Police dog training videos have been an invaluable tool to help train these magnificent canines to help protect and serve.  Part of the reason that many police stations do not have a dog officer is that it costs so much to train a police dog and to get them further training sessions.  With police dog training videos, the overall cost of acquiring a good police dog has gone down.  But, anything on videotape or digital recording often gets viewed by people who really shouldn’t see it.

Not For Household Pets

Unless you are in the police force or a security company, please do not train your pet dog to do the things a police, army or guard dog can.  Dogs have a tendency to see everything as a great game.  When playing with each other, dogs like to play very rough, using their teeth.  In guard dog training videos and police dog training videos, dogs are encouraged to use their sense of play and their instinct to play with their teeth.

Police and guard dogs are trained to aim for a person, knock them down and clamp their teeth on an arm or leg and then not let go until they hear their master’s command.  These dogs are also trained to know when they are on duty and that when they are off-duty, some behaviors like biting are not allowed.  These facts are usually not part of police dog training videos, because they would be superfluous information to people who work and live with these dogs every day.

Big Trouble

If a pet dog learns how to take a human being down with his or her teeth thinking that it was a game, they will play this game with everybody.  Inevitably, the dog is put down and the owner sued into bankruptcy.  The police dog training videos themselves are not to blame.  Unsupervised kids or stupid pet dog owners are to blame.

If you have a child and a dog in your home, you need to supervise them regularly, just to be sure that the dog isn’t picking up any bad habits from the kids.  If your dog has begun to pick up on potentially dangerous behaviors learned from mimicking police dog training videos, positive reinforcement and professional training can often help get rid of these habits.  When in doubt, please muzzle your dog before going out in public.  Old dogs can and do learn new tricks, good and bad.

In many modern hunting dog trials, no animal is actually hunted.  A hunt is simulated and a pistol used only by a judge is shot into the air, but usually no animals are killed.  Since the dogs are not judged on killing an animal, there’s no need for the prey animal to be killed.  But hunting dog training videos often show grotesque actual hunts far away from field dog or gun dog trials.

Unnecessary Suffering

Hunting dog training videos focus on the things dogs do to assist a humans in the hunt.  It is always the human that actually does the killing.  In fact, the killing bite instinct has been bred out of a lot of breeds of dog, including the retriever breeds.  Instead, depending on the breed of dog, the clever canines find the prey, flush it out into the open for the human to shoot and then bring back the killed prey.

Sadly, today’s sport hunters are not very good shots.  They nick or maim their prey rather than kill them outright.  This means that the dogs often wrestle and bring back agonized prey in hunting dog training videos.  The trainer and camera person are often laughing about the feeble attempts for the prey to get away.  A real animal lover – and someone who has to hunt for food – considers it a duty to minimize any suffering.  Death for the prey is to be as quick as possible.

You also should never kill a prey animal just for the sake of shooting a hunting dog training video.  Although there is an incredible outcry over the abuse of animals in television and movies, there needs to be just as much outrage over the suffering and death of prey animals in hunting dog training videos.  If the dogs don’t need to kill animals as part of their training, then why bother killing them for dog hunting training videos?

What If?

Some proponents of dog hunting training videos showing actual deaths of animals claim that this merely is a picture of real life.  But what about police dog training videos?  Police dogs are trained to take down prisoners with their teeth.  But the people used for practice are always in larger protective suits.

If you wanted to show real police dogs in real work, then why don’t they make videos with real prisoners without protective gear being taken down by dogs?  It’s the same thing.  If you don’t like real prisoners being used to train police dogs, then you shouldn’t use real animals to make a hunting dog training video.