Schutzhund: Theory and Training Methods

The Schutzhund obedience phase is continually compared to the American Kennel Club obedience competition. The reason is perhaps that many American trainers view Schutzhund from a perspective developed during many years in the AKC obedience ring. Unfortunately, this perspective sometimes leads to less than insightful comparisons between Schutzhund dogs and AKC dogs.

Viewed from the diehard AKC enthusiast’s standpoint, Schutzhund dogs often lack precision, and some of them are too lighthearted and boisterous about their work. Superficial comparisons of this sort overlook the fundamental differences between the two sports.

The most obvious is the difference in scale. The Schutzhund dog does not traverse a twenty-by-forty-foot ring during the obedience routine. It traverses an entire playing field. It has far more ground to cover, and the routine is more flowing and faster paced.

More important, the Schutzhund dog is a working dog, not just an obedience dog. It is not a specialist but a generalist that is expected to display all-around talent and utility. On the same day that it competes in obedience it has two other phases in which to perform that involve many hours of training, a great number of skills to learn and some rare qualities of character.

The most important distinction between Schutzhund and AKC trials is that Schutzhund is not only a training test but also a breed test. The obedience phase is used not just to examine the dog’s schooling, but its character as well. For this reason, the Schutzhund’s obedience program includes two tests of nervous stability that do not appear in AKC competition: response to gunshots and heeling in a group of people.

Because the trial is a breed test, the Schutzhund judge looks as much to the dog’s attitude about working as he does to the animal’s precision during the exercises. The Schutzhund dog must make an impression in obedience. It should show in every line of its body its delight in being at work with its master.

According to the old German saying about obedience, “The fast dog loses points slowly, while the slow dog loses points fast.” We wholeheartedly endorse this ideal. From our perspective as breeders of working dogs, the obedience phase is primarily a character test for willingness. Some of the old-time German breeders and trainers knew willingness by the term pack drive. They saw eager obedience as the product of the dog’s intense need to belong to and associate with other social beings. We believe that all the useful work that dogs perform all over the world—from search and rescue to narcotics detection, from herding to guiding the blind—is founded upon the dog’s bond to its people and its willingness to subordinate its own desires to theirs.

Furthermore, willingness is a genetic trait that is by no means automatically bestowed upon a dog when it is born. Willingness, like other character traits, is variable. Some dogs have a great deal, other dogs little or none. And it is a sad fact that, no matter how brave or beautiful or clever, a dog that is unwilling is useless to us. It is without value because we are of little value to it.

Precision is also required in the obedience phase—but not to the extent seen in the AKC ring. In AKC obedience competition trophies are won and lost on the basis of minute differences in exactitude—on inches and fractions of inches. There exist countless ways to be suddenly disqualified from competition. For example, in AKC competition it is a serious fault for the dog to bump or rub against its handler while heeling. Bumping is also a fault in Schutzhund, but a much less serious one. Furthermore, if the dog bumps through eagerness, its spirit will delight the judge and move his pencil to leniency.

Precisely because of the spirit and energy demanded on the Schutzhund field, obedience is arguably the most difficult of the three phases of the sport. In addition, every season the obedience phase becomes increasingly important in deciding the outcome of competition. For the last few years, the major trials in both the United States and Germany have been won and lost in obedience. Because many of the dogs in the top ranks of competition are nearly perfect in tracking and protection—scoring 98s, 99s and 100s—and are therefore basically equal in these phases, now it is in heeling, retrieving or jumping that championships are decided.

Why? What is the difference?

Tracking and protection training are based upon the dog’s powerful and instinctive urges to eat, to hunt and to fight. The trainer’s role is merely to activate the animal’s urges and shape its innate behavior.

Obedience, on the other hand, is primarily inhibitory in nature. Obedience is mainly concerned with preventing the animal from acting like a dog; it restrains its impulses to roam and explore, to hunt and to try its strength against other dogs. It is much more artificial than either tracking or protection, and for this reason it is difficult to train obedience really well.

Good obedience depends upon creating motivation in the dog. Therefore, the animal’s willingness, its eagerness to please us, is absolutely essential. We cannot do without it. In addition to this basic requirement in the dog, the animal’s handler must take care to:

• use, at the proper moments, a great deal of vigorous, sincere and unselfconscious praise

• practice emotional restraint and self-control

• be patient and meticulous

• have the sense and the skill to apply the least amount of force to the animal that will accomplish his purpose

Used together in a thoughtful way, these guidelines will help to produce a dog that is lively and free-moving in obedience—a pleasure to look at and a pleasure to work with.

