do is provide them a sense of safety while they work.

I’m not against teaching a bark command and although I wouldn’t do it myself I can see some room for bitesports as well. Dogs often don’t see these things as anything more than “speak” or a game of tug. But teaching a service dog that their handler could be attacked by a human at any moment is just sad. We want them to be happy to be out working public access and there are a lot of things that could go wrong in their training if we teach them that a threat could be lurking around every corner.

I have a large Belgian Malinois as my SDiT and I can see how easily she could intervene if something were to happen, but that’s not my goal. I want her to feel safe and confident that I will step in and handle any situation that makes her feel uncomfortable. Her job is to do heart rate alert, some helpful tasks on command and eventually light mobility. My job is to keep her safe and happy for the rest of her life. So yeah, we won’t be doing protection work.