Jeff talks with Colorado K9 Conference Instructor Steve Stoops

Hey, everybody. As usual, before we get to the show, I want to pay a couple bills and thank a couple sponsors.

So the first sponsor of the show today I want to talk about is Next Level K9. So Tim Adams owns Next Level K9. Check out thenextlevelk9.com. He's the lead sponsor of the Colorado K9 Conference. So there's a dog vendor. Tim's doing some training, but mostly selling a lot of dogs.

So he's got single and dual purpose prospects available, keeps a lot on hand and as you've heard me mentioned here in colorado he's driven up to me i know that he delivers dogs in different parts of the country so check out the next level canine.com or give tim a call at 801-358-0120 and you can also meet and see some of his dogs at the colorado canine conference he's the sponsor and he's gonna bring dogs that are for sale and you can test and work the dogs right here in Colorado at the seminar.

So I appreciate Tim sponsoring the show. Also, I want to talk about Bob Eden. Bob Eden owns the canine activity tracking software. So Cats, you've heard of Cats? Bob Eden owns the company. He was the first one who did record keeping online for police dogs, and he's been a big sponsor of the show ever since I started it. So check out catsplatinum.com. Bob will set you up with a free trial and you can see how totally customizable Cats is. So it's a really good product.

I think most people that once they look around through the product and see how they can make it their own, usually stick with it. So finally, I want to talk about Ray Allen. Ray Allen is a canine equipment. They're based here in Colorado. They've been a good sponsor of the show also. And everything that you get from Ray Allen is just known for their quality.

So by the time it hits Ray Allen's website, it's already They've been tested by a lot of different people that they have tested products, and you know it's going to be good. And if for some reason you have any issue with it, Ray Allen stands behind everything. So I've never had any problem working out if I have a product that I wanted to return or need to get reissued or something through Ray Allen. So outstanding company. Check out RayAllen.com.

With that, let's flip over the show and talk to Steve Stoops.

This is the police canine training podcast with jeff meyer join us for each episode to get real world advice from canine professionals who have experience on the street each episode will focus on up-to-date information that you can use on the street spend about 30 minutes with us each week as part of your training day our goal at police canine training is to make every canine team be the best they can be, Welcome to the police canine training podcast. I'm your host,

Jeff Meyer. Today I have an instructor from the Colorado Canine conference. I have a Steve Stoops. Steve taught last year at the conference and got really good feedback from his class. He did a class basically on helping dogs transition from a training environment into street ready and be ready for a confrontation on the street. So it was a really good class. The feedback was good.

Steve's a fun guy to talk to. Everybody enjoyed his class and then, you know, meeting him in person, having a beer with him later that night. So he'll be back this year at the seminar. If you're interested in the seminar, check out the coloradocanineconference.com. And it's got Steve's bio on there. So we won't spend a ton of time on that, but we'll talk to him about what he's got going on and talk about the class he's doing. So Steve, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Jeff. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I appreciate you jumping on. I know you've kind of caught you in between some travels and you've been doing a lot of traveling and seminars and stuff. So what have you been up to? I've been traveling the world really here recently. And tomorrow I'm heading for Germany. I'm going to train with the blonde bomber, Thomas Haas, for a week. And then I'm going to pick up a dog for a customer.

And then I'm going to New Zealand for a few weeks to train some dogs. And June, I've got a couple of seminars in Australia. And then I'm coming to my favorite seminar in July, which is the Colorado Canine Conference. Well, I appreciate that. We did have a good time last year. I think we will again this year. So would you, go ahead. No, it was so much fun. And I, that was one of the best times I've ever had training dogs was at your seminar.

Yeah. And I think it's going to be this year. We've got a few additional instructors, a bigger group and kind of more venues. So it should be more of the same. So it's going to be a good time. You can tell, you can tell all the instructors that laughed at me last year that I actually have a prepared PowerPoint this year. My daughter did it for me. So I'm going to be. Having a PowerPoint and being able to turn the computer on and hook it up and use it are two different things.

I may have to lean on you for that, on the technological stuff, but I will have a PowerPoint. Your class was good it was it was uh it was eclectic how's that yeah it was a a debacle i think that's the right word nobody left yeah so uh when you you said you got a customer i know you do you do a lot of things so you do besides police dog stuff you do some like high net worth type people that buy dogs from you also yeah i i do that i i do home protection dogs for families.

