Preparing for Real-World Challenges: Insights from Experts

Hey everybody, today's show I'm going to have some of the instructors from the Colorado Canine Conference talking about some of the stuff we're going to be doing at the conference. So I'll mention it again in the show, but if you want more information on the conference we're putting on, check out coloradok9conference.com. Still a lot of spots open and have great instructors. Should be a really good time. We're going to be putting it on for the first

time this year. Hopefully it'll become an annual event. So coloradok9conference.com. And also I want to mention one of the sponsors, CATS, K-A-T-S, CATS Record Keeping, Canine Activity Tracking Software, Bob Eden's software. He does a great job putting software together for all your tracking, so training and deployments. So check out catsplatinum.com. It's the original canine software, and they've been doing it for a long time with great customer service and very, very easy to work with.

So check out catsplatinum.com for your record keeping needs. And with that, let's get to the show. Music.

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. Music.

Welcome to the Police Canine Training Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Meyer. Today, I have a couple of the instructors from the Colorado Canine Conference with me today. I have Steve Stoops, Ron Cloward, and Cameron Ford. And what we're going to do is follow up on a podcast that I did.

I did about a month ago, I did a podcast where it was just me and I just talked about transitioning over from training to the street. And that generated probably as many emails and comments from any podcast I've ever done. I know it's a hot topic and I know that it's an important topic. You know, in this day and age, we should be really scrutinizing our deployments and how we're doing things. You know, we always have, but I think now more than ever, you know, we're under a lot of scrutiny.

So having a smooth transition over the street and not taking any risks, you know, making sure that your dog is prepared for his job is kind of a theme for me. And that's kind of what we're doing at the conference is we're doing critical skills at the Colorado Canine Conference. We're not going to have any helicopters. We're not going to be rappelling off a building or anything like that.

We're going to be working on good, solid street skills that whether you've got a ton of experience and a very experienced dog or a brand new dog, you know, you get some benefit out of it because you're getting literally hundreds of years of experience from trainers who have done this for a long time and lots of good and bad deployments. So I just wanted to bring these guys on.

We're going to do a couple of these episodes here in a row with some of the instructors talking about, you know, what it takes to move from the training environment to the street. And this could also, you know, this doesn't mean that we're talking about just a dog that is fresh out of the academy. You might have this dog three or four years before he ever gets an apprehension.

And statistically speaking across the country, lots and lots of dogs when they retire might only have one or two apprehensions in their whole career. So this is the types of exercises and thought process that I want you to be thinking about throughout your canine career. And if you've had a bunch of apprehensions, there's still probably room for improvement and there still could be a time where maybe the dog doesn't work. So I just want to bring these experts on.

Throw out some additional ideas to what I put out there because there's a whole bunch of ideas on this hot topic. And I'm just going to go around the room and just kind of talk a little bit to each one of them.

The first one, I'm going to talk to Cameron. And if you follow Cameron Ford a lot, you know that Cameron does a lot of detection dog training. And when people talk about transitioning from the street or from training to the street, we're always thinking about getting that first bite or something like that.

But there's definitely a transition for a dog, a detection dog, you know, and if you work a bomb dog where he's in a training environment, his, basically his whole life, and we really don't find a lot of bombs luckily in our country, you know, you need to have some techniques to make sure that your dog's not just good in training and he's ready to go. So with that, I'm going to give the microphone over to Cameron and, you know, how's it going today with you Cameron?

It's going good. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. I appreciate you jumping on here. It was kind of short notice. us. We got your college guys together. But if you're not familiar with Cameron, I've got his bio on our website at the Colorado Canine Conference, so you can check it out. But most everybody knows who you are, so we'll just jump right into it.

Cameron, tell me a little bit about what you do to make sure that once a dog is kind of done with their initial training and throughout all their training, that when that day comes, especially like I said, dope dogs find a lot of dope most places, but an explosive dog, you know, what do you do to ensure that that dog is going to transition into a working environment?

