Real Protection- not everybody will agree with me.

Not every dog should be trained for protection , neither do I think that every dog should be started with the protection training early. The training plan should be tailored to each individual. Some of the things I look for when evaluating and designing the plan are maturity of the dog, sociability, natural predisposition.

A real protection dog is trained different than it would be in bite-sport, although majority of "protection trainers" use a lot of similar techniques and work the dog on prey drive. The best, real and trained, personal protection dog that I ever saw had very low prey drive. That dog set the standard for me, when it comes to what I want to see when a dog switches on to protection mode. For that reason I do not breed for high drive dogs and focus on other qualities.

Now for the early protection training. Unlike in bite sport, I do not think that all puppies and young dogs with protection potential need a protection based preparation. And here is where a lot of people will have a different opinion with me. A highly social dog can skip the prep work and move in to real and serious protection work once matured. A dog who is naturally more reserved towards strangers I prefer to work on prep as soon as the dog has reached certain level of maturity in my eyes. In any case, a dog must be mentally stable, easy to read for the handler, and secure of their position in social settings. A fearful, unstable, and unconfident dog has no place in protection work.