Training is a maintained state rather than a permanent trait. An owner who works to maintain protection dog training keeps the dog they paid for. An owner who lets the daily work lapse watches it drift over months, usually without noticing until something matters. This is what the upkeep actually involves, and it takes less time than most people expect.

Why training degrades

Dogs do not hold behaviors in storage. Every command a dog knows is a habit reinforced by repetition and consequence, and habits weaken when neither happens.

The decline is gradual enough to miss. A recall that used to be instant takes a beat. A place command holds for ten minutes instead of thirty. You repeat yourself once and the dog complies, so nothing seems wrong. Six months of small concessions produces a dog whose responsiveness looks fine in calm conditions and gives way under pressure.

That matters more in a protection dog than in a pet, because reduced obedience under pressure means the dog is drifting back toward making its own decisions. The whole value of the training sits in the fact that the decision is yours. We explained why in command-based vs. instinct-based protection.

The daily ten minutes that maintain protection dog training

Keep it simple and keep it consistent. A workable session looks like this.

• Two minutes of heeling. Changes of direction, changes of pace, a few halts. This is the single best diagnostic of where your dog’s attention actually is.
• Three or four position changes. Sit, down, stand, from a distance as well as beside you. One command each time.
• A recall under mild distraction. Something more interesting than you should be happening nearby.
• A place command with duration. Send the dog, walk away, do something else, release it deliberately.
• End on a success. Finish with something the dog does well, then release clearly so the dog knows the session is over.

That is the whole thing. It fits before work or after dinner, and the only hard requirement is that it happens on the days you do not feel like it.

Weekly and monthly work

Beyond the daily session, a few things need a longer interval.

New environments, weekly. Neutrality erodes when a dog’s world shrinks to your house and yard. Take the dog somewhere different once a week. A hardware store parking lot, a park, a quiet patio, a busy sidewalk. The goal is boredom rather than excitement, and boredom only stays available if novelty keeps arriving.

Full obedience run, weekly. Once a week, run through everything the dog knows rather than the handful you use daily. Commands you never use are the ones that quietly disappear.

Distance and duration, monthly. Push a little. A longer down-stay, a recall from further out, a place command with you out of sight. Finding the edge tells you where the dog actually is.

What to leave alone

One clear exception to all of the above.

Do not rehearse the protection work yourself. Do not test it to see whether it still functions, and do not demonstrate it for friends who want to see what the dog can do. Both teach the dog that the threshold is negotiable and that the commands are part of a game.

Protection readiness is maintained through structured sessions with a trainer rather than by an owner at home. That is what refresher sessions are for, and they are included with every placement.

How to tell the training is slipping

These show up before anything serious does.

None of these are emergencies. All of them are easier to correct in the week you notice them than in the month you finally act on them.

The household side of it

Plenty of what degrades training has nothing to do with training sessions. Household habits do as much to maintain protection dog training as the daily work does.

One command, once. Whoever gives it, it gets said a single time and then followed through. Repeating is the fastest way to teach a dog to ignore you.

Same words from everyone. Exactly the words from transfer training, not synonyms. Down and lie down are two different commands to a dog.

Same standard from everyone. If one adult accepts a slow response, the other is enforcing a rule that does not exist in the dog’s experience.

Rules stay rules. Furniture, feeding, door behavior. Dogs learn from the exceptions rather than the intentions.

In two-adult households this is where most drift originates, and it usually shows up as a split rather than a slide. We covered it in the first ninety days.

When to call us

Early, and about anything.

Owners tend to treat a question as an admission that something has gone wrong. A concern at week six takes a phone call. The same concern at month six has had time to become a habit the dog now believes is the rule, and undoing a habit takes considerably longer than adjusting one.

Lifetime support and refresher sessions are included precisely so nobody has to weigh whether an issue clears some threshold. It does not need to.

Worth booking a refresher without waiting for a problem: after any major household change, before or after extended travel, at the one-year mark, and any time you notice two or three items from the table above.

For the settling-in period, see the first ninety days. For what happens at handover, see transfer training and the first week.

IGP training, formerly known as Schutzhund, produces some of the most precisely trained dogs in the world. It also produces a specific set of habits that need additional work before a dog is ready for a household. Our program was built by a competitor who has spent decades inside the sport, so this is a subject we can speak to from experience rather than opinion.

The short version: IGP training builds excellent foundations, several of which transfer directly. A few things it teaches need to be undone. And there is a category of work the sport never touches at all, which is the part that matters most in a family home.

