Confidence and Caution in Working Dogs

The best results in many areas are achieved by balance between various factors. Usually, extremes without a balance do not achieve optimum results. This is true for the performance of working dogs. I already covered the subject of aggression in one of my previous articles on this website. This article discusses the balance between caution and confidence. This is well illustrated by studying the behavior of our two working K9 dogs — Luna and Rocky.

Dog pedigree

Luna and Rocky are both excellent working dogs. Both have a superb Dutch KNPV pedigrees. Luna is an offspring of Boris and Rocky is an offspring of Bonky — both famous for producing many KNPV and police dogs. However, for all the similarities in their working abilities, there are many differences in their behaviors. The main difference is that Luna is more cautious with her approach. If she is unfamiliar with something, she would cautiously check it first to make sure it is not dangerous and that she could handle it. Rocky, on the other hand, has very little caution.

Examples of dog behavior

This is best illustrated by watching the following video of both on the ocean beach. Rocky has never seen the ocean and the waves. When he first saw the waves, he backed for a second in surprise and caution, but only for a second. Then he, carefree, ran into the waves to fetch a toy. Luna has been careful. She does not trust the waves and respects their power. She goes into the water, but with caution.

Another example was how the two dogs handled a new surface. We were hiking in a new park and had to pass a grated bridge. Rocky could not care less. We already knew that Luna is sensitive to metal grated surfaces. She can be trained to go on them.

First, Luna finds a safer way around the suspicious bridge.

Then, my wife trains her to go on the bridge using food as a reward. After she passed once, she had no problems passing this surface.

Caution versus fearfulness

A cautious dog is not fearful. A fearful dog would not even examine an object and would back off any challenge. Fearful dogs are not suitable to be working dogs. A fearful dog cannot be confident. However, a cautious dog can be. Luna is an illustration of this trait.

There is a relationship between prey and defense drives (as defined in my Aggression article on this blog) and caution and confidence. A very high prey drive may negate dog’s caution and seem as added confidence. Luna has a strong prey drive that she expresses the strongest in her desire to bite a sleeve or a suit. That drive mostly cancels her cautious nature.

Rocky has an even stronger prey drive for any object that moves (in the order of ball, bite tag, bite sleeve and bite suit, etc.). His momentary caution of the strange waves in the ocean were forgotten as soon as a toy was thrown into the water. Luna has some defensive drive, which is consistent with her cautious approach — she will defend herself from someone who seems to present a risk to her when she is cornered. Rocky, on the other hand, has almost no defense drive. To get Rocky to bite in a defensing situation, we need to activate his prey drive with aggression.

Best dog character for multi-purpose working dogs

So, what type of dog character is the best for doing multipurpose (MP) military or police dog (i.e., dogs that attack, search, and detect explosives and firearms)? It depends on the circumstances. Take for example Luna’s and Rocky’s explosive detection work. They are both good at this task. Luna approaches the search with drive but when encountering a new strange object, she is careful around the object and would approach it with caution. Rocky approaches detection with an even higher drive and pushes everything aside to get to the odor. Rocky is the type of dog you can send into a suspected terrorist building, and he will take the building down to find explosives, and if he encounters a terrorist, he will attack him with the same rigor (once properly trained). He may, however, set a booby-trap with this carefree search.

Conclusion

It is important to have confidence and drive in our working dogs. Ideally, we strive for balance between confidence and caution. We look to have dogs with some caution but minimizing this trait. A dog that jumps carefree into the fire may be too bold, but we also do not want our working dogs to constantly examine the actions we instruct them to do out of caution.

K9 Tech Security working K9 dogs critically supplement our AI surveillance technology to offer a unique and most effective personal and property protection solution to our customers.