Police Dog Training: Training for Public Service
Canines are easily trained so that they can serve the public as police dogs. Police dog training is simple to accomplish and can allow canines to be used to protect people and places. As canines have a greater ability to smell things, they can be taught to sniff out illegal drug activity or to be instrumental in working with search and rescue operations to help hunt down criminals in general or even contribute to the disaster relief.
This training focuses first on teaching obedience lessons to dogs. This training accustoms them to obey vocal commands. This type of training also introduces them to working closely with humans. Dogs are offered experience with many different types of conditions in preparation so that they forget to become familiar with different sounds and to teach them not to respond to unexpected distractions.
Canines are chosen for their willingness to learn new things while trying to fit in like police animals. If they prove to be overconfident and personable, they don’t match the attributes needed to function alongside an officer. Using the same criteria, if they are found to be too aggressive, they will not be police dogs.
In the obedience training section, they are taught to respond correctly and quickly to different commands, and they are also taught to curb their aggressive behavior. Teaching to follow orders and control their actions to respond to the officer’s needs is also part of the training. A helpful and loyal companion is raised to accompany and assist the officer in his courageous fulfillment of the requirements of law enforcement.
An important learned behavior of police dogs is to employ their keen sense of smell by allowing the animal to help officers find missing, injured or missing persons or illegal substances. By allowing animals to follow scents, they can be relied on to locate people or items and for officers to be aware of findings. In certain situations, when an animal has demonstrated the presence of illegal substances, that demonstration alone may allow the officer to obtain a search warrant and begin drug control actions.
Police dogs can also be trained to help find the presence of bombs or criminal activity. Many live bombs and criminals in general have been dropped after a well-trained police dog was put on the case!
As police dogs are taught how to assist officers, the canines learn to follow commands in the original language of the country where they began working with humans. The officer working with the dog is taught to pronounce the commands in the original canine wording, as the officer will only need to learn a few new words, and it has been found that the human can master new words more simply than dogs!