Navy SEAL Dogs by Mike Ritland Page B

believes some positive reward is coming his way. As trainers and handlers, our positive-reward system also provides us with a growing confidence that we won’t be the ones a dog turns his considerable bite force on.
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    How exactly do we refine a dog’s innate skills to make him effective at apprehending individuals? Just as with detection work, we start a dog early and continually increase the complexity and duration of the exercises—moving the dog from play as a pup to more serious work as he becomes an adult. We push each dog to near his breaking point.
    Beginning when a pup is four to five weeks old, we start to develop and encourage his prey instinct. We always take advantage of a dog’s inherent desire to want to chase moving objects. So we’ll take a terry cloth towel or a rag, something that’s very easy for the pup to grip, and something we can tease him with easily. We’ll begin the process of developing the dog’s prey instinct so that it becomes a useful skill for things other than just playing tug-of-war.
    As you’ve probably experienced if you’ve ever raised a pup, when you wave something in front of him he’s going to chase after it and try to grab it. In our work, we do something similar, but with the intent to get a pup frustrated that we’re the ones that have hold of the rag. We play a little tug with him, and then when he bites in deeper we give him counterpressure by pulling back slightly. Then we hold still. The dog will usually naturally pull and then counter and go a little deeper. When he does that, I’ll let go and reward him by letting him have the towel or rag. It’s as if I’m saying, Okay, you chased it, caught it, killed it, now you get to carry your prey off and prance around with it. It’s yours and you get to have it. Have fun.
    From there, we advance to doing that work in all different types of environments. We do it in buildings, out in fields, in dark places, inside vehicles, or anywhere else that a pup may or may not be during his later training or when he’s downrange. A pup is not just environmentally going places. He’s chasing balls in those environments. He’s doing rag and bite work in those environments.
    Just as in every other step of dog training, over time, we take very small and slow baby steps forward. From rags we progress to a puppy sleeve, which is basically a jute pillow. Jute is a pretty coarse fabric, but it’s very soft and very easy for a dog to grab onto. Then we apply the same principles we used with the rags and terry cloth towels.
    Sometimes we’ll take an empty 20-ounce plastic bottle, flatten it, tie it to a string, and tie the string to a pole. Then we’ll “flirt pole” the dog with that and tease him with it. It’s a tease because it’s a much different material than the puppy sleeve and is very hard to hold on to. This exercise teaches a pup that if he wants it, he’s going to have to bite down hard and hang on hard or he’s going to lose it. With cloths and rags and the puppy sleeve, the dog can use a pretty gentle grip and still manage to hang on to the thing because he’s got sharp little puppy teeth that dig in and hold on. That won’t work with those plastic bottles.
    Even at five or six weeks old, when a puppy is grabbing a rag, we pick him up off the ground, raising his back end higher than his mouth. We pat him hard on the rib cage. We place him on a slippery, elevated surface. All the while, we’re still doing the bite work with him. Basically, we are just teaching him that no matter what position his body is in, no matter what environment he’s in, he is going to be okay and he just needs to keep those jaws clamping down.
    Next, when a dog is between three and six months old, every couple of training sessions we increase the intensity in some way. We might increase the hardness or thickness of the