And since I've retired from the Army, I've got my own sport dog club that I do on weekends, knuckle-dragger, canine combatives. And then I do quite a bit of teaching around the country. And I just got done with a seminar in Georgia with the Cobb County Police Department. I was really impressed by the support they get from their department, a pretty big police department, and they're pretty busy. And we spent all week doing what we did in Colorado at your seminar. Nice. We had a good time.

A lot of dogs. And I'm sure you got a lot of good feedback. And I'll probably change the dogs quite a bit in a week. Yeah. Actually, I was training with Brian Green. He was teaching with me. And Brian and I have done a couple of seminars together. And we have a good time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of fun. Absolutely.

So talking about the class. last year we did a podcast on it i'm sure people can dial back and listen to it but i want to go in a little more in depth and i think one of the reasons i wanted to kind of re-hit the podcast on this subject is because i had not seen your training until last year and got to see quite a bit of it in between you know run around doing some seminar stuff but, definitely saw really good results and you know you can kind of call it what

you want guys talk about you know get the dog street ready or you know ready you know transition from training but But can you, first off, I guess, where did the necessity, where, you know, you've done a lot of training from, you know, some military and, you know, a lot of military, a lot of police, a lot of different training.

At what point did you really start seeing you needed to find that one step to bridge, you know, to get the dogs ready for their first encounter with a person with no equipment? Well, it's twofold. As a policeman, I had some misfortunes with dogs on first-time deployments on real people. And then, secondly, when I went to the military, to one of the top counterterror units in the world, that was a no-fail. We absolutely had to come up with a way where dogs would not fail on the first time.

Because in police work, most of the time, you're going after people that don't want to go to jail. In the war that I was in, we were going against religious fanatics who didn't care if they died and they wanted to take people with them when they did. So I had to concoct a way to ensure a high rate of success on first-time encounters with motionless, equipment-free adversaries. And that's where, through trial and error, I came up with the system that I

try to share with other people now. And I guess here's a point to make that you can make for me. When it comes to the tactics for the military, some of those things are good in civilian law enforcement. And what I've seen over the years between K-9 and, you know, like some of the SWAT tactics and stuff, they don't equate. We have different rules. We follow different things. I mean, is that pretty fair to say? Yeah.

The tactical part. The tactics don't mirror each other at all, but I'll tell you what, I think coming, seeing both sides, the high-speed military unit and the police department, I think it was more hazardous and scarier being a policeman because so many times you're by yourself, it's you and your dog. There's, there's no helicopter, there's no ISR. And when you make a decision to send your dog or to pull your weapon, you're the guy that they're going to come after civilly and criminally.

If you're with the military, there's several layers of leadership above you that, that take heat and you have ISR, you have helicopters, you have 30 other people with you. So I think, I think it's more difficult being a policeman. Oh yeah, I could see that. And where I was going at that point was, you know, that while the tactics don't marry each other and having the experience you have, does the dog training marry each other?

Because it seems like it pretty much does. Yes, yes, because it's the same thing. Whether you're in the Hindu Kush or whether you're in Anderson, Indiana, the dog has to meet and confront equipment-free people that are hot in evading capture in both genres of the dog work. So the dog has to hopefully will rise to the occasion and dominate the adversary. And I guess where I'm going with that is that, you know, I worked for a larger department and we had a lot of resources.

And I've mentioned on this podcast before that sometimes when I'm, when we're talking about like area search tactics or something, I'll have people tell me, well, you know, you had a resource rich environment. You had helicopter, you had more people, blah, blah, blah. We don't have that. I think on that, some people tend to maybe think that the, especially the high level military units that you've dealt with, that they have like the magic formula to get the perfect dog.

You're buying dogs from the same vendors, the same, they're coming from the same places. You might have first crack at them because I think a lot of the vendors, you know, want to make sure they're taking care of, you know, your units. But these dogs have the same genetics that the dogs that we're using are. am I correct? Yeah, when I would select dogs for the special operations, I use the same criteria as I did when I picked out dogs in law enforcement.

We want the same dog, and one of the misnomers is that the special operations unit have all these super secret tactics and techniques. Not true. They hired police officers like myself. They did not, when they stood up the program, They were smart enough. They didn't go to Lackland because Lackland had no experience with offensive combat. American policemen do.

