Police Officer Preparation & Law Enforcement Resource - Archive

How many of you have cross trained dawgs in Law Enforcement? A lot of trainers today are not big on dawgs that do two jobs. Explosive detection is a field that you need the dawg to be right on the money. Narcotic detection /attack duel training in a police dawg is fine in my book. I have trained and worked them and I was very pleased with them.

What do you think?

I have trained Chem, Bomb, and a duel Narc/Human detector dog. I would ideally like to have a dog do more than one job, except for the chem or bomb dogs for obvious reasons. Keeping it simple for the response is key in my opinion. If you have a passive response for human, make the response for drugs passive too.

I watched a few dawg teams work this week and they were great. These young guys are motivated and they work hard. I watched a cross trained narcotic/attack dawg do his thing and all I could do is smile. Nothing like a dawg getting a bite and hauling a guy to the ground. :D

In the dogs mind there is no distinction between the differnet fields. He only knows a set off excercises which he excecutes. The fact that these excercises have something to do with narcotics or bitework isn't off any importance for the dog. If the dog is capable of doing an excercise or set off exercises to the satisfaction of the handler/departement and he has the mental ability to do them at this level over and over again than there is no problem. If the dog isn't capable of doing this he shouldn't be doing it

Greetings


Johan

Dual purpose, or crosstraining dogs for different tasks has been going on for many years, successfully. While it takes a bit more effort in selecting the dog there isn't a problem doing the training. As one poster stated, they are different behaviors and each requires different responses from the handler.
The only drawback, in many departments opinion, is the increase in the amount of inservice training that is required. For example, a single purpose drug or explosives detector is required (it differs from department to department so I'll use mine) 16 hours of inservice monthly. A dual purpose dog requires 24 hours per month. Some supervisors see that as additional time away from the job they were trained to perform. Training time with many departments is always a sticky issue.

DFrost

We dont cross train. We have bomb/firearms, drugs and tactical (General duties) dogs. This works fine cause generally all the dogs are at different places doing their specific tasks.

My unit is a public order management unit and the last thing I would want was a cute little labrador coming to back us up!!! However, when we search places for IEDs, they are apparently much better than the dobermans and shepherds...