Well, specifically, if I'm looking at a bomb dog or an operational explosive dog's team is to, as we're phasing through the, I would call the latter parts of the initial training, is to increase our search durations and less finds, Pretty much no find.

You know, I'm building my goal to include blank searches more frequently, one, earlier on in training, and two, as training progresses, there is search duration, so significant search time that may or may not yield in a find, as this will match much better what reality is going to be like, especially for the law enforcement officer in the United States or even security K-19 that do the same kind of work.

So that's probably the biggest thing is one introducing zero as a concept earlier in the training than most typically do. And then the second part is increasing the search duration of the training. And in the environments I'm expected to work in, you know, a lot of these times, unfortunately, due to what areas are available to canine teams. It's usually like your, you know, impound lot or city or county fleet areas. And the dogs will get very used to these locations.

And especially because of the earlier on training, there's a history to these locations that this is going to be a lot of fun.

This is Christmas morning every year. but then all of a sudden we go to a new environment and this in many cases unfortunately due to time constraints of a lot of teams going through classes or whatever they may not be given an opportunity to search a lot of new places in their training and then but all of a sudden now they are operational and they're expected to go search let's say a stadium or an arena or a government building of some type and

they haven't had a chance to be there yet and all of these areas have lots of different unique and fun smells to dogs and that is going to change how this handler may be interpreting the dog so again part of my plan of as i progress the teams through is going to be increased search duration new locations, Little to no finds because at this point, I'm not worried about is this dog motivated. I should have addressed a lot of the concerns earlier on if this dog could do a 20, 30, 40-minute search.

So pending that that's already been done, this is a transition. We need to make the blend of training and reality look more similar than look different. A lot of times, I think our biggest issue is the difference part of it. Yeah.

And I think, you know, I think I really agree with you because I think some of these dogs are used to finding, you know, 15, 20, 30 finds a day during training and then they get certified and then all of a sudden it's two weeks before they find, you know, get another training day, but they, they're getting deployed and they're like, well, what happened? You know, so they're not really ready for that. So the blank searches. And then the reward sequence is different.

We also got to prepare the team to that. Obviously, on many real world searches, how we're communicating the dog is, let's just say the dog is alerted for whatever the reason is. What is our action on find? What are we going to do? I would say 99.9% of the time, I should not ever see a dog in or throw a ball towards anything when the dog's alerted. So the but but we need to show what that sequence looks like in training aspects.

So the dog indicate the handler must go through the protocols of whatever they choose to use. Are they using a marker system? Are they using a direct reward system? But now they need to praise the dog off. This needs to be done in training. So that way, when it if it you are the lucky slash unlucky person who gets an indication with your bomb dog that your dog hasn't or isn't expecting that, I'm not leaving until I get paid.

You know, and we need to have something in place that the dog has seen before in training that when we utilize whatever this, you know, technique is going to be for the handler to get the dog.

From the location of indication back to me needs to be done in training so that way it's not done for the first time on a real search because that's the other part that becomes muscle memory both handler and dog yeah if they just constantly train and we're paying we find every single every time the the the odds you could be that person who makes a find we need to have something in place that is safe and gets the

job done operationally so that way it can be moved to that next point of the action on fine. So that way the techs or whoever's going to be involved or evacuate, whatever's going to be going on, if it hasn't been done already, this is the procedure that we're dealing. Well, and I think that's obviously just as important. You know, if you're dealing with a drug dog and the first time he finds real drugs, now it's a familiar odor, but it's a new odor. It's not your training drugs anymore.

And if you don't make that as positive or more positive, you're going to have a dog that can find your training drugs and will disregard the street drugs because, you know, you're not rewarding him and he's not getting the bang. And I think, you know, the one question I get, and I know you get too, is exactly that, that the dogs perform well in training and then they go out and they won't search a car, but they don't do training next to a highway on a single vehicle stop with no, you know.

Not a training day because training days dogs have already found seven or eight items in training and they're with the other dogs. They know it's a training day and then you drive down the road three blocks from your training venue and try to replicate it. That's not the same as in the middle of their shift having one of your narcs pull over out on the highway and do it as a real deal. And I think that's kind of the same concept that you're talking about.

