In a recent issue of Police K-9 Magazine (Spring, 2007), a K9 handler submitted a question concerning training his dog to overcome distractions during narcotics searches:

“I have a 20-month-old male Malinois. He started training at 14 months and was certified in narcotics at about 17 months. He seems to have good drives, will hunt forever, loves the ball, etc. However, he is easily distracted. The trainer says the dog will get over that as he matures, but I have not seen any improvement yet. Anything will take him off task- a bird flying overhead, any noise, or people walking or cars driving by. It is very hard to do a search with him on a car stopped next to the highway. Any suggestions to get him more focused?”

The question was highlighted in the “Training Perspectives Q&A” section of the magazine and received responses in the form of advice from three on-staff Trainers (pp.14-16). The advice ranged from accepting that the dog was genetically inferior and “replacing” it, to putting a turtle-neck sweater over the dog’s head to create “blinders” so it is forced to use its nose during a search instead of its eyes.

It is with the deepest respect for all of these trainers and their experience that I humbly ask the following question:

Why don’t you just enforce the command you gave your dog?

When we command our dogs to sit and they choose to lie down, we enforce our command in some fashion. When we command our dogs to release from an apprehension and they choose not to, we enforce our command in some manner. But when we command our dogs to “find-fetch” and they blow us off, we scratch our heads and wonder if our dog should be washed out of service. For some reason, it has become gospel that you don’t command your dog to search, you ask it to search and hope that it’s in a good mood. Why?

Please don’t misunderstand. I am not condoning extreme physical corrections, or in any way downplaying the role of positive, drive building training methods. Self rewards, self learning and motivational techniques are extremely important and play a key role in my personal training. But, in my opinion, the dog blows off the handler’s command because he has consistently been allowed to. He is obviously extremely prey-driven and has discovered that the things going on around him are more exciting than the task he has been commanded to perform. In this situation I would:

A) make the task as fun as possible as the other trainers have suggested.

B) make the dog understand that it doesn’t matter that there is something more exciting going on around him, he has a task to perform and a job to do.

I fully understand and expect these statements to draw sneers and worse from my fellow trainers. The taboo of implementing control into search work is deeply ingrained and accepted. I also understand that each dog is different and some dogs are more sensative than others. But if the above mentioned dog indeed has the level of drives described by its handler, there is absolutely no reason to believe that a proper program of enforcement and attention to command would reduce its desire to search. The details of such a program are too many to delve into in this article. This is not a “how-to” article. Rather, it is a challenge to a common dog training commandment. I hope that it is taken with the respect it has been written.

In this video I show how I apply control during a narcotics search using a remote collar. There are two separate marijuana hides in different cars. My dog, like the above handler’s dog, is highly prey-prey driven and visually oriented. He was initially trained with traditional purely positive methods. He is cross-trained for patrol and very driven for a bite sleeve. I use a clatter stick in the video because he associates it with bite work agitation. I stim my dog with each command to search and when he shows interest in me, the bite sleeve, or environmental noise and movement. In total, he was stimmed 7 times combined in these video clips. He was rewarded with a ball on a string for his scratch alert.