And so the tactics that made the special operations successful were the police tactics that we've been teaching and seeing and learning since the late 80s. So we married those tactics up with a very high budget and with some really smart guys that fill the ranks of special operations. But –. I think police officers can take pride in the fact that the techniques that won the dog war, and it was the dog war, were techniques that were taken from the police field and morphed into special operations.

Boy, that was a word salad. Did it make sense? It sure did, Kamala. I appreciate that. Oh, thank you. Cackle, cackle, cackle. No, but I think it's just a valid point. Because like I said, I know that sometimes, you know, just from training with SWAT teams, sometimes I've had these guys that want to take these techniques that you can't use in civilian, in the civilian world that work really, really well.

But on the canine side it's a different world and i think it's it's pretty cool that as you said that the techniques that the military adapted are by and large from things that that civilian law enforcement brought to them i'm sure they've changed it and stuff but i just thought before we really started talking about some of the stuff you did i wanted to be real clear that these are techniques that'll work for a civilian law enforcement agency just fine without getting into, you know,

there's no, no different rules of engagement here. You know, if, if, if the, if the suspect is good to be bitten at that time, we want to make sure the dog's ready for his job and not fail it. So it's the same, same, same, same premise either way, just different situations. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Uh, locate, locate, dominate, drive to the, drive to the equipment free man. Like you would drive to a bite suit. That's what, that's what we're looking for.

That's, that's the end state of the, of, of the training that I do is that the dog will drive to the motionless man. Like he will drive to a bite suit.

And and that's where so the anyway everybody's seen the videos on online and especially now body cameras and cameras everywhere cops are getting in trouble a lot of them are getting criminally charged the dog that the first time he's ever seen a motionless man with no equipment the dog doesn't engage and then the dog the cop does something inappropriate trying to get the dog at that point to engage it's that's not the time to be trying to train you know the dog's got be ready for it before then.

So obviously that's what you experienced, you know, with the military. You know, the longer I'm doing this, I really could build a much stronger dog in a six-week school if I didn't use equipment. If I did these techniques, like I was telling you before when we were talking offline, I've done a couple of these seminars like recently where we pulled out no equipment. But by the time we were done, these dogs were fanatics, and fanatics in a good way.

And I really, I think I could train better police dogs without equipment than I can with equipment. What I mean, bulletproof, street-ready dogs. I will always use equipment. I'm not anti-equipment at all. I'm just saying in theory, doing what I do, if I had to have a dog save my bacon, I would rather do, I would, I would give up the equipment and do it this way. And that's a bold statement, but I'm a believer. Yeah.

And I think it's a fair, fair statement to say, and I've been guilty of it too, is maybe doing too much bite work, too much equipment work or something over the years. I wish I would have done less equipment. Had I had, had I to live my canine life all over again, I wish I would have used less equipment and more of this kind of stuff.

So let's talk about what is this kind of stuff? You did the seminar. Maybe we'll just kind of talk about that. How do you start? Where do you go? To me, the goal, what I need from a good street dog or a good commando dog, I need, number one, an open and happy dog. It doesn't have to be friendly, friendly, licky, but open and happy. I need strong situational nerves. I need confrontation.

So something that can be trained it doesn't have to be inborn a lot of dogs don't even know they possess it and so. The three rules of dog training teach, train, test we spend the beginning teaching the dog that when met with an adversary that, He should understand that he can be confrontational. He can look that man in the eye and go forward. A good dog can do one or two things. They can jump forward or jump back.

We want that dog to jump forward with confidence and on somebody without equipment. And it doesn't affect his sociability because when you're teaching confrontation, you have to be a good role model and act like a nemesis.

Normal nice people don't do that but that's i get i get personal and i'm a nemesis with the dog and letting letting him understand that when met with somebody in a confrontation he can he can dominate by a forward and aggressive action and then we we do it standing up at first and then we move it to down motionless equipment free and then we implement it into searching so let's Let's talk about that first step. And I got, I was able to watch you work a lot of dogs last year.

So the first step you had, you just had the handler sitting there, no commands on the dog. The dog's relaxed. The dog's not, you know, it's the first thing you've done. So he's not in drive. He's not walking over to the training field. He's just at his normal state. Here comes Steve Stoops walking up with no equipment.

