Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Gordon Carroll (good books to read for beginners TXT) 📕

clearing the pointed boards. His chest hit the fence with a loud thud, but he dug in with his back nails and shoved himself up and over, landing lightly on the other side. Max ran straight to the back fence, no longer tracking or trailing. He was air scenting now.

His prey was in the next yard.

I lost sight of Max as he made it over the wooden fence. I could tell by his posture: the arch of his tail, the set of his ears, the line of his shoulders, that he was close. I ran full-out, bruising a knee against the bumper of a car and taking splinters in my left palm jumping over a fence.

Luckily the gate was unlocked and I didn’t have to scale it. Unluckily Max wasn’t in the yard so I did have to climb over the back fence. Luckily it wasn’t the fancy side of the fence so it was easier to climb because of the cross beams on my side. Unluckily I didn’t see the planter on the other side and landed one foot on the lip, slipped off and just barely managed not to fall again.

I saw Max crossing the yard at roughly the speed of the Flash.

In the K9 world there are three types of control when it comes to the apprehension of suspects during a search. There are the Hold and Bark dogs, the Find and Bite dogs and the Handler Controlled dogs. The Hold and Bark (or detaining) dogs find a suspect and then set up three to five feet away and either sit or lie down and simply bark until the handler finds them. As long as the suspect doesn’t try to escape, hurt the dog, or hurt the handler, they don’t get bit (theoretically). So what do you think the Find and Bite dogs do? They find and they bite. And they hold on until the handler calls them off. Sometimes not even then. And then there’s the Handler Controlled dogs.

Each discipline has its strength and weaknesses. The Hold and Bark discipline has its strength mostly in court and in litigation against lawsuits. The idea is that the fewer people who get bit the fewer people there are to sue over said bite. The weakness is several fold. Any experienced handler learns that dogs are, if not smart, at least very crafty. They quickly figure out that if the handler isn’t in sight then they are free to engage the prey. I’ve had decoys in a bite suit standing perfectly still when Pilgrim would find them, look back to make sure I wasn’t close and attack until I came in sight then disengage and start barking as if he’d just found them. Like I said, crafty. A worse problem is the inherent danger, to both the dog and the handler, setting up and barking at the suspect creates. It alerts the bad guy to their presence and even pinpoints their exact position, setting them up for an ambush.

The Find and Bite discipline has its strength in surprise and ferocity, sort of the shock and awe attack of the K9 world. As soon as the dog locates the bad guy he immediately engages. This affords an extra measure of safety to the handler and his cover officers in that the suspect is distracted from firing on them if he has a four legged shark ripping into his leg. The weakness is that defense lawyers look at it as a payday in that they love to argue that their sweet innocent client was just harmlessly sleeping under the bush at three-thirty in the snowy morning, patiently waiting for the police to find him so he could surrender, when the mean, vicious police dog attacked him without warning or provocation for no reason at all causing serious permanent injury and emotional distress that would take years and wheelbarrows full of money to compensate for. That and the unfortunate few innocent people that get bit because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The solution, at least in my opinion, based on my training and experience, comes in the form of the Handler Controlled discipline. Handler Controlled dogs don’t get to decide for themselves. Instead they take their direction from the handler. If I’m searching for a bad guy and he’s hiding under a bush and I don’t see him then I have given my dog permission to engage. This gives all of us a better chance of getting through the situation without anyone getting shot or worse. If the suspect is planning on an ambush the engagement acts as a distraction and a deterrent, allowing us, the good guys, to take positions of cover or to be ready to lay down firepower if necessary before taking rounds ourselves. Plus the bite itself often takes the fight out of the bad guy all on its own.

If I do see the suspect or he surrenders upon seeing us then I still have the ability to order my dog into a down and guard so that he doesn’t have to get bit at all.

In the first two scenarios sending a dog is a lot like shooting a gun. Hold and bark is like firing a warning shot that requires a second bullet if things get hairy. Find and Bite is like shooting straight at the suspect; once the bullet leaves the chamber it’s going to hit what it’s pointed at. Handler Controlled is more like using a heatseeking drone. You lock on the target, but if for any reason you decide you don’t want it hit, you can call off the strike.

Obedience is the key to the Handler Controlled discipline, which takes lots and lots of training.

My dogs are all Handler Controlled. Lucky for this guy.

I saw Max’s body posture change as he darted towards a wooden deck that was built out about fifteen feet from the sliding glass doors of the house whose fence I’d barely managed to clear.