And I'll leave it with this part of it. But anything that we do, and I'm going to use a technical term, behavioral mass, and I'm just going to use now, I'm going to dumb it down and make it called training mass. Anything that you do lots of training with, like experience-wise for the dog, whether it be your training aid, your areas, whatever has a big history behind it has a significant impact on the dog.

And then all of a sudden when there is a change or the mass behind something else is much less, this is where we see some confusion and some things not be as clear to the dog or the handler. Because just to your point, if I've always done it like this, whatever the like this is, training aid, the environment, the procedures, if it looks like this, but all of a sudden over here, it's not going to necessarily work like this.

We have to make sure that if I pour that sand from the one jar, I need to level it out a little bit. I need to make sure that I'm giving the dog, like we keep saying, the right picture that's going to match operationally. So that way there's not a potential failure that I could have prevented by being more prepared. Yep, yep, exactly.

So moving on, but staying with the same topic, you know, let's talk to Steve Stoops real quick. Now, Steve, I know you did, like, over your career, you've trained a lot of police dogs and a lot of military dogs.

We'll get to the patrol side of it, but when we're talking about the detection side of it, what did you do to make sure that, especially when you're sending dogs, you know, into an area where they were going to find bombs and stuff, what were you doing to make sure that the dog wasn't still in training mode and he was ready to go out and work?

And the environment so i made sure that the training pie matched the reality pie and i had the luxury of being able to go out on multiple targets overseas during the war and we would find problems that that we were running up against we have fixed them such as farm animals from those countries like she chickens and we were able to gather those kind of animals and train around them.

And so knowing what they're going to run into, what the distractions would be and train around that and train through that, that was the most important thing that we did on the detection training.

So real similar to what Cameron's saying is just get your, you know, transition from, you have to do the basic training somewhere, but then at some point go out and start doing your training in the environments you're going to be in and, and wean the dog off getting fines, you know, right and left, I'm sure.

Yeah yeah and uh yeah it's they've got to get a payment out on the real deal or they're not going to do the real deal yeah even if you have to stop training hides you know yeah while you're out there just a drop training aid or something to let them find stuff yeah it's keep them motivated and ron i know you you have a lot of dogs teams that you train with and i i think it's a real a real combination of drugs, bombs, guns, a little everything.

What are you training those teams to do on the same subject? You know, it's pretty much what both Cameron and Steve have said. It's like, you know, we work the sterile environments all the time in training, you know, and putting them through schools and getting these dogs operational. But then now it's time to get out in the world and, you know, do it. So during a handle or schools, we'll actually take two vehicles that we have, training cars that we have and take them out on the highway.

And then one of the times they'll come in on like an actual stop and run their dogs on it, just to try to show those dogs that picture. And not every time is there an aid on the car so that they get that picture as well. I tell handlers all the time around here that sometimes the best detection training is no aid out at all.

You know, and that's to the experienced dog, of course. But if they go into a room every time and they find dope or they find guns and ammo or whatever it is you're working, they expect to. And then all of a sudden they get out there and they go into a room and it's not there. And they've got these dogs will have a dumbfound look on their face with like, what the hell? It's funny. And like week two of handover school, we're doing detection stuff.

They'll come in on a Monday and I'll have six rooms and I'll tell them these six rooms run them. And there won't be a single aid out there. and guys will spend five and six minutes in a room that they could search probably in a minute at the most.

Because we condition them as well. So we're not just conditioning, and I think Cameron kind of alluded to it, we're not just conditioning the dogs, but we condition this muscle memory in the head or they'll keep doing the same thing over and over again because that's the way we've always done in a sterile environment. So we've got to get out in the environment we're going to work in and train.

Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned the sterile environment because in the podcast I did by myself on this subject a little while back, One of the things I said, and we'll discuss this here, you guys feel about it, but I hate bite sleeves, don't like them at all. And I said in that, that I'd rather not train than do like a quick thing with a bite sleeve.