You're giving the dog some hard eye contact. And what I noticed on a lot of the dogs, because they were all very social dogs, that with no command from the handler, at first when you started giving them hard eye contact and trying to pick a fight with just your body language, it was very common what I saw is the dogs would almost self-correct, like kind of lean into the handler, like, hey, this dude's causing a problem.

I don't want to get in trouble by reacting. Is that kind of what you usually see? Yep. And, and that's why new dogs don't like, won't engage real people because they don't want to get in trouble. Equipment isn't real. And so I take my time. We give the dog a lot of time on those, on those first reps. And it, and so I, I, I show respect to the dog though. If his ears go forward, I just don't walk up and, and start teasing.

I don't, I really, I don't agitate. you've seen me do I don't agitate but I will show him respect when he picks his ears up I'll back up a step. I'll give him his dignity, and I want to help the dog do that through the first stage of it where he can understand that when thrown with a direct confrontation with a man, that he's allowed to self-activate and challenge the man.

And why we wait and why we do it with no, so you'll see, you know, it's kind of takes a few minutes the first time, but when the dog meets a real bad guy, his first time on a building search, or on an area search away from the handler, the handler is not going to be there to give him the command. Yeah. And, and, and especially with the new dog that hasn't met a real adversary, The dog has to have the self-volition to turn, to kick it on and dominate that guy.

And this is the pathway to, to, to doing that. And I kind of liken like what I was watching there. It's really not that different than, you know, if you go to a, if, you know, we were all a time when we were college age, you go to a bar and the bar is crowded and you're minding your own business. You turn around and there's some dude 15 feet away, just staring at you. It's like, you know, I don't know what I did, but what are you looking at?

You know, and you have options then, you know, either, you know, ignore it and pretend he's not, you know, when you look back and he's still looking at you at some point you're going to have to respond. And that's kind of what's going through the dog's head. Yeah. But you know, you got to be careful, you know, saying that, you know, that's so that's social aggression, right? Yeah. In a bar. I, I, I don't want to elicit social aggression out of the dog.

So we keep it compartmentalized with, you know, I am, I'm not going to do what normal nice people in a restaurant's going to do or nice people in public. I act like an asshole. Yeah. And a lot of people will look at you in the bar. You know, you may have a t-shirt on there looking at, but it's not a challenge. Well, yeah, I'm talking about the guy who's challenging you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, what I'm doing is I'm not, I'm not one guy. Yeah.

And that's the one you should, but, but then we changed, we, like I said, slowly over the three day period, then we changed it to where I'm sitting down and I teach the dog that he can make me fun by performing. By what I mean fun, he can make the dead prey go active by performing in an aggressive manner. And I call it the bark-up drill. I lay dead, and they stand there. And if the dog has the ability to make it fun, by barking, it'll make me jump.

He barks again. I jump up. He barks again. I jump up, do lateral agitation, and then I run away. But he empowered himself to make me fun. Does that make sense? It does. It does. Yeah. Yeah. And it's bringing, he's, he's, he's basically now learning how to pick a fight. Yeah. So, you know, you were talking about the bar, the guy looking mean at us. Yeah. I can see you and Mike Nesbitt hiding behind me. I would protect you. Don't worry.

I'll protect you too. I've done it before. Don't worry. Daddy's here. I hope, will Mike listen to this or is he too myopic to listen to my podcast? I'll play it for him. and then over beers at the seminar. We can all explain what happened last year and how disappointed we were. I'll tell the truth. I'll tell the truth. But anyways, I got you guys. I'll protect you. Don't worry. I appreciate that. Everybody needs a protector, I guess. Yeah, no problem.

And that's what I do. If I stand behind you, they'll still see me. But I've had a couple. I won't mention the location, but a while back, Brian Green and I taught a fairly large department and they had some failures on the street. And we did this for the week. And they had an 18-month-old Malinois. His first deployment was a guy that was in an officer-involved shooting, ran into an apartment building, was hiding out on a balcony. And they sent this young Malinois in.

And he went in. The guy was sitting down on the ground, leaning against the balcony and the dog activated and dominated him. And that was his first encounter with a real bad guy. And it was a smashing success and they were very, very happy. So it is the results. The proof is in the pudding. Like we've had several of those report back where young dogs with no encounters have success. And that's rewarding.

Makes me happy. Yeah. So I assume, now I did a podcast well back with Eric Good and they're using a bark fence and the techniques are.