The great challenge is to bring to obedience something more, something of the intensity that the dog carries in bite work. We do this by harnessing the animal’s prey drive. Later in this book we will see that a great deal of Schutzhund bite work is founded upon prey drive—the dog’s urge to chase, catch and kill prey. Retrieving a ball or toy is founded on precisely the same instinct. The strong retriever does not chase a ball simply because it pleases its master, or because it has been taught to retrieve. The animal does it because it is a hunter, and the act of chasing an erratically moving object and biting it is intensely satisfying to an impulse very deep within.

Actually, the term play retrieve is something of a misnomer. For many dogs, especially those bred for work, retrieving is a serious endeavor, much closer in nature to hunting or aggression than it is to play. These dogs pursue the ball with an awesome intensity of purpose. This is the sort of animal we need for Schutzhund obedience because, when it chases the ball, it experiences an intensely strong physiological rush of excitement. The dog comes alive with spirit.

We call this process arousal, and our basic method of motivating the dog for obedience is to associate arousal with the obedience exercises, so that they are infused with its energy. We make the association through extensive use of a prey object like a ball in training, using it to reward well-performed exercises and also to help establish eye contact between handler and dog.

INDUCIVE TRAINING VERSUS COMPULSIVE TRAINING

In the past it always was (and often still is) taken for granted that some sort of physical force is required in order to train a dog. Therefore, traditional dog training was almost wholly compulsive in nature.

Compulsive training punishes and rewards the animal through the use of unpleasant stimuli. The handler punishes the dog by presenting it with something unpleasant. For example, if the animal breaks a down stay, it is corrected with a slap of the leash on its withers. The handler rewards the dog by taking away or omitting something that is unpleasant for it. For example, he shows the dumbbell to the dog, begins pinching the animal’s ear and stops pinching only when the animal takes the dumbbell into its mouth.

Traditional dog training depends upon physically manipulating the animal, and this is why traditional methods are inseparable from the use of a leash. Only comparatively recently have some trainers thrown away their leashes and discovered another way to train, an inducive way.

Inducive training punishes and rewards the animal through the use of pleasant stimuli. The handler rewards the dog by presenting it with something that is pleasant. For example, he praises the animal, gives it a piece of food, or even throws the ball for it when it performs a correct, fast finish. The handler punishes the dog by taking away or omitting something that is pleasant for it. For example, he punishes a crooked come-fore by refusing to praise or feed the dog, or throw the ball for it.

Of course, in actual practice, the distinction between compulsive and inducive methods is often blurred. For instance, the distinction is unclear when the “force” used to compel the dog is very gentle, as when a handler guides a puppy into a sit with his hands and the leash. This procedure is not easily construed as unpleasant. It is also unclear when, as is customary, the handler corrects or punishes his dog, and then immediately praises and pets it a moment later. In this case we would seem to combine the two different kinds of training.

We can make the distinction in another way by examining the issue of choice, or free will. In inducive training the animal is free to choose what it will do. When told to sit, it is at liberty to instead lie down, stand or run in circles. The only constraint on its behavior is that we will reward only a sit, and all other responses will be punished by omitting the reward. In compulsive training, the dog has no choice and no free will. There is only one response possible for it. All others will be corrected—forcibly stopped before they can be gotten underway. This is what the leash is all about, and why traditional training methods have for so many years been dependent upon it or some other method of restricting the animal’s freedom of choice.

In the last ten years or so this country has seen a revolution of sorts, a movement toward inducive training. It is difficult to say why it occurred so recently, because the inducive aspect of animal training was already well understood by behavioral scientists in the 1960s and even earlier.

The inducive revolution was undoubtedly influenced by the appearance of academically educated dog trainers who make a profession of helping owners of pets with behavioral problems. These behavioral therapists, as they are called, primarily use inducive techniques and normally disapprove of compulsion.

Events far from the world of working dogs may have played a role in the inducive revolution as well. In the last two decades commercial marine mammal training facilities such as Sea World have gained tremendous prominence. The trainers at these facilities have mastered a very high form of the art of inducive training. In marine mammal training, inducive expertise is a necessity because a dolphin deep in its tank has nearly unlimited freedom of choice. It is impractical, and many people believe unethical, to try to compel it to do anything. All that remains is to reward it when the animal does as desired and omit reward when it does not. Some of these experts in inducive technique have crossed over to the world of dog training, most notably Karen Pryor.

