Heel Command for Drug Dogs

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Captain Ray Varner with the Page Police Department. What we want to teach you today is walking the dog in the heel position. What we want to do is when the dog is in the heel position and correctly positioned in the heel position, this muscle is going to be right here along the side of the leg so that the dog is in the correct heel position. Then what we want to do is he is going to step out with the left foot and turn and go. If the dog doesn't go with him, he has a German pinch collar on, as you can see right here. What it does is the pinch collar will tighten and that is the same as what would happen if a coyote or a fox or something is out in the wild and the little puppy starts to walk away. What happens is the mother goes out and picks him up by the neck and brings him back. That is a correction to the puppy saying no you better get back into the den. That's what a pinch collar does. It pinches him just enough to know that he's supposed to do something else. Okay, so the handler steps out and walks and the leash keeps hitting his knee. He keeps talking to him and he keeps saying good boy. He walks and then he stops. What we want him to do is stop and sit just like that. See how his head is cocked. We always want him to do that because we don't want to say...His name is Zeus and we don't want to always say "Zeus do this, Zeus do that." What we want to do is just walk and then praise him for what he's doing right. He'll sit there with his head cocked and he's looking at the handler for direction, and that's what we want. When you stop he's supposed to stop and then he'll match that front shoulder right to his leg. We want them straight and parallel all the time. The pinch collar does the negative. The handler is the coach and he does all the positive. You see how the handler's not telling him sit. He's not yelling at him or anything. He's not jerking on the pinch collar. He's stopping and the dog is conditioned to walk by that left leg. So no matter where that left leg goes, the dog goes. So he's constantly saying, "Good boy, that's a good boy." and he stops and sits. Good boy."