Very very similar it's just you just don't have a fence so the the in this scenario that the handler's got the dog on a leash yeah and there's got to be some trust you know with the handler yeah but no i don't i don't do it through a fence and we get up we get up and and i think the fence stuff's great i just i don't i i don't do it that way but nobody does it the same way right yeah yeah but but it's just interesting that if people kind of like what

you're describing they listen to that yet they're going to see i like it when you know really good trainers are teaching the same technique in different ways and just show people there's a lot of ways to to get the same problem i think being a teacher it's successful i'm successful if other people can take what i'm showing and implement it themselves it's if they can't then i'm not teaching properly but it's imitation is the highest form of flattery you know

if it's successful and people like it.

Go forward and be and prosper you know exactly exactly so so go back to the you know what we're talking about the the first scenario the handler is just sitting there with his dog there's no command on the dog you come up you start giving him you know some little bit of not even a furtive movement just uh kind of a just i act weird yeah you know what i mean like like what what i don't act like a nice person but i'm not i'm not a bully brooding boisterous it's just uh you're certainly

not i'm acting weird yeah you're not cracking a whip and doing the things that would definitely activate the dog you're you're just showing a different picture yeah and uh you know, you can you've got sport aggression and you've got real aggression you've got the aggregate.

Let me give you an example i did this with a i'm not one of the dog sports but a dog last week that came out of one of the dog sports and it stayed in a down an obedient down no matter what I did to it because it had no real aggression it was all sport aggression. And it needed quite a bit of help. So I think the sport aggression is great. You know, I love biting equipment, but yeah, a good police dog or a good commander dog has to have aggregate aggression. You know, the combination.

Absolutely. Yeah. So when the, you're making it, and as I mentioned, a lot of times the dog will almost kind of lean into the handle like, whoa, you know, I don't know what this guy's doing, but I don't want to get in trouble. And we don't let the handler talk to the dog. That's another, the handler can't.

All he's got it all he has to do is fold the leash and make sure the dog doesn't get tangled in the leash and i'll do the rest of some i always call it waiting for the volcano to erupt yeah and it's sometimes it takes 10 minutes you know but but i want it to be their decision and and then and what you're waiting for is the dog to come out when the when the if the handler gave him a command most of the dogs would react right away the dog is almost waiting like well i'm

not getting in trouble here so yeah i'm going to start pushing the issue a little bit and when they don't get in trouble i'm going to push the issue a little more because i i'm getting pissed off at this guy and when they're not getting in trouble for it then they start realizing well and then once they understand what they can do they're not pissed anymore yeah they're actually wagging their tail and they're happy to see this adversary because they know he's a punk

and they can win and it's always fun to be the bully and chase the punk away and that's what they get to do so once they once they finally make that like you said 10 minutes sometimes with a dog finally puts his ears up then you back up a little bit then what does it usually do if they do something if they do something as as as much as sometimes they'll do a little bit of a half yawn you know stress, and i'll show respect to that i'll go oh you know like you got to see it they

everybody needs to sign up for your seminar and I'll show it. Yeah. But they. I can do, I can do a thousand people in one room. That's no problem. No problem. No problem. So when they, but you're not gonna be able to make fun of every single person in the room then. When I got you in Nesbitt, what else, who else do I need to make fun of? There you go. There's a lot of, there's a lot of subject matter. A lot of fun there, yeah.

So the, so the dog shows that, that slight behavior, you back up, then you just keep bringing a little more until the dog brings more. And in that scenario, in that first iteration of this, ideally you want that dog to stand up and bark or. Uh, yeah, like a sharp barking, not sport barking, but sharp barking.

And then the dreaded t-shirt then i will i will let them have their teeth yeah and uh i'll i'll let them bite my t-shirt now let me let me address this for the for i've done it a few times but the t-shirt is a very small part of what i do and once you once you bite the t-shirt a couple of times you burn it you burn the training value okay yeah yeah but i want to get the purpose of the shirt is to let the dog know that he can have his teeth without bite equipment there.

And it has nothing to do with teaching a dog to bite a t-shirt. And that's what, right. I know that was one comment we got. I don't want a dog that's grabbing clothes. I want him to grab the man, but I can't, I'm not going to let them bite me. So the closest thing I can do is I give them, I let them bite the t-shirt carrot and I run away, but they, that's the first time they've got to have their teeth with no bite equipment. Yeah. Undercover sleeves, the dog knows it's equipment.

