How Much to Train Drug Dogs

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Captain Ray Varner with the Page Police Department for expertvillage.com. We have a new dog here and what I wanted to teach today is we call it the just noticeable difference in training. The just noticable difference is we want to just enough correction to ge the job down, but not enough to hurt their temperment. Also, it goes the other way too. It's just enough praise to get the job done, but not enough to make him break the position. Put him in the heel position. SOmetimes when you praise him and if you priaise him too much, they'll jump up and lick your face and go all over the place. What you did was you gave him so much emphasis that they broke the position. Now what you have to do is you have to go back and put him in the heel position and correct him and push him down. You're the one that gave him the stimulus to break the position. It's called the just noticebale difference. You do just enough to get the job done, but not enough to hur their temperment in the correction, not enough to make them break the position. Now, he has him in the heel position, and you can see when he applys the pressure of the pintch collar, it's just enough to make the dog sit. The whole time he is praising the dog. All the time praising him saying you're a good boy. He's going to turn and walk down and just walk. That's to correct him and try to keep him on that side and bring him up. See how the knee is doing the correction, but he's constantly praising him and saying good boy and turning him and molding him into that position. It's the just noticeable difference. He's giving him just enough praise that the dog likes it. Okay, bring him right up here and then stop. When you stop, you pull up on the choke chain and you priase him. Did you see when he jerked on that pintch collar, did you see his face? Because the pintch collar activated. It actually pintched his skin a little bit, but that was enough. You just enough for the dog and you can tell by his face he went I felt that, and then you say, "Good boy." and then you make him sit. Now, when he's walking back and forth any place other than right here, then the pintch collar is activated. So if he's up here, the pintch collar is activated. If he's back here, the pintch collar is activated. The pintch collar is doing the negative. The handler is doing the praise saying, "Come on, good boy." See where his front shoulders are. Then you stop, pull up on the choke chain, push down on this butt, and then praise him. Good boy. Now, you see there's actually negatives in there. The pintch collar is actually doing the correction, but you wouldn't notice that because of the way he's acting and because of how much prais the handler is giving the dog and he's molding him every place he wants him to be. So the dog is being trained, he's learning how to walk ther. He's learning where he's supposed to be at and there is corrections there, but it's just noticeable difference and that's what we want to see. "