Dual training a dog questions - Page 1

I am looking for opinions on dual training my dog.  I want to do Sch and protection work with her and she has done well (7 months) at SCH club training showing good drive, courage, bite etc.  At home she is very careful and protective of my 6 year old handicapped daughter.  We were thinking of buying her a service dog, but then wondered about using our dog in a dual fashion.  Mostly my daughter will need her for balance when walking and help getting up if she falls as well as at school if she drops someting from her desk and to carry a kindergardners backpack to class etc.  (light)  We took her to a local trainer who I know for a fact has trained several dogs for the Steinbrenners (yankees owners( vomit in my mouth to say that)) and several of the athletes in the three major sports teams in the area as well as a ton of movie stars etc.  (as evidenced by pictures, letters etc that include him stars and dogs as well as writings on the pictures mentioning his training)  He has evaluated the dog three times twice with and once without my daughter to see her in different situations and said she is well qualified to do both.  He says he can do the personal protection, service dog and search and rescue/tracking with her (apparently she has a great nose) and should get her back towards the end of April.  We will be required to take my two kids twice a week to training classes to also work with her during her training.  He said after that we would work on getting her ready for BH and Sch. competitions when she is old enough.  She will be certified as a therapy dog as well as some kind of stuff through AKC for service dog and good canine citizen or something like that as well as a companion dog and some sort of tracking if I understood right.  He really wants to to add the search and rescue incase my daughter might wander off etc.   What are your thoughts and opinions on this and what would you expect to pay including the SCH training lets assume SCH1?  The dog will be with him until April

Thanks for your thoughts and opinions

One last thing adding in the therapy dog good canine etc does that add in additional value to puppies over and above a SCH title if I breed her later on (doubt I do but promised breeder I would wait until she was three to spay her)

Officially, no dog can be labeled as service dog if they have had bite work or protection training.   That said, this is your personal dog, what you tell people about the dogs abilities and training is up to you.    Here are some things to consider:

1.  Protection dogs are that.  If they perceive a threat, they will protect. (All obvious ).         ------------ 2.  A service dog must be able to go any where and be able to calmly handle any situation.   If the dog goes with the child to school....  School is full of screaming, running, jumping, unpredictable actions from little humans.  How will the dog be able to differ between a threat and an active child?   ------  my personal recommendation is to have a separate service dog.    It is not to say that a GSD couldn't do both, but you are talking about a young child being able to control a dog that has been taught to protect.   School is a very bad place to learn a lesson that the child miss controls the dog when they themselves are learning self control.   For young kids, I always recommend a Golden Retriever.   This is a docile breed that can do everything you want for your child and still, generally, have no concern for other children.    ---------  Make sense?

School is full of screaming, running, jumping, unpredictable actions from little humans.  How will the dog be able to differ between a threat and an active child? 

If a dog can't differ between that and a real threat then the dog has issues to begin with. Even my Huskies know the difference between children doing that and adults acting like that.  They'd go nuts,  (tails wagging/just happy to see the kids is what I mean) wanting to see the children who do that, but wouldn't care for the adults acting like that and would most likely ignore it.  With that said, I wouldn't think it ideal to have a personal protection dog/the child together without adult (knowledgeable and able to handle the dog) supervision anywhere for that matter.  I don't know what all laws go into having a service dog in the class room either.

But the OP mentioned of training personal protection....service dog......and possibly search and rescue? I've been told it is illegal to train a dog for SchH (which the OP mentioned doing too) and search and rescue in some states. Can anyone on here verify that? Think about what the dogs intentions are when finding the helper, compared to finding the human.....

Well, too much going on to really get into it. 