What IGP training actually is

IGP is a three-part working dog sport. Tracking tests scent discipline over a laid trail. Obedience tests heeling, retrieves, jumps, and a send-away under judge observation. Protection tests searching for a helper, holding and barking, and controlled engagement with a clean out on command.

It was developed as a breed suitability test for German Shepherds, a way of proving a dog had the nerve, drive, and trainability the breed was meant to carry. Titles are earned at trials scored by certified judges, which is why an IGP title is a verifiable credential rather than a claim.

Our training program was developed by co-founder Shawn Thompson, a Schutzhund and IGP champion, four-time U.S. World Team qualifier, and holder of more than 50 working titles across the sport.

What transfers directly

Four things, and they are substantial.

Obedience precision under pressure. Sport obedience is graded to a standard most household training never approaches. A dog that heels correctly while a judge circles and a helper waits in a blind has learned to hold a command under real distraction. That is the exact quality a protection command depends on, and it is why we treat obedience as the delivery system for everything else. We explained that in why protection training comes last.

The out. IGP scores the release heavily. A dog that will not out cleanly loses points and fails at higher levels, which means the sport selects hard for a reliable stop. In personal protection that stop is the entire liability question, and a dog arriving with a sport-conditioned out is arriving with the hardest part already built.

Full, calm grips. Sport rewards a full mouth and a settled dog on the bite rather than a frantic one. That calmness under engagement correlates with the nerve strength we look for.

Handler focus. IGP dogs work with a handler rather than independently. They check in, they take direction under arousal, and they treat the handler as the source of what happens next. That relationship is the foundation of everything that comes after.

What needs to be undone

Three habits, all of which the sport actively trains and none of which belong in a household dog.

Equipment orientation. Sport dogs are trained on a sleeve, and a dog that has only ever worked a sleeve has learned that the sleeve is the target. A dog that releases to chase equipment rather than staying engaged with a person has learned the wrong lesson for real conditions. Resolving this takes deliberate work across varied equipment and scenarios.

Predictability. Trials follow a known pattern. The helper appears from a known blind, wears known gear, and behaves within known rules. Dogs are clever enough to learn the pattern rather than the principle, and a dog reading a script performs beautifully right up until the script changes.

Scoring conventions. Some sport behaviors exist because a judge is watching. The bark and hold is a scoring requirement. Certain positions and re-grips are conventions of the trial rather than useful responses. None of it is harmful, and all of it is noise that needs sorting out from the parts that matter.

What IGP training never covers

This is the largest gap, and it has nothing to do with protection work at all.

IGP tests a dog on a trial field. It says nothing about how that dog behaves in a living room with a toddler, at a restaurant patio for two hours, when the doorbell rings during dinner, or when a delivery driver walks up the driveway. A dog can hold multiple titles and still be unsuited to a family home, because the sport was never designed to measure that.

Household suitability is its own body of work. It requires broad socialization across ordinary environments until the world registers as unremarkable, time actually living in a home rather than a kennel, and deliberate proofing of the dog doing nothing under provocation. We covered what the finished version looks like in what well-socialized actually looks like.

A program that treats sport titles as the finish line places dogs that are impressive on a field and unproven in a house.

How the two fit together

Read across the rows and the relationship is clear. The sport builds the mechanical foundation to a standard household training rarely reaches. Personal protection work takes that foundation, resolves the sport-specific habits, and adds the entire dimension of ordinary life that the trial field never examines.

Why the credential still matters to you

Anyone can describe their dogs as elite. Sport titles are earned in front of certified judges and recorded, which makes them one of the few verifiable claims in a category full of unverifiable ones.

What a title tells you is that the person training your dog has been measured against a standard by people with no stake in the outcome, repeatedly, over years. It does not tell you the dog in front of you is right for your home. Both things are true at once, and knowing the difference is what lets you evaluate a program properly.

When you are comparing programs, the useful questions are what order the dog was trained in, whether you can watch the release rather than only the engagement, and whether the dog has lived in a home. More of them are in questions to ask any protection dog company.

For how a controlled response differs from an instinctive one, see command-based vs. instinct-based protection. For what the full program timeline looks like, see how long it really takes to train a protection dog.

A trained dog that has never met you is a dog with excellent skills and no reason to give them to you. Transfer training is where that changes. It happens in your home, on delivery day, and what you do in the seven days that follow determines more about the next decade than anything else in the process.

