The method

How Angier K9 trains, in teaching order

The method as the trainers practise it on film, from what a dog needs before pressure means anything through to the handover and what keeps it working at home.

1. Before the first command
   Nothing is asked of a dog until the trainers know what they are dealing with.
2. What the dog works for
   The dog, not the trainer, decides what counts as a reward, so the program offers toys, touch, food and freedom and builds on the one he works for.
3. Reading the dog, and the handler
   Diagnosis comes before technique.
4. Pressure, relief and the word
   The unit the whole method is built from: a steady, low pressure held until the dog solves the problem himself, released the instant he does, with the word attached at the moment of relief so that it comes to mean the thing that turns the pressure off.
5. The command and its words
   The owner gets a small vocabulary and every word has one job: the command, a correction marker that sends the dog back into it, a second word that bans a behaviour, "good", and one release that means real freedom.
6. Does he really know it?
   A dog answers the earliest reliable signal, not the word, so until the hand, the body, the leash, the reward and the handler's pattern have been taken away, nobody knows what the dog knows.
7. The e-collar
   The number on the remote means nothing on its own: the right level is the smallest one that gets a clear response from this dog, in this place, today, and the stakes of the behaviour, not how soft or tough the dog looks, set how strong a correction is.
8. A fair correction
   A correction is fair when the dog can tell what caused it and could have avoided it, when it lands at the moment of the act, and when it is big enough to change his mind without being bigger or longer than what it answers.
9. When the dog argues back
   A dog does what he expects to work.
10. The session, and the real world
    A session is a dose, not an effort: short, mostly not commands, with freedom between reps, ended when quality drops or the heat rises and, where possible, on one clean rep.
11. The frightened dog
    A frightened dog is not disobedient: pushed far enough any dog freezes, flees or fights, and in panic he cannot choose.
12. Calm in the house
    Most of a dog's life is spent loose in a house with nobody asking anything.
13. The walk, and freedom
    Heel is two skills under one word, entry and motion, taught separately, and it is a tool picked up for a minute to get past something, not the shape of the walk.
14. Reactivity, bites and neutrality
    What families call aggression the trainers usually read as insecurity, a fear bite, over-arousal or a pattern that has been paying, and the goal is neutrality, not friendship: the dog may look, avoid, ignore or sniff, but not go after.
15. Other dogs, and the right home
    When two dogs share a house, they are trained and judged as a pair in that house, with each dog's name, rules and needs kept separate.
16. The handover, and after
    After a board-and-train the dog usually knows the job; what fails is the owner.
17. Protection work (specialist module)
    The bite-work curriculum, recorded mostly in Dolce's file with Bane, Savage and a few others.