Yep, they can smell it. You have to make a presentation with undercover equipment. I'm not against them, okay? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not about what I'm saying. There's a time and a place for all of it, yeah. But this, the techniques I'm doing, I've found a lot more successful. Yeah. Sans equipment, you know? And so it takes a few reps.

You know, the dog finally, on this first one, he finally understands, okay, you know, I can actually respond to this ass who's standing in front of me put the dog away well he's you know happy about that then when he comes back that's when you do the basically the seated one and now the dog sees you and is like oh I remember this guy and then walk up and now the dog it's his chance to pick a fight with a person that's just sitting there yeah well and then we yeah once he's once he's

doing it there when we're when we're in the training area then we then we you know we've got the violence and we've got the the delivery system so we've worked on the violence now we do the delivery system and and that's on leash and on leash areas where they know where they just have to put the dog on the x and then the dog starts looking for it yeah so and and when he finds you now the dog has started to learn that

equipment or no equipment i can and then he will do sharp barking i will jump up and i will run away. Biting, biting is the hundred dollar paycheck. The second best thing is making the loser leave. And so they get a $20 paycheck. They get the hundred dollar paycheck when they meet the guy out on the street and through frustration, aggression, that is the pathway to initial success on your first time encounter with a bad guy. You get a, you get a dog that knows what confrontation is and,

and he's frustrated. He wants to get his. So what do you see in the, When the dog has seen this several times, by the time he gets to the real street experience, it's like, all right, now all my frustration gets to go to this, this guy here. Who's, who's not. I'm going to throw a department. I'm going to throw a department name out there. Cause I love them. Nashville, Tennessee. You there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nashville, Tennessee, their regular training and

it's paid off big time for them. It's, it's working well. Yeah. They've got good trainers, but they're, they're a very canine, a lot of usage in Nashville. They're very pro canine and they, they've made part of the regimen and they've had a lot of success. Well, good, good.

When is there, is there like a point or a, I don't know, most, most of the time when you're doing this, the dogs are working through, but is there times where you're seeing a dog that just doesn't possess the right drives and character traits that. Yeah, luckily not that much. I guess I've been lucky because where, where I've been teaching, it seems like the dog selection is a lot more on point. So I'm not, I'm not, I haven't, I've met a couple, but gosh, I couldn't cite you one right now.

The overall quality I'm seeing in dogs are really good. And the, you know, the social media, it's, it's positive and it's negative, but the positive part is I see, you know, a lot more knowledge out there. Sure, sure. And that's, you know, it's like anything, you have a lot of this stuff on social media.

There are some good techniques, there are some bad ones, but I think watching the technique and studying it and maybe putting it in your back pocket in case you need it, because sometimes I see something that I don't really like, but maybe I'll come across that dog that I need to try that technique on.

So this will translate into now the dog understands you i've done the area search i did get the the only thing i could buy at one point was that damn t-shirt and i didn't get that i've got this frustration built into me and when you're doing this if you were say if you were training with a department on a regular basis and you've trained up the new dog obviously the new dog has seen this a lot the world we live in now it's not not the not when

you were a cop or even just even when i I started as a cop. It's not as busy for canine units, so it's not going to be uncommon for this dog. He goes through his training, maybe works well on this type of training throughout his whole training, but then he goes, you know, a lot of these agencies, he might go year or two, three years, and he's not going to actually ever physically touch a suspect. Would you revisit this training on a regular basis? Quite a bit.

But, you know, but I would still be doing the other things.

My obedience i'd still be using bite equipment you know working on all the other aspects control yeah obedience but really it it's not complicated it's it's the whole premise, hey steve you're cutting out just a little bit so you said it's not complicated it's not complicated yeah you know that the the job of the police dog is to locate and dominate adversaries Yeah, and if they see these extras on a regular basis, like I said, whether it's one or three years before they get to actually use

it, it'll be a tool they're ready for.

You've tapped into that part of the brain where they know they come with down and motionless. Get aggressive because the motionless down, seemingly compliant guy can sometimes be the guy that will kill you.

