Muzzle Fighting for Police Service Dogs

With Ed Frawley & Kevin Sheldahl

89 Videos

3 Hours of Content

This course was produced in 2021 by Kevin Sheldahl and Ed Frawley.  Back in 2005 Kevin and Ed produced a DVD by the same title. 

Working police K9's in muzzles has come a long long way in the past 16 years. 

Video Podcast: The Evolution of Muzzle Fighting in Police K9 Training

29Mn 50 Sec

Teaching a new or experienced dog to work in a muzzle has obvious advantages. Besides eliminating protective equipment which in and of itself is important, more importantly, muzzle training allows us to teach decoys to work dogs without offering a presentation.

A presentation simply means the decoy offers an arm (or leg) for the dog to bite. Do that enough times and we have a dog that looks for a presentation when engaging the decoy or the suspect. It doesn't take long to search YouTube to find a video of police dogs bouncing along next to a fleeing suspect looking for a presentation to bite. Most are not bad dogs, they are just dogs that have not had correct training.

Good muzzle training eliminates that problem.

Kevin is a qualified Police Service Dog Teaching Judge (Utah POST) with extensive experience teaching police officers to become service dog trainers. 

Kevin is a retired police K9 handler/instructor. He is also an internationally recognized Police K9 judge and is certified as an expert witness in state and federal court on police K9 cases.

He has trained police K9 handlers all across America. Twice a year he holds six-week classes for new police dog handlers. In the past 25 years, Kevin has taught over 65 of these six-week courses. 

This course has in-depth and detailed segments on the following subjects:

• How to correctly measure a dog for a muzzle
• How to condition a dog to willingly accept wearing a muzzle, using reward-based training methods
• Training the decoy.
• The foundation of teaching your dog to punch the decoy while wearing a muzzle
• Training scenarios that reflect real-world deployments for police dogs.

Our course will only be offered in this online format. There is simply too much information to fit on a new DVD disk.

89 Videos | 187 Minutes of Video