What transfer training actually is

Our trainer brings the dog to your house and stays to work with you directly. You handle the dog. The trainer watches you handle the dog and corrects what you are doing, in real time, in the environment where you will actually be doing it.

The commands themselves take very little of that time. A list of words can be written on a card. What takes work is your delivery of them, and that is where almost every problem we see later has its origin.

What we correct in almost every session

These come up so consistently that we plan for them.

• Repeating the command. Saying it twice teaches the dog that the first one is optional. This is the single most common habit and the most damaging.
• Timing. A correction or a release given two seconds late connects to something other than what you meant.
• Body language contradicting the word. Leaning forward while asking for distance, or tensing the lead while asking for calm. The dog reads your body first.
• Tone drifting upward. Volume and pitch rising when the dog hesitates. Working dogs read escalation as uncertainty.
• Asking rather than telling. A command phrased as a question gets treated as one.
• Rewarding at the wrong moment. Praise delivered after the dog has already broken position reinforces the break.

None of these are difficult to fix. All of them are close to impossible to notice in yourself, which is why the session happens in person rather than as a video call or a printed guide.

What the session covers

Beyond the command work itself:

The daily routine. Feeding times, exercise, the structure the dog is accustomed to. Keeping this consistent for the first weeks removes one variable from an already new situation.

Introduction to your home. Where the dog sleeps, where its space is, which areas are open and which are not. Set before arrival where possible.

Your household and neighborhood. Everyone who lives there, plus a walk of the area the dog will be seeing every day.

Visitors and deliveries. How to handle the door, what to do when someone arrives, how to introduce a guest.

The protection commands. What initiates them, how to end them, and the circumstances where you should not use them. Most owners go the dog’s entire life without needing this, and the training exists so that the capability performs and then stops when told.

What normal adjustment looks like. So that an ordinary settling-in period does not get mistaken for a problem.

If two adults will handle the dog

Both should be present, with hands on the lead. Not one person attending and briefing the other afterward.

People give commands differently without realizing it, and the differences are exactly what a second-hand account will not capture. Two handlers working from one person’s memory of the session end up with two standards, and a dog with two standards learns which person to obey and which to wait out.

The requirement is not that one of you leads. It is that both of you are identical in the ways the dog can perceive: same words, same standard, one command said once.

The seven days after we leave

This is the window that decides how the next decade goes.

The dog is in a new house with a new person and no established relationship. Everything it learns about you in these days becomes its working model of what you mean and whether you mean it. Habits set here are the ones you will be living with.

Five things matter more than anything else:

1. Run the routine exactly as the trainer gave it. Same times, same words, same sequence. Improvisation comes much later, if at all.
2. Handle the feeding yourself. Whoever the dog will take commands from should be the one putting the bowl down.
3. Keep the household quiet. Holding off on visitors for the first several days makes everything after it easier.
4. Do the daily work every day. Ten focused minutes. The point is the repetition rather than the duration.
5. Leave the protection work alone. Do not test it, and do not demonstrate it for anyone.

Expect the dog to be quieter than you anticipated. A working dog in a new environment observes before it engages, and that caution is a stable dog collecting information rather than a sign of a bad match.

What to do when something feels off

Call us. That is the entire answer, and it is the thing owners are most reluctant to do.

People worry that a question in week one means they are failing. The opposite is true. A small issue at day three takes a two-minute phone call. The same issue at month four has had time to become a habit the dog now believes is the rule.

Lifetime support exists specifically so that nobody has to weigh whether something is worth asking about. There is no threshold you need to clear before calling.

Why this cannot be shipped

Some programs deliver dogs as cargo with a command list. The dog arrives trained and the handover is a document.

Everything above explains why we do it differently. The command list is the easy part, and the handler habits that determine whether those commands work are invisible to the person who has them. A trainer standing next to you in your own kitchen, watching your timing and your posture, fixes in an afternoon what would otherwise take months to surface and longer to undo.

For what the following months look like, see the first ninety days. For whether you have the background for this, see do you need prior experience. For what else a placement includes, see what’s actually included.

Around two years for a dog completing our full program. That is the short answer. The longer answer explains why the timeline is what it is, why some programs advertise far shorter ones, and what you are actually buying with the difference.

The timeline

The stages overlap rather than running strictly end to end, but the order in which capabilities are built is fixed. That order is not a preference, it is the mechanism, and we explained why in why protection training comes last.

