PPD or IPO prospect? - Page 2

OP, I am certain and confident all previous posters are knowledgeable and gave sensible opinions, I just would like to stress one single point, a good professional trainer on site evaluation will be most beneficial and fact based opinion after seeing, interacting and testing the puppy, maybe have a look at its pedigree too.

Sometimes a Op's description in written words does not tell exact facts, they say seeing is believing, for what ever it is worth

 

Ibrahim

OP,

A dog with good nerves is more confident and has a higher threshold for what makes them go into defense.  A dog with poor nerves is more easily set off, because they lack confidence. As you described, she is very fiery and defensive, which at 6 months of age, is a problem with poor nerves in my opinion. As far as using her for IPO or PPD, if it were me, I would find another dog more stable, again, thats my opinion.  I personally wouldn't want to do bitework with a dog that is already exhibiting signs of stress(her defensive behavior). PPD and IPO would require some type of pressure put on her by the helper, which may make things worse.

I would recommend finding a trainer near by to talk to and have an evaluation done. Perhaps if you are new to working dog ownership you may be misinterpreting her behaviors. It is an honest mistake, we all start out as beginners :-)

In my experience, government agencies will not train or help train civilians and their dogs. It is worth a try though.

Good luck, besides being dog aggressive, she seems to be a nice dog that has adjusted to your busy city lifestyle well.

It seems as though that a dichotomy exists not only between the working and show GSD, but within the working GSD as well. On the one hand there seems to be a community of working GSD enthusiasts who based their understanding on what I would refer to as the " schutzund model ". A dog in this category usually has a high ratio of prey drive which allows them to bring a lot of visible power to the protection phase of Schutzund. The superior competition dog of this type would have substantial fight drive that lies on the threshold between prey and defense drives.The  well timed deployment of these drives make a wonderful display. On the other hand the other type of working GSD , Czech and DDR seem to have a higher ratio of  defence drive.This defence drive can emerge very early in many pups ( sometimes as young as 9 weeks old ).This pup is  100% DDR and her breeder said to ensure that she is heavily socialised up to age of  months, as she would be very civil.And so it goes she seems to be turning out this way. 

With the schutzund oriented dog if the helper comes on too strong and the dog has very little defense drive , the dog may retreat. In dogs with good defense he feels the same threat but he responds to it with agression and confidence. A confident dog with good defense may even invite the threat. That a puppy is showing strong natural defense from young is not abnormal. Despite this, puppies may still have a relatively low avoidance thresh hold and putting them in a " training " defensive situation is certainly ill advised

A dog that has been socialized(lets assume for the sake of the arguement, PROPERLY socialized) does not mean the dog will have good nerves.  I personally would rather have a dog with higher prey than defense. You do not need a dog with high defense to be an effective PPD or even a patrol dog.

Before I comment further on your above response, would you please describe, or show us in a video, what defensive, firey behaviors your puppy shows?

 

 

your post; IPO or PPD prospect. Go visit good trainers! Defence can be fight or flight. In some dogs it is a very thin line between fight and flight. You might be listening to, too much reteric for a beginner. get involved.

Get your dog evaluated by a competent trainer, you have morphed into " lines", this is about your dogs behavior within the context of breed behavior. It is obvious by your posts that you don't have enough experience with all the lines to be contrasting the differences in them. Don't go by Internet regurgitation points, take your dog to a competent trainer and have her assessed. 

Gustav
Im not morphing into lines , but because of the large variety of information and opinions it often seem as we may actually be talking about different things. By accepting that there may be different working dog models (which can be approximated by "llines"), the information can be more manageable, and things can be made more easIly. It seems here that when people speak about the working GSD their ideas are informed by a certain model of the dog. This model I refer to as the "sschutzund". It is quite possible and reasonably so, that based on the idea of drive ratios, we have alternate models of the working GSD. It also seem reasonable that the schutzund and other models can be mapped to lines.

No...

Get off the internet and find a trainer that knows what they are doing.

Sounds to me like you got all the bases covered.....Good Luck!

How about neither and you try Rettungshunde (IPO-R) instead.  SDONA is the North American representative of the IRO and have held many seminars and training events in the New York area:

http://www.sdona.org/training-events/

http://www.iro-dogs.org/

Also note, the RH title is a Breed Survery level title as well with the SV