Controlled Aggression - Back to the Laboratory in Detection

Mar 07 2025 69 mins 8

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In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:

The practical differences between direct reward conditioning and indirect reward conditioning.
Primacy of learning and conditioning hunting as a means of locating odor.
Understanding the foundations built into your dog’s early training.
Utilize the quality of hunting as the barometer to show your dog’s interest.
Giving varied and unique hiding places for the odor to your dog in training.
Creating sticky behavior in your dog when searching.
Building variability to maintain behavior over time.

Key Takeaways:

In the direct reward methodology, we are pairing hunting and odor recognition. It teaches an olfactory queue to get an obedience behavior.
In the indirect methodology, we pair the final response and the odor recognition.
Variation in hunting volume and variable reward in finding the target order are extremely important.
Remove handler dependency as much as possible. You don’t want your canine to be obsessed with you, your reward delivery, and presentations. You want them to have enough independence to do their work without influence from you.
Mimic what you see in deployment in your training and in-services. Those pictures should be aligned, your dog doesn’t know the difference.
Clearing blanks is something your dog needs to know how to do because that is what they’re going to see often in deployment.

"Variable reward is the thing that's going to really keep your dog at a high level of engagement in the hunting process over longer periods of time and more area that we're asking them to cover, and it's very important to master variation in how you do detection." — Jerry Bradshaw

Get Jerry's book Controlled Aggression on Amazon.com

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Website: controlledaggressionpodcast.com

Email: [email protected]

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