Why it takes this long

Maturity cannot be rushed

This is the constraint people miss. A working breed is not mentally mature until somewhere around eighteen months to two years. Before that, a dog can learn a great deal but its judgment, confidence, and stability under pressure are still developing.

You can teach a young dog to bite. What you cannot do is verify that it will hold up under real pressure as an adult, because the adult does not exist yet. Waiting for maturity is not slow training, it is the only way to know what you actually have.

Socialization is accumulated, not taught

Obedience can be drilled. Neutrality cannot.

A dog learns that ordinary life is unremarkable by encountering enough of it, repeatedly, without consequence. Restaurants, crowds, elevators, dropped objects, raised voices, unfamiliar people moving quickly. That is a function of exposure over time and there is no way to compress it into a short course. It is also why our dogs spend time living in trainers’ homes rather than only in kennels, since a home is the environment the neutrality is for.

Proofing takes longer than teaching

Teaching a behavior is fast. Proving it holds under distraction, under pressure, in unfamiliar places, and under adrenaline takes far longer.

We spend more hours rehearsing a dog doing nothing under provocation than teaching it to engage. That imbalance is the entire safety mechanism, and it is invisible in any demonstration video.

The evaluation runs the whole time

Dogs are assessed continuously from around eight weeks and can come out of the program at any point if they do not meet the standard for nerve strength, stability, or temperament. Those dogs go to good homes, but they do not become placements. Keeping that standard requires the time to observe the dog under a wide enough range of conditions to judge it properly.

Why some programs advertise much shorter timelines

You will see protection dogs offered after a few months of training. The number is usually accurate. What it describes is a different product.

Shorter timelines are typically achieved by starting with bite work and layering obedience on afterward, by compressing or skipping the socialization phase, by placing dogs before maturity, or by having no washout standard so every dog that enters gets sold.

Any of those produces a dog faster. None of them produces the same dog. The difference does not show up in a demonstration, which is the problem, and it typically surfaces in a real household months later.

What if you do not need the full program

Not everyone does, and the timeline is one of the reasons.

We occasionally place dogs before they have completed the full program. For a buyer who wants a highly obedient, well-socialized dog with a protective presence rather than fully proofed protection work, that can be the better purchase, and it costs meaningfully less. It is worth raising during a consultation rather than assuming the longest timeline is the only option.

And if what you want is a well-trained family dog with strong obedience and a deterrent presence, that is a considerably shorter and cheaper path. We will tell you if that describes your situation.

What happens after you buy

The clock does not stop at purchase.

Customization. Once a dog is matched to you, we tailor its training to your household, environment, and expectations. You are not receiving a generic finished dog.

Transfer training, at delivery. A trainer brings the dog to your home and moves the command structure to you, covering your delivery of the commands, the daily routine, and how to manage visitors and deliveries. Details are in delivery and transfer training.

The first ninety days. The dog arrives finished. The relationship does not, and that takes about three months of consistency on your part. We walked through what that actually looks like in the first ninety days.

Then permanently. Ten minutes a day of maintenance work for the life of the dog. Training is a maintained state rather than a fixed trait, which is why refresher sessions and lifetime support are included rather than sold separately.

How long until you can have one

Different question, and usually a much shorter answer. Because dogs are in the program continuously at different stages, availability depends on which dogs are approaching completion and which one suits your household rather than on starting a two-year clock from your first phone call.

Some placements happen relatively quickly. Others involve waiting for the right individual dog, particularly for less common breeds or specific requirements. A consultation is the fastest way to find out what your realistic timeline looks like.

For where that time shows up in the price, see what goes into the cost of a trained protection dog.

Buyers evaluate protection dogs almost entirely on the last thing the dog learned. They watch the bite work, judge the intensity, and decide from there. Almost nobody asks what order the training happened in, which is unfortunate, because that single question tells you more about how the dog will behave in your home than any demonstration video ever will.

Protection work is the final stage of our program, not the first. That is not a scheduling preference. It is the mechanism that makes the finished dog safe, and reversing it produces something categorically different that looks identical from the outside.

The sequence

Three phases, in a fixed order, each one a prerequisite for the next.

Phase one: obedience is the delivery system

People think of obedience as the polite part of the program, the sit and stay that makes a dog pleasant to live with. In a protection dog it is doing something much more specific. It is the channel through which every other instruction travels.

A protection command is not special. It is a cue, the same as a recall or a place command, and it inherits whatever reliability the dog’s general obedience has. A dog whose recall fails at seventy percent under mild distraction will not somehow produce a hundred percent release under adrenaline. Whatever gap exists in ordinary obedience widens dramatically under pressure.

