Day of Reckoning
Jim Engel
Over past decades the European canine establishments, particularly the FCI and the SV, have become increasingly hostile to the serious protective heritage canine culture, that is the training, trialing and breeding of dogs suitable for multi role police and military service. Specific examples include the aborted 2014 attempt to remove the stick hits from the IPO protection test. The FCI Utility Dog committee quickly backed down under intense pressure — especially from America — providing an important lesson of where real power lays. Center stage is currently given over to the attempt of Heinrich Messler, president of the SV and the WUSV, to reach out to training fields around the world and dictate training practice, specifically forbidding virtually all German Shepherd IPO trainers worldwide from the use of the radio controlled training collar.
Apparently this Euro elite is so far removed from reality as not to have foreseen the firestorm of indignation this would bring forth. In order to gain some insight let us consider the comments of Jan Demeyere, a prominent advocate of this Euro pussification culture in opposition to ear cropping and tail docking in addition to the use of modern training methods such as the radio controlled and the prong collars. Not surprisingly, he is an outspoken PETA enthusiast. His recent blog statements provide insight into this way of thinking, indicating how profoundly ignorant these people, and I include much of the SV leadership, are of real world protection heritage dog breeding, training and deployment. For example, he states:
"We do not need all dogs to reach 100 points in protection!"
No, but those who want to win a major championship need to train for every point, and in the case of a tie a protection point has more value than an obedience or tracking point. Police and military trainers do not need the finer points of obedience style, but must strive to produce working dogs which will remain under control and engage effectively under unforeseen circumstances and against unknowable adversaries who do not play by the rules. Even less competitive trainers whose objective is to work with their dogs and better understand their character for purposes of breeding selection or simply a rewarding hobby of training a companion dog can and do, under the guidance of experienced people as necessary, make good use of the radio collar.
Demeyere also mentions:
"We do not need dogs to bite because they fear electric shocks!"
This is just beyond the pale, stunningly absurd. Yes, perhaps there are “trainers” someplace in the world physically abusing inadequate dogs to get them to bite out of fear, but such things are simply unknown in modern training. Over the past forty years I have personally never seen or heard of this sort of thing. Such a dog would be useless, present such a poor picture to an IPO judge as to bring only embarrassment to the trainer or be an enormous liability to a police canine officer or military handler, who would have a dog likely to break and run when needed most. When training is based on the fight or flight paradigm it may in ignorant eyes seem to work because the dog is restrained and fights only because he cannot flee, in a real world encounter he is almost certainly going to take the flight option at the first serious confrontation. Even in a junk yard guard dog situation such a dog would be vulnerable to anyone with a small amount of canine knowledge. It is simply astonishing to me that anyone could think in this way in this day and age.
The radio training collar, which often uses a vibration or buzzing sound rather than a shock, is for fine tuning control and applying an appropriate correction, often in a more humane way than any other method. Good dogs engage because of inherent fighting drive - an attribute less and less present in SV show dogs - rather than compulsion. Real aggression comes from within, and is there because of breeding and early training in drive rather than compulsion.
The fundamental reality is that the SV is reacting from weakness, their puppy registrations have fallen from 30,000 per year in the 1990s to about 10,000 per year currently and continue to drop like a stone. The Malinois is making strides that will make this breed the default police and military breed if the GSD people do not return to their foundation values. Although I bred and trained another breed, I have always had deep admiration and respect for the German Shepherd and the generations of working breeders and trainers, and for this reason will continue to speak out; this heritage is worthy of protection.
We know from the fact that the FCI can be intimidated, as we saw in their backing down on the issue of removing the stick hits from the IPO trial, that big words do not equate to strong men or political positions. Pure bred registrations, especially of the larger and more robust breeds, are dropping rapidly in most of the world, especially in America where the AKC is in such a state of panic that they do not even publish annual registration counts any more. These people are playing from an increasingly weak and insecure position.
The current situation is ambiguous in that while Messler has stated that implementation of a WUSV wide ban on radio collar use is necessary, no action has been taken and the WUSV will not meet for another year. Thus USCA is not at this time under any actual directive requiring action, and perhaps Messler will be satisfied that his strong words will be sufficient to placate the Euro animal rights elements and de facto leave it at that. But this is not really satisfactory in the long term, the USCA and the American community in general need to stand behind the principle that American working dog affairs are to be regulated by and for Americans, and that Germany has no legitimate right to impose their laws on our people.
Heinrich Messler seems to think that as SV president he is of such power, that the fear of SV displeasure is so strong, that he can dictate the conduct of German Shepherd affairs throughout the world, right down to the level of telling Americans how they can train in their own back yards, that he can impose German civil law in America. Perhaps he needs to contemplate the fact that Adolf Hitler also was a man who came to believe that as a German leader the rest of the world would have to yield to his wishes.