Essentials of Civil Aggression

In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:

Bringing more civil aggression into your sport or police dogs.

Utilizing prey guarding to start training young dogs for proactive defense.

The difference between uncontrolled aggression and expressive aggression.

What to look for in a patrol dog regarding civil aggression.

The three ways dogs manifest a reaction to a threat.

Key Takeaways:

In our training for our police dogs, we're concentrating on these civil aggression essentials and thinking about how that decoy can bring about some of that aggression, and then we can start to minimize the cues that bring out that aggression, and then it becomes much more contextual.

Don't let people make you believe that just because a dog shows expressiveness and aggression in an expressive way, the dog will become uncontrollable and incapable.

Defense is not a dirty word. There's nothing to be scared of. Defense is not a weakness.

When promoting aggression and tapping into the defensive side of the dog, and building confidence in those reactions is ignored, oftentimes the dog cannot figure out how to bring a prey response out of a decoy, which can lead to displacement behaviors.

"It's easier to cap a dog when he understands how to be expressive than to never allow him to be expressive in the beginning." —  Jerry Bradshaw