This is why the obedience phase is not rushed and not decorative. We are building the mechanism that the protection work will later depend on. If it is soft, everything built on it is soft, and the failure surfaces at exactly the moment it matters most.

The specific standard we want before moving on is compliance without negotiation. One command, first time, under increasing distraction, in environments the dog has never been in. Not a dog that complies when the situation is calm.

Phase two: socialization is where neutrality is built

This is the phase buyers understand least and the one that does the most work in a family home.

A dog’s threshold, the point at which it decides something warrants a response, is not fixed at birth. It is set largely by experience. A dog with a narrow experience of the world reads more things as significant, simply because more things are unfamiliar. A dog with a broad one reads almost everything as unremarkable.

So socialization is not about making a dog friendly. It is about making the ordinary world boring. Restaurants, bookstores, crowds, elevators, dropped objects, raised voices, running children, unfamiliar adults moving quickly. Every one of those, encountered enough times without consequence, gets filed as background.

That filing is what protection training later depends on. When we put a defensive response on cue, we need a dog that will not fire it spontaneously, and the only reliable way to get that is a dog for whom almost nothing qualifies as a trigger. You cannot teach a dog to ignore things it has never seen.

Our dogs also spend time living in trainers’ homes during this phase rather than only in kennels, and work in a training room built to mimic a house. The neutrality has to be built in the environment where it will be needed, not in a facility that bears no resemblance to it.

Phase three: what protection work adds

By the time a dog reaches protection training, it responds reliably to cues under pressure and treats normal life as unremarkable. Only then does adding a defensive response make sense.

The work itself is less about teaching the dog to engage than about defining the boundaries around engagement. When it starts, which is only on command. When it ends, which is immediately on command. And what does not count, which is everything else, rehearsed deliberately and repeatedly.

That last part consumes more training time than the engagement does. We spend far more hours proving the dog will do nothing under provocation than we spend teaching it to act. A dog that will engage is easy. A dog that will engage and then stop cleanly, under adrenaline, while fully committed, is the entire product.

What happens when the order is reversed

Some programs start with bite work, because it is the fastest route to a dog that looks impressive and the easiest thing to film. Obedience gets layered on afterward, socialization gets whatever time is left.

The result is a dog with real capability sitting on a foundation that cannot govern it. Three specific failures follow.

• The release is unreliable. The out was taught after the engagement rather than as part of it, so under real arousal the dog defaults to the behavior it learned first.
• The threshold is low and drifting. Without a neutrality baseline, the dog keeps making its own judgments about what qualifies, and every unchallenged reaction confirms its judgment.
• Obedience collapses under pressure. It was trained in calm conditions and never load-tested against the dog’s own drive.

From the outside this dog is indistinguishable from a properly built one. It engages hard, it looks controlled in a rehearsed demonstration, it photographs well. The difference only surfaces in a real household, usually months later, and usually as a surprise. We covered what that difference looks like in practice in command-based vs. instinct-based protection.

Why this takes longer and costs more

Being straightforward about the trade-off: this sequence is slower. Obedience to a genuine standard takes months. Socialization cannot be compressed because it depends on accumulated exposure over time, not on repetition in a single week. Protection work only starts after both.

A program that begins with bite work can produce a sellable dog considerably faster, and that speed is real. It shows up as lower prices and shorter waits. Buyers comparing on those two numbers alone will consistently choose the faster dog, which is why the market rewards the wrong order.

What you get for the extra time is the thing you cannot evaluate in a demonstration: a dog whose threshold is high, whose release is reliable, and whose default state around your family is indifference.

How to check the order yourself

Four questions, useful with any program including ours.

1. In what order was this dog trained, and how long was each phase? A clear, specific answer is a good sign. Vagueness here is the answer.
2. Show me the release, not the engagement. Ask to see the dog called off while fully committed.
3. What has this dog been proofed against doing? Ask for specifics: running children, an argument at raised volume, a stranger reaching toward the handler.
4. Has this dog lived in a home? A dog that has only ever lived in a kennel has not been socialized to the environment you are buying it for.

For what that training looks like once the dog is yours, see the first ninety days. For how this affects households with children, see are protection dogs safe around children.

Every protective dog will eventually decide something is a threat. The only question that matters is who gets to make that decision, the dog or you. That single distinction separates a trained protection dog from a liability, and it is the thing most buyers never think to ask about.