I'm to the point with detection dogs that I really think it's almost detrimental if you got an experienced dog to go into one of these abandoned buildings and put out, you know, that has no other odor than the sterile building. You know, in beginning training, it's fine because the dogs are learning the new odors.

But I think if you're, for a training day, if you go out to an empty building that has no odor in it whatsoever, except for when you were there a month ago, throw something in a drawer of a desk and, I mean, most of us could probably find that odor.

So it's almost detrimental, you know, if it's setting up poor training as opposed to, you know, you know, take that time and go to Home Depot and, and put, put your odor out, you know, in an area there and have somebody watch it and, and run your dog there. You might not get as many finds, but you're going to get a lot more training.

Absolutely. Yep. And what you're bringing up is it matches as we, you know, we're experienced, so we understand this, but the dog's brain neuroscience wise is wired to look for the things that don't belong in a space.

Space yeah and and if like to the point that you just made if i keep putting training hides out in environments that are stale old buildings because i mean i get it that's what we that's what we're stuck with sometimes we're stuck with that old building filled with asbestos no one's been there in years but this is the canine training location and then when you go stick a training aid in there well that thing doesn't belong there and

it's reacting with this environment depending on chemically you can go to the science crazy shit too but with all that said the dog can pick that up and to your point are we making sure the dog knows the odor or is the dog just learning to go look acknowledge the thing that doesn't belong here acknowledging the anomaly is also reinforcing and some dogs it's the odor some dogs it's like you know what this doesn't belong because i could easily go put

something else that doesn't belong and i might get a couple dogs that will linger maybe even full-on alert or to the point that ron was making to the handler goes well there's got to to be something here because I saw my dog sniff longer or it's tail wagged faster or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And we've all mentioned, I think, even just in this conversation that, you know, we're limited on our training areas because of the venues and stuff.

But sometimes I think that's a crutch because we're limited by our own imagination and how much work you want to put into it. So even if you work for a small agency, you can go out and find some businesses that will support you. And, you know, I mentioned Home Depot a lot because everywhere I travel to, you know, I take dogs into Home Depot when I'm, if I'm selection testing them or training or whatever, if we're doing detection training and Home Depot is always friendly to having dogs in there.

So that's one example. I think, you know, lots of stores are like that. Some people here in Colorado last week were doing, were training in the Shields department store and that place is packed, but nobody cared that they were, the cops are in there training. And so, you know, you can find busy places to go work in and mimic your environment for this kind of stuff. It's just a matter of getting out there and doing it. So like you said, use your imagination, get creative.

I mean, I would on patrol as, as I know, we can't do this as much anymore, but I would just see various, let's say homeless encampments around the city. Right. And then when they've left an area, I can tell it's, they're no longer there anymore, but you know what that place has a bunch of smells that are going to be highly distracting.

Tracking and i may be able to use this location with a training objective to see how does my dog do and what does my dog look like when there's this kind of crap around there are these kinds of levels of smells and then like steve said have a plan in place to well i can put odor in here but i'm gonna set it up so the dog has to go through the area first and then holy shit there's the the thing i'm looking for over here but the handler more importantly is observing what

is my dog doing when it's in this highly contaminated very stinky environment and then what does my dog do the minute it acknowledges the target odor and then more importantly writing this down journaling this information so that way we get better in case we're called on the stand to say why did i how did i know was because of this this and i know it because i've seen it yep Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, like you say, it's just, it's a matter of going out and doing the work with that.

But I think, you know, what's cool about this conversation is four people here are all saying the same thing, you know, for, you know, just getting new environments and exposure dog to more, more of what they're going to see.

So transitioning over in this discussion over to patrol dogs, it's similar concepts, but we'll go back to you, Ron. I know that, again, you have more than 100 teams that you train, so you deal with this on a regular basis. And before we started this recording, one thing that you acknowledged right off the bat is that everybody at some point is going to have some failures.

So, you know, we can talk about that, you know, having a backup plan and then, you know, what are some of the things that you're doing to make sure that to limit the, you know, it's still weird stuff's going to happen, but, you know, what do you do to get dog more ready for the street? Well, we try to spend at least the last week and sometimes the last two weeks just throwing as many different scenario-based things at them that we can.

And different environments with different challenges, you know, not just jumping through the window of a car, but having to jump over on top of a car into a window of a car or, you know, putting a tarp over an open door piled up with boxes and a smoke machine right there and sending the dog. And the dog's got to figure out the problem to get into the decoy inside the car i mean just.

You know you've got to show them these different pictures and we always talk about it with the handlers that they need to recognize when the dog is either an asset or a liability and when it becomes a liability because it's something the dog's never seen then maybe it's time to put the dog away and figure out another way to solve the problem and so you know we we We try to do that, and we try to get them out of just their normal, just show up, do some bite work,

do some outs, do a building search, do an area search. Oh, you're good. Fire up the barbecue and open up the ice chest and have a cold beer. I mean, it's got to be a good full 8, 10-hour day of lots of reps with lots of things these dogs are going to see on the street. That, you know, I mean, you talked about the homeless and how many of these homeless guys are walking around with these tarps and blankets and stuff wrapped around them.

And the first time you go to deploy your dog in a situation like that, and you've never trained anything like that, the dogs are like, what the hell? And they don't know what to do.

So, you know, train it, prepare for it, but be ready if, you know, if things don't work out, you've got to have a back at playing you kind of know what you're going to do next yeah and and that's part of you know should be part of your crisis rehearsal thinking my dog runs alongside him or my dog goes down and sniffs the tarp the guy's holding on to and runs back you know what's what's plan b so yeah you were talking about the fleet my very first appointment with my very

first dog because everything we did was equipment based it was a sleeve or a suit most of the time asleep my dog went after a burglar that I sent him on. The guy was running. He ran up alongside him and ran alongside him, looking up at him for a sleeve. He had no idea what to do because there was nothing there. It made me so angry I caught the guy, and I'm not that fast.

And you probably weren't prepared for that. I mean, you probably thought the dog's going to be the miracle here and watch this. And that's exactly the way it was. I mean, I just kicked into cock mode and went after him myself, realized my dog wasn't going to do it. But I always believed that he was going to be there and he was going to do it. You have to be prepared for that failure is going to happen. And it may not happen. It may happen more than once.

And the one thing we can never replicate in training is the endorphins that our bodies put off. Yeah. And when we're out there working, everything that, every odor that our body is putting off is completely different than it is in training because we're in a sterile environment. Yep. And I know one thing from, you know, training with you for so many years at the Western States Conference.

Conference i know one thing that you're big on and i really appreciate it is how guys are dressed during training so can you kind of talk about that the importance of that well yeah you've got it you need to be in gear i think you remember the one year we had the guy that showed up at one of the training scenarios and he was wearing a turquoise colored shirt i do and flip-flops i'm just looking at this and i'm shaking my head like what are we telling this dog yeah what you know the dogs know

when we go to work because of the gear we have on but we don't train in that gear and it impacts both the dog in training and dog on the street i mean you need to train your gear you need to know where things are number one as well as your equipment for your dog so i mean that's the biggest reason why we really push it and you know kudos to state parks guys those guys always show up in their gear they're ready to ready to train and they've all got their gear on them I don't have to ask them.

So, I mean, it makes a big difference in training. I agree. It drives me crazy seeing a training day where everybody's in T-shirts and it doesn't look like a training day to the dog. And the dogs learn that really quick anyway. And then, like you say, building the muscle memory of where all your stuff is so when things don't go quite right, you're ready to bring the next tool out if you need it.

Exactly. Exactly. And Steve, I know you dealt with this a ton, you know, because you didn't have any, you know, obviously there's not room for error in anything we do. But what you were doing was, you know, pretty high stress and, you know, you didn't want to have failures, but I'm sure there's probably some things that didn't go quite right.

But what were you doing to that, you know, it's a different environment, but I'm sure there's some things that transition over to the environment that cops are working in now that still would help, you know, cops here be ready for, you know, their first deployments or, you know, transitioning over. Yeah. Ron just took me a walk down memory lane with my first dog, the same kind of failure.

So I base, what I try to do is, well, everything's based on failures that I've, that I've seen with my own dogs and how, how do we lessen the failures? And I don't use as much equipment as I used to use. I go a lot of gear free type of things. And I think the most important thing I have to have on a dog is, is confrontation, situational nerves and self volition.

And would have should have could as a young handler i wish our trainer would have hit the the gas pedal more than the than the brake pedal yeah on the dog yeah but uh yeah just like ron's sleeve story mine was very similar and yeah we need that equipment at times but i think we man is primary work without that equipment and show the dog confrontation and show him that if If you're not there with him, he can, he's allowed to have the self-pollution to initiate contact.

So you say you're doing it with, let me just interrupt you because you said you're doing a lot of this without equipment. So how do you set that up? First of all, I think you got to have a good actor to do it. When I do it, I try to communicate to the dog, I don't like you, and I'm not going in to pray. I'm not giving presentations because we all know bad guys don't give presentations. They don't go in to pray.

Over half the time, they're probably laying down, and I will first eyeball them, act a little pensive, and then if they make a furtive action, ears up, lean forward. I will defer and give that respect and show a little bit of a fade.

Then i will press it then also at this point the dog's on leash and there's no other equipment oh of course yeah yeah yeah yeah it's got it's got to be on leash but yeah i i always say that short time short tight lines are like steroids in a dog when you're doing confrontation yeah they feel that umbilical cord from the handler to them a short tight line.

Really really it's hard to describe i don't have an adjective but it helps them develop but uh walking up online to me laying down they look at me i jump up and run away frustration frustration and probably people see me do those t-shirt bites that's just one thing that isn't a test for the dog uh it's just another picture and again going back to ron trying to show them as many things as i can because so if somebody hasn't seen you do that can you describe the whole t-shirt thing

well the first guy i've seen do that was arvin winkler uh years ago when he when he came to train with me at fort bragg it is just a comp it is just a confrontation drill i can't let the dog bite me every day because i'll be going to the hospital every day but i stand up there with the shirt eyeball the dog step closer and since i'm not going to make a presentation with my arm i stretch the t-shirt out with my hands a little bit where they can get to get a frontal on

it but understand that they are allowed to have their teeth when there's no equipment around yeah yeah that's all it's not an end-all be-all it's just a picture and it makes sense and then when i have handlers that i can really have faith in and if we train i will lay down on the ground they walk into the room and they slowly walk that dog up and i'm not giving any prey or anything.

And if I've got, you know, a lot of faith in that handler, I'll let them come down and get a t-shirt bite while I'm on the ground. And then when they bite the t-shirt, I get animated, but that's just one little piece of it. But one thing that's going on, the flying will end the bites and some of these dog sports, they're cool, but they don't mirror reality.

And I read something Something from Kevin Sheldon just recently, he wrote a really good piece about that, about combining police dog training and some sport dog training. The sports are great, but don't teach them what you don't want them to learn.

I like that yeah i was gonna say i i've watched even give guy harrison credit for don't teach him what you don't want him to learn, i was gonna say i've watched steve do this in person and it's it's a i mean what it pulls out of the dog is really important confrontational confidence aspects that when just like he said And just like we keep talking about, most engagements aren't these beautiful runouts and the guy turns around and

puts his arm out like he's going to hug the dog. The dog takes a bicep bite. It's going to be a lot of times close quarter in tight situations where there's a bunch of shit around the person who's trying to actively evade and conceal themselves. And there's shit falling down. There's five other people yelling once they see the guy too. And all of that is a totally different mind state for the dog.

Dog and if we constantly keep being lazy about our training and only focusing on the fun cool stuff that are easy wins you're going to get out of it when you put into it yeah and i think it was steve or somebody i was with one time asked handlers like did anybody was anybody forced to be here and of course they were like no okay so you've all volunteered to be here so you want to put in the work to be the best you can right and that's an important concept you

know i haven't met a dog handler yet that was like you know what i was forced to be canine you know i didn't want to be here, but I'm working a dog. So if you're there and you're listening to podcasts like this and you're going to events like we're talking about, be willing to be open-minded to listen to pros and cons about what you've maybe been doing and what you see being presented to you.

Because we also understand that law enforcement in Los Angeles is different than some law enforcement exposure in Butte, Montana.

But at the end of the day, the dog still has to to perform so whether that one person gets a bite every two to three years or one who gets one every two to three months or maybe two or three in a month it's you have to be ready for when the time comes your situation if i can piggyback on cameron real quick um what he just said i think for myself you jeff all of us and and ron i think all of us want to put the biggest set of balls on the objective as we can when we're when we're sending

that dog out there that's that's our job and i got a huge amount of respect for the sport i belong to a schutzen club but i'm just saying that's what some some of the the sports stuff and kevin sheldoff was addressing this that that's leaking in into the police dog world can have diminishing returns in the long run i mean i i'm gonna go to a schutzen club with my new shepherd however i keep it in context yeah.

I see a lot of these guys making a big deal out of these organizations or whatever's vendors that are doing nothing but working frontal bites with their dogs all the time. And they just think it's amazing, these frontal bites. And I've asked them a couple of times, I go, but how many deployments did I have in my career that were ever a frontal bite? So is it a picture that, I mean, yeah, it's a good way to work a dog. Don't get me wrong.

I like it. I like building that dog and that kind of thing, but it's not the end-all be-all of police dog training. We need to be doing more. We need to be doing different things. And, you know, Steve said something a few minutes ago that made me think of something that a guy that I love dearly, Dave Reaver, said to me years ago. He said, Ron, the dog's got to know who the opponent is. Exactly. And that's exactly what we need to make sure that the dog realizes

that the man is the opponent and that he needs to be able to win that fight. Yeah. I'm going to piggyback on you again, Ron. Okay. I, I just had a guy at my club.

A support guy that from one of the bite suit sports was telling me how so more policemen, you know, how they want to just educate the policemen. But I advised him, you know, at the end of the day, it's a routine, all the sports as wonderful as they are.

It's a routine. routine it's never routine when you're on duty with a dog god it can be more messed up than a football bat in some of the situations you walk into with with a new dog so you know what i mean there is no routine our our routine is chaos and our dogs need to eat chaos like candy you know like thrive on chaos and that's a system a system of chaos that it's managed well that's that's what the training should be because that's what the life is you could your first

search could be some Some dude under a huge pile of dirty laundry in a cramped closet, you know, crazy stuff. And specifically avoiding routine, I think, and I think a lot of people don't pay enough attention to that. But, you know, anytime your training turns into any type of routine, it needs to be changed immediately because these dogs will habituate to that quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm excited about this seminar because we can, we can do all this stuff.

We're going to have a lot of, a lot of, a lot of scenarios set up doing this kind of stuff. So. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to plug that for you a little bit here, Jeff, because WSPCA has been doing Western States police canine has been doing this for over 10 years now in Reno. And I remember the first year we did it, he had like maybe 40 teams there. Now we have to shut it down on 125. And it's because you get a lot out of this particular kind of seminar.

I mean, the other conferences are good. Don't get me wrong. You get to hear a lot of really good speakers talk about things and share their training, wealth of training knowledge. But when you can actually go and get your dog out of the car and work a situation or a scenario that the trainers put together for you, and they can show you or teach you something from that scenario, that particular training that's taking place.

What more value could you get out of any training? So I encourage people, you know, if you want to get that kind of training, maybe forego the other conference and load your dog up and come out and actually do a conference like this where you can go hands-on. And I appreciate that because, Ron, you've had me every year at Western States, and, you know, it's a great format.

