Chimera Kennels

Hi i was thinking as of late, thinking about a 4th pack member, as there were more than 30 home invasions last month, 10 in one week, a bank robbery where the suspects tried to car jack a car on there way out, car drove off so they shot at it, then sucessfully car jacked someone drove off and got away from the cops, suspects have not be caught, this month someone got stabbed when confronting someone trying to break into there car, and 11 days ago there was a home invasion on my street, luckily someone noticed suspicious activity and called the police, suspects were caught all 5, 3 females 2 male juveniles, in a town as big as my moms this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but in this town there is so much rift raft out here, and the town is so small its just a big mix of good and bad, and somethings always going down! sry for long read

This got me thinking about guarding and protecting, i was wondering how many of you consider your dogs Guard dogs, and your dogs just pp dogs, i know there is a difference, i know it takes alot more guts for a dog to protect its territory when no one is home, and i am assuming this is where defense drive comes into play, lee would you consider the American Sentinel a guard dog? or a protection dog? how about you david and your dogs? what does it take for a dog to guard? what kind of drives would you look for? and what would you look for??? thx in advance....

It depends upon the breeding plan.

You may not be able to make all PP dogs into sentry dogs (dogs with defense behavior), or all sentry dogs into PP dogs...but if you have a sentry dog with high pack instinct you can certainly make a decent to good PP dog out of it. And, if that sentry dog also has prey or fight drive, then a good trainer should be able to make an excellent PP dog out of it. This is what the perfect American Sentinel is.The family companion guardian is a "sentry" type dog (a dog with strong defense and some suspicion) that protects both home and family. We also want the prey and fight instinct because that makes it easier to train and results in a dog with a greater degree of commitment. The American Sentinel should protect its home with defense and fight instincts though. Due to training, it protects the family on command via conditioned training by incorperating the command/attack response via classical conditioning. This is done by a conditioning the stimuli (the command) to an unconditioned stimuli (the challenger) with a natural response (the fight). The strong pack instinct helps ensure loyalty. Prey drive and intelligence improves the efficiency of the training.

A family companion guardian SHOULD be both a sentry dog and a PP dog. It's job is to protect both home and family.

SOME people think that a  dog can't be both a good PP dog and a good sentry dog. Personally, I strongly disagree. Now, my reason for this is because I do NOT confuse a PP dog with a patrol dog. A patrol dog may or may not make a good sentry dog, and a good sentry dog may not make a good patrol dog...but if a bond exists between a sentry dog with good pack drive, it can make an excellent PP dog.

I say this because a reliable sentry dog must have (IMO) good defense drives. If it has more than this, that's great...but defense itself is important in a sentry dog.

A patrol dog that does apprehension work doesn't need defense. It can have it, but it may not be needed. Some rank, which is a type of defense, can cebe beneficial in patrol work, but many handlers of patrol dogs would agree that defense isn't actually required for that type of work.

A good PP dog should have fight drive.

All of the above will benefit from having a decent amount of fight drive...but the majority of the dogs out there don't have true fight drive and yet many of those dogs still do rather well.

I would recommend reading our article on Animal Behavior.

Thanks for the reply nice read... 

Reading back through my post, I was a bit wordy and redundant there. I was going back through it to revise it some, but I am tired and I believe it  gets the point across. It has been a very good, but very long day so that will have to do for now. Be sure to check out the link on Animal Behavior though. It is probably worded better..as I wasn't as tired when I wrote that.

I'm getting old. LOL.