Inducive technique came on the scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A small group of people immediately embraced it. Old-time “snatch-and-jerk” dog trainers scoffed, and became even more adamant in their insistence that reliable, competitive training could only be accomplished with compulsion.

The debate quickly became reactionary. Both sides entrenched, and there appeared two groups that vociferously espoused pure forms of each method. Thus, inducive trainers said that they did not need force, while compulsive trainers insisted that they were not using force.

Then, as so often happens, it became evident that the conflict in theory was not as insurmountable as we thought and that, all along, the most consistently successful dog trainers were using a combination of both methods.

Nowadays, a seemingly obvious conclusion has been reached. We do not see induction and compulsion as separate, distinct and incompatible systems of training, but instead as parts of the same system. Induction and compulsion serve different purposes. They are each used at different stages in the dog’s development, and also at different stages in the teaching of any given exercise.

Inducive methods are used to introduce dogs to new skills and concepts (to teach). They are used to convey understanding to the animal. Furthermore, they produce better motivation for most tasks, and a better, more pleasing appearance in almost all tasks. They are used, above all, in training puppies, but they are also invaluable in dealing with sensitive adults.

Compulsion and force are used only when the dog has attained a precise understanding of the skill expected of it (to train), and only when it has established a habitual, lively pleasure in performing it. Compulsive methods are used to polish the dog’s performance and make it absolutely reliable.

However, the conversion from an inducive to a compulsive method is by no means inevitable. It is instead a function of the animal’s character. Some dogs are too soft and sensitive to support much force. Other dogs are so willing and talented that force is not really needed to polish the majority of their exercises. In the case of an animal like this, if it comprehends what it is that we want from it, then it happily and reliably does it. This dog therefore can and should be handled inducively all its life.

The proportions of compulsion versus induction in a training program are not solely a function of the dog’s stage in training or its character; they are also a function of the handler’s character. Some people are simply not comfortable using force in dog training, while others see it as the only way. It is perhaps best to view the inducive versus compulsive question as a continuum that runs from pure inducive to pure compulsive, with all trainers falling somewhere on that continuum according to their preferences. Quite simply, it is a question of temperament. For instance, of the two authors of this book, one regards the conversion to compulsion as a necessary and desirable development, while the other regards the conversion to compulsion as a last resort, the thing to be done when all inducive strategies have failed.

EQUIPMENT NEEDED FOR OBEDIENCE TRAINING

For convenience in making quick, precisely timed corrections, the obedience leash is much shorter (two to three feet long) and much lighter (½ inch) than the all-purpose six-foot lead.

There are many different correction collars that can be used for obedience training, ranging in severity from a plain leather or nylon webbing choke collar to a tightly fitted pinch collar. The choice of collar depends upon the character of the dog and the temperament and ability of the trainer. It is interesting to note that, although it does not look harsh, the nylon cord choke collar—simply a thin cord connecting two steel rings—is, in our opinion, among the most punishing of collars and must be used with great care.

As a general rule, it is far better to have a powerful collar, and to use this collar precisely and with little physical effort, than it is to be “undergunned” and compelled to use a great portion of one’s physical strength in order to dissuade the animal from some misguided intention.

To bring the dog into spirit, some sort of prey object like a ball or kong is indispensable. For the dog, chasing and retrieving a thrown toy is analogous to chasing fleeing prey. Retrieving, therefore, excites and arouses the animal and provides a ready source of energy for work.

A .22 caliber starter pistol (firing either crimped blanks or the longer blanks packed with wadding) is the most common revolver used by American Schutzhund clubs. However, there is sometimes great variability in the types of gun used in trials, ranging up to .38 caliber and 9mm. Therefore, during training the handler should expose the dog to as many different types of gunshot as possible. Starter pistols are available from a number of the training equipment vendors.

The hurdle and wall are normally built by Schutzhund club members. See the illustration above. Hurdles used in sanctioned Schutzhund trials are normally brush jumps and topped with either vegetation or broom bristles. Training hurdles, however, are made with wooden slats so as to be adjustable for height. The scaling wall is most commonly made of ⅝- or ¾-inch plywood and is adjustable for height.

The dumbbells used in Schutzhund are made of hard woods and are specifically weighted. The best and more durable ones are made in one piece, lathed out of a solid block of wood. They are available from a number of vendors in the United States. The various sizes and their uses are: