Police K9 Training: Reading & Understanding Your Dog

Police dogs are a massive part of our law enforcement, utilizing their strengths that we as humans do not have. It’s spectacular, but at the same time, working with dogs is much harder than working with other humans. Between us and k9s is a language barrier--an inability to communicate as fluidly as with one person to another. Police K9 training, for example, requires a lot more time and effort for both the dog and handler to develop an effective understanding of one another. We at Julius-k9 are a supplier of dog equipment across the US. We are trusted among police officers with the high quality of our gear, and many will come across our supplies when searching for a dog harness near me. We want to take a moment to describe a little bit about what goes into understanding our furry companions.


Components of Understanding and Communication

Learning to communicate with our K9 allies takes careful and consistent training. This can be described as learning to read the dog from the human’s perspective. There are several ways that this is learned over the duration of the training.

  • Identifying indicators
    • Indicators are signals that a dog sends that something has changed and they are aware. In many cases, this can lead to the dog lashing out in some way if not properly handled by the handler. Every dog is different and has their own personalities, so they may also have different indicators; however, there are some consistent, popular indicators many have seen. A sharp, sudden head turn indicates that the dog has noticed something out of the ordinary. A handler needs to pay close attention to the dog to control their environment. A change in breathing functions as another common indicator. A sudden change in breath can indicate that a new smell.
  • Close attention 
    • Piggybacking off of indicators, there are many small details that often go unnoticed by the untrained handler that are worth paying attention to. For example, a dog’s hearing is far stronger than that of a human. It’s important for officers to pay attention to the ears of their K9 partner. These police dogs will be able to hear and react to various
  • Like learning to read
    • We learn to read with our eyes and not our ears, yet many of us might not pay attention to a dog’s warning signals unless they start barking. Officers in training with their police dogs might wear noise-cancelling headphones. This forces the office to pay much closer attention to the dog’s body language--allowing them to learn much more subtle indications.

The Value of Police K9 Training

As already mentioned, dogs have many skills that we humans lack. In particular, their sense of smell and hearing are much stronger. This allows these dogs to assist us in ways we wouldn’t be able to do on our own, such as hearing subtle sounds of an escaping criminal, or using their noses to locate objects or people. By working together, we’re able to accomplish more than either would be capable of individually, and we’ve seen it work.


Contact Us for a Dog Harness Near Me

Julius-K9 is a major supplier of dog equipment for pups of many different shapes and sizes. Whether you need a dog harness near me, a leash, or a new collar, we have the supply to meet your demand. We have supported police dogs for years, as well as police K9 training, and we understand that it’s helped make our world a better place. We can supply to clients across the US, so wherever you are in this country, we can help you and your dog connect on a whole new level. For more information about our products, contact us today.