So I'm setting this one up with the idea that, you know, the people that come to yours will keep coming to yours. I don't want to interfere with a great conference, but there's nothing like that in this area. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun having all these great trainers out here and putting up some fantastic scenarios and along with a little bit of classroom stuff, but a lot of good critical skill scenario training. And if it's not fun, not worth doing. Exactly.

I was going to say, I was going to say. Cameron, you trained with us. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. And I was going to say the, one of the important aspects, you know, even for me, I've scaled back doing the seminars that are just lecture only because I, I, I just, a lot of times we, we all get this, we all speak to a lot of different, you know, attendees who go to these things. But when I'm lecturing, I, some people just don't know where to put something yet.

You know, I'm giving them information and it can be good information, but they don't know where to put it, it's limited. But if I can go out and go hands-on and we can actually do the work, it becomes a lot easier to see where to put things and why things go in this sequence. So to have a seminar where we can, hey, dirt dive a little bit, just do some conversation, but let's go out and go do the thing, will pay off a lot more and help, especially the ones that are newer at this.

Oh, okay. Now I know why so-and-so said that. Now I see where this could go into here. And then again, also for them to see for themselves pros and cons. And Cameron, I think you're, you're planning on bringing out some video equipment. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. So that'll, that'll be a great opportunity that, you know, you can, you could run the scenarios with Cameron and then go back to the classroom and, and kind of go over them for, with everybody. And it'll be good and bad.

We've been doing video reviews to see how well people's interpretation of what happened, what really happened. Which is, which is a, it's a great exercise that a lot of people don't get. And, and your video review, I know you, you're a big enough equipment geek that this isn't going to be a, an iPhone in your hand. I'm sure you'll probably have, So you're going to have all kinds of stuff wired up. So it'll be, it'll be real well done and it's a great, great opportunity.

So I might bring my sash that the queen of all invading and I'll wear it one day. Heck yeah. We'll put you right up front and we'll, we'll get you, we'll get your title. Correct. We'll explain that later. Yeah. So, well guys, I appreciate this and, and I'm looking forward to it. We're about just right at two months away and, and I'm, you guys are all going to be out here and we're gonna have a great time. So, thanks for taking the time today.

I think this is good information and it's going to be, you know, in person, it's going to be even better. So, thanks guys for jumping on here today. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you. All right, that's going to wrap up today's show. I want to, as always, thank a couple more sponsors. We mentioned that Ray Allen is going to be the lead sponsor of the Colorado Canine Conference. So check out Ray Allen Canine. They are the original canine company. They've been around forever.

And the cool thing about Ray Allen, I always mention it, is their quality is top notch. There's a couple other companies. There's one that's kind of large size that a lot of people deal with. But once you buy equipment from maybe one of the other companies and you buy Ray Allen's equipment, you understand right away that they have good quality stuff. So check out Ray Allen Canine. They're always putting in new stuff on their website.

And when they put something up, it's already been product tested by a lot of people. They send it out to a lot of different experts and get feedback. And they don't just throw something together and then throw it up on the website and see if it sells. It's been tested long before they ever put it up there. So they have a real good quality control. So when you see new stuff up there, know that it's been bounced around for quite a while by lots of their different product testers.

So check out Ray Allen Canine. Always a pleasure to deal with them. Also, I want to mention Kevin Sheldahl. He has Canine Services down in New Mexico. And Kevin's been doing this for a long time, does all kinds of different training. So if you check out Canine Services, you'll see that you can do basic training with him. You can do all kinds of different seminars. He'll come to you if you want him to come to you, but canineservices.com.

He's got stuff on Facebook that he puts out, some real interesting writing sometimes. And then again, he'll do any type of training you need for canines. He's done all of it. He's done it on the street. He's a very experienced trainer and handler. So canineservices, it's k-9services.com, canineservices, or give Kevin a call and his number is 505-250-4576. So that's going to take care of this show. Have a safe week and we will be back next week with some more instructors from our conference.

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