Want to learn about K9 obedience, police dog training, learning theory and more? Jerry Bradshaw has been a sports competitor and police dog trainer for 25 years, and as the executive director of the Protection Sports Association he's been around the world competing and training K9s. Welcome to the Controlled Aggression podcast.
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Preventing early queues in training to your canine.
Teaching your dog that their actions initiate activity from the target.
Morphing reactivity into proactivity.
Having a training progression to move away from the handler and decoy help of early foundational training.
Key Takeaways:
You want your dog to be willing to initiate, even if there's no reaction or triggers from the decoy.
As humans, it is easy for us to identify that a random extremity is part of a larger human being. It takes dogs longer to look at that picture and figure out that what they are seeing is attached to the target, which is a passive human being.
Have a plan if your dog is struggling with proactivity to go back to foundational elements. Don't get in the habit of assisting them with movement every time.
Allow context to work for you. Avoid creating anticipation and let the training and context work by changing the picture the dog sees.
"So don't be lazