Thank you Eastern Shore Canine from Spanish Fort, Alabama for your support and this brilliant blog post highlighting canine human trust and attachment.
The most intimate thing in dog training is having the dog actually attached to you. It’s personal and yet playful. It is the trust between decoy-dog, dog-handler and handler-decoy. For so many handler/owner teams, it’s saying, “I deeply trust you to do the right thing for my dog, make split second decisions and return him/her back to me safely, in such a way that we are all better for the experience. This sort of training is one of the highest levels of obedience training.
This isn’t reckless abandonment. This is an exercise in a dog’s natural ability being expressed through his/her handler to train them properly. This is an exercise in trust between handler and decoy to build the dog properly for increasingly difficult scenarios. This is more of a wonderful live action game of chess and ballet, all rolled up into something so unique, so abstract that the uninitiated stop to admire the painting. This isn’t to be hung in the Louvre or to be admired on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is however, a beautiful painting, brushed daily throughout lifetimes of multiple dogs and trainers. This is all a collective to proudly show off what these undeniably amazing animals can do and the relationships that are forged throughout the process.
When someone asks you if you’ll work their dog, take it as the most honor a handler can bestow onto a fellow colleague. When someone asks you what you do, proudly say that you help build lifelong bonds, unlike many will experience.
For those in the sport world, working K9 world and pet world-whether this is a hobby, a jobby, a job or a lifelong passion project, we are all in this together. Knowledge comes to us all at different times and manifests throughout different seasons of our life. Individually, we are only as good as ourselves, collectively, we can provide lasting love for all around us.
To those that are holding the line of proper ethically balanced training, breeding and cultivating, we are forever grateful.
As always: Be kind and rewind