To the OP, I would say you could possibly do 2 out of the 3 things that you want to do.  But one might even be pushing it.  Granted, you will need an exceptional dog, unlimited free time and a substantial training budget.  You will probably not be great at any of those disciplines but you might be ok.  If it were me and I was in a situation of deciding I would pick the most important and most feasible area of training and start with that.  SAR (search and rescue) requires a great deal of time and commitment.  I train weekly with SAR people and the trailing and tracking is completely different than SchH tracking.  I also do SchH every week and that is a huge time investment and commitment.  I have also certified therapy dogs in the past and that is another completely separate discipline.  I could do SchH with my current Patrol / narcotics dog but the training style between Police patrol and SchH is very different.  Although my dog is a high level SchH dog I gave that up with him for several reasons when I converted him to my patrol dog. 

Being a novice to training you should probably stick with one area of training and work on excelling at that.  An experienced trainer could take a good dog and easily do 2 of the 3 things you mention well.  Trying all three at once is like going for a doctorate, running a business and training for your first triathlon; something has to give.  I'm not even going to address the comments on protection training and service work.

PS:  Go Yankees and I hope Jeter recovers soon. 

Andy Maly Vah.....sure it can be done.....you need a dog with great nerve and moderate drives. 

Absloutely, and an excellent trainer who understands and works dogs in several disciplines.  Andy and Melanie are a good example of an excellent team. 

I was thinking more along the lines that the dog was 7 months old and the "handler/owner" in the school setting was a 6 year old.   If both the child and the dog was older, I would think there would be no issues.  For what is wanted for a service dog, I still think a Golden Retriever is best for a 6 - 7 year old handicap child.

In a school setting, you are now dealing with parents. Right or wrong, I guarantee, if a classroom parent found out that the service dog their 6 -7 year old child was exposed to everyday was also trained in bite work/ protection, there would be lots of commotion raised.  Not because of there is a service dog, but because the service dog is "dangerous."  Please understand, I am not saying the dog is dangerous; I, and most of us know better, but sadly the public does not.  When the public sees a GSD, they see a powerful and dangerous dog (just like the attitude towards a pitbull).  Golden Retrievers have a much more docile image.

When you have a handicap service dog, you can no longer just think about the dog and what it does for you.  You have to take into consideration the public; even the idiots that really should not be in the gene pool.  It is these idiots that can ruin it for everyone.  For a handicap child, this can be most devastating.

So many points here that I am going to stick with the top few for now. First many schools will not allow a child to be in control of a service dog in school. This is any dog not because it has protection training. If you add protection training there is NO way they will allow it. I am not saying this is right or wrong but it is something that has happened multiple times and has been discussed on here. Second, I would never no matter how good the dog, allow a six year old control of a schutzhund trained dog. My service dog has an exceptional tempeament doing both schutzhund and service work. I have a ten year old son who has been raised with dog rules and around them all of his life and he is not allowed to be in control of my dogs alone because all three have had bite work/schutzhund training.  I do not suggest all dogs doing service work can handle and switch off doing schutzhund as well. At the same time my schutzhund 3 male is 100 percent non threatening and easily control in public and I do not believe schutzhund work makes a dog publically unstable in the least. When I did search and rescue with my dogs, I believe they could have handled both sar and bite work. Many dogs already started in working were purchased from countries like Germany that already had schutzhud titles were brought to the USA and used for SAR but once here they were not allowed to do bite work per SAR group rules like my dogs. 
The last point I would like to bring up is that if you are going to send your dog away to be "trained" for protection, and SAR then you will not have the needed skills in just "visits" to work your dog in these things. If you do not have time to devout weekly to maintain in a training class and working your dog during the week you should not even think of protection training or SAR IMO. Why would you hire someone to train your dog SAR for you and therapy and all these other things if you are unable to do the training with your dog and will not know what to do with the training? Something about a person "trainer" promising all of these results and it being so simple for the dog to do all of these for you afterwards does not sit right with me. 

I now have another question. I went back and read your other posts and in those you were looking for a pet and said you only had a ten year old child with no mention of a handicapped 6 year old? What are you trying to really accomplish with this puppy? Do you want a competition dog? Are you wanting titles so you can say the dog is duel trained in something to breed from it? I read back to see what experience you had to see if I was jumping the gun about if you have someone else train the dog you will not have the skills to maintain that training. If you could just clarify things of what you expect/ want and your results you desire you can be better advised.