This is the argument underneath everything else we do, so it is worth setting out plainly.

The distinction in one sentence

An instinct-based dog protects when it perceives a threat. A command-based dog protects when you say so, and stops when you say so.

Both dogs may look similar in a demonstration video. Both may be genetically sound, physically capable, and impressive on a bite sleeve. The difference is not in what the dog can do. It is in what decides that the dog does it.

What instinct-based protection actually looks like

Most people picture a dog that has had no training at all. That is not the concerning case. The concerning case is a dog with genuine protective drive, decent genetics, and no structure imposed on it.

That dog is not neutral. It is running a threat assessment continuously, using criteria you did not set and cannot see. A stranger’s posture. A raised voice during an argument. A neighbor reaching over a fence. A delivery driver moving quickly. Some of those readings will match yours. Some will not, and you will find out which at the worst possible moment.

Three specific problems follow.

• The threshold is invisible. You cannot know where the line is until the dog crosses it, and by then the event has already happened.
• There is no reliable off switch. A dog that started on its own authority does not stop on yours. This is the part that creates real liability.
• The criteria drift. Every unchallenged reaction teaches the dog that its judgment was correct, which lowers the threshold over time rather than raising it.

None of this makes such a dog vicious. It makes it unpredictable, and unpredictable is the actual problem in a home with children, guests, contractors, and deliveries.

What command-based means in practice

A command-based dog has learned three things that an instinct-based dog has not.

First, that the protective response has a cue. It is initiated by a specific word or signal from its handler, not by the dog’s own assessment of a situation.

Second, that it has an ending. The dog releases and returns to a neutral state on command, immediately, regardless of how engaged it was a second earlier.

Third, and least obvious, that ordinary intensity is not a trigger. This is built by deliberately rehearsing the dog through pressure, noise, argument, fast movement, and unfamiliar people while requiring that it do nothing. The dog learns that arousal in its environment is not its business unless told otherwise.

That third piece is why a properly trained protection dog is calmer around a chaotic household than an untrained dog of the same breeding. It has been specifically taught that most of what happens in a house is none of its concern.

The release matters more than the bite

If you watch protection dog marketing, almost all of it shows the engagement. Very little shows what happens two seconds later.

That is backwards. Producing a dog that will bite is not difficult. Producing a dog that will stop biting the instant it is told, while fully committed and under adrenaline, is the hard part and the whole measure of the training. It is also the part that determines your legal exposure if the capability is ever used.

When you evaluate any program, including ours, ask to see the out. If a seller shows you ten videos of engagement and none of a clean release, you have learned something important.

Why the order of training is the mechanism

Command-based control is not a module you add at the end. It is produced by the sequence, and the sequence cannot be reordered without losing it.

Obedience comes first, because a cue only works on a dog that already responds to cues under distraction. Then socialization, because a dog cannot learn that ordinary life is neutral until it has been exposed to enough ordinary life to form that baseline. Only then does protection work begin, on a dog that already has both.

Reverse any of it and you get a dog with bite skills layered onto an unstable foundation, which is functionally an instinct-based dog with better technique. That is worse than no training, not better, because the capability has increased while the control has not.

This is also why our dogs spend time living in trainers’ homes and working in a training room built to mimic a house rather than a kennel. The neutrality has to be built in the environment where it will be needed.

The honest limits

Two things we will not claim.

Command-based control is not permanent without maintenance. It is a trained state, not a fixed trait. An owner who stops doing the daily work will see the dog’s responsiveness degrade over months, and a dog with degraded obedience under pressure is drifting back toward making its own decisions. Ten minutes a day is not a suggestion.

No dog is a machine. A command-based dog has a dramatically higher and more predictable threshold than an untrained one, not an infinite one. It still requires supervision around young children, still needs a space of its own, and still should never be provoked for entertainment. Anyone who tells you their dogs are entirely without risk is selling rather than explaining.

What to ask any seller

Four questions will tell you which kind of dog you are being offered.

1. In what order was this dog trained? Hesitation here is the answer.
2. Can I see the release, not just the engagement?
3. What has this dog been proofed against? Ask for specifics: noise, argument, running children, unfamiliar adults reaching toward the handler.
4. What would disqualify a dog from your program? A seller with no disqualifying criteria has no standard.

If you are working through whether this is right for your household, our pieces on protection dogs and children and whether you need prior experience cover the two questions that follow most often from this one. For what maintaining that control looks like day to day, see the first ninety days.