Posted by Jerry Bradshaw on October 18, 2008, 9:11:58, in reply to "Re: How much Muzzle Fighting do you do in your K9 program?"

Hi Jim: I have never heard those percentages. Having started my career teaching college as an applied statistician, in order to make such a statement, there would have had to be a long term study of patrol dog training, and control for temperament variables to assign causality from the type of sleeve used and its predictive value to actual street bites. I think what you heard is what some trainer may have, in his own experience, believed. It is very difficult to assign causality like that when there are so many variables (temperament, training methods used, etc). Most dogs are prepared using a variety of tools, so how could you break it down and say it was the muzzle that was responsible for the street bite rather than the hidden sleeve, if that was also used in training? It is a very complicated statistical question. My statement was merely to explain that you can have a nice muzzle attack on a dog, but it is still possible that the dog will not engage a street bite, and as well I made the point that you can have a dog with a lousy muzzle attack that is very strong street biter. It is one tool, but there is also the potential to use the tool improperly, and actually reduce the dog's natural aggression, or make the aggression dependent on the cue (existance of the muzzle): no muzzle on no aggression, no street bite. Hence why we need to do a lot of things to prepare the dog to take that street bite. In my longer article forthcoming in a magazine, I make the point that much of the muzzle work that I have seen done, is not done too well, and there needs to be an improvement in technique. Many dogs that naturally do a nice muzzle attack, would have engaged a street bite anyway! So it isn't necessarily the muzzle training that had an effect. Please don't take my coment to say that the dogs should not be trained to do muzzle fighting, just that they should be trained well when in muzzle, and that other techniques - including proper use of civil aggression techniques and hidden sleeve work, and human focused aggression work are all together critical, and we shouldn't just rely on muzzle fighting as a predictor of the likelihood of taking a street bite. If you do have a reference for the percentages that you can track down, I would be grateful to see it. These kind of things are of great interest to me! Thanks for your comment! Jerry

 Post a Response