Absolutely. you know they're very dangerous absolutely and i think one of the things i really like about this is again you know go back to i made the point earlier i i get a lot of uh like case review stuff from agencies that maybe they're in a lawsuit or they you know want me to look at a video, it's you know this is just not the not the environment that if the dog fails on the street the only thing that the handler can do at that point now is leash that dog up.

And adjust the problem some other way and go back to the drawing board. You can't. And honestly, I mean, I hear these stories about back in the day, we did all this stuff. I didn't see a lot of it. So it's always been the same thing, but I just don't want handlers to get in trouble.

You know, all the video and all the scrutiny that, that cops are under of, of when the, when the dog hasn't seen this type of training, then, you know, I've seen some very strong dogs that don't want to bite the first time because they don't know what to do. And then maybe, you know, I don't want the handlers to do the wrong thing. So it's just important to note that this is just a training technique to, to get them ready and that you still need to have that mindset.

It's one technique amongst a thousand tools in the toolbox. Yeah. And you should always still have that mindset of this dog might not bite this guy. You know, I've got to have a plan B and a plan C and I'm using a dog. So until the dog's proven himself. And if the dog fails to activate, you know, it can have lethal repercussions. You may have to escalate the force on the guy, you know, by shooting him or impact weapons where it would have been a lot traumatic for the bad guy.

If the dog engaged him, you know what I mean? Yeah. But I think in that situation of a dog in the middle of a, you know, you call it what you want, a failure on his first engagement or second engagement, the dog hasn't activated. You're not going to get that dog to activate by grabbing the dog and throwing him into the shed again and trying, you know, the dog's already left the shed with the suspect in it.

And you see these videos of someone, you know, of a handler trying to get the dog to, to, to work. And, and a lot of times, you know, that's just putting more stress and, and, and you're going to get yourself in trouble over it. So that's why I really like these techniques. It prepares the dog better for their first encounter.

Yeah. And so what we're after is self-volition on the dog's part. Like I, I don't need permission. Like I'm on my own, you know, I'm on my own. I'm out here in the woods, 50 meters from my handler. I can, I can, I can initiate contact because I want to. Yeah. I'm ready to go and I don't, I don't need to ask permission. I'm not going to get in trouble for doing my job.

So it's definitely good stuff. I'm excited to have a, you know, a whole new group of handlers this year, run through it again, because I know the feedback last year was good. So it was really cool because Eric Stambro had the, had a station close to mine and it married up beautifully with what he was doing with his, with his, with his, with his aggression work that he was doing. They would go from my, my venue right to his.

And it was a really nice the way it married up. Yeah. And he was using equipment, but the two, the two things worked well together. So it's, it, uh, it worked, it worked well. So I'm looking forward to it. So. Yeah. Can't wait. Yep. Well, I know you got to probably pack your bags since you're traveling the world here real soon. So I appreciate you jumping on today and doing this. And I'll talk to you before then, but I'll definitely be seeing you in a couple months.

Well, I appreciate you having me and I can't wait to see everybody in Fort Collins. Yeah. It'll be a good time this year. Thanks, Steve. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this episode. I want to finish by thanking a couple more sponsors. So Kevin Sheldahl owns Canine Services down in New Mexico.

Kevin does everything canine. So whether you need to buy a dog, get trained, get training there in New Mexico at his site, or he'll come to you and he'll do training and seminars and department evaluations at your site. And if none of those work, he's got some online courses. So if you check out canineservices.com, it's k-9services.com, or give Kevin a call at 505-250-4576, and he'll give you all the information.

So his online detector course is a really good course. If you can't come to him, he'll bring the course right to your computer screen. So check out canineservices.com. And finally, it's warm weather, so it's time to make sure your heat alarm's working. And I say at every show, your heat alarm needs to be tested at least weekly. It should just be part of your training day. So make sure that everybody's heat alarm is tested on your training day. You guys witness each other's heat alarms working.

And the only heat alarm I ever recommend is acecanine.com. So acecanine.com has got the best technology and the only one I know that has a cell phone feature to it. So the heat alarm will talk directly to your cell phone and stay in touch.

So there's no connection issues with it. And if there is a connection issue, there's so many redundant features in it that once it knows that it's not talking to your cell phone, that will also trigger a warning to let you know there's something wrong and you need to go check your dog. So really well thought out product, works really well. Give John Johnson a call or check out acecanine.com for your heat alarm needs. Thanks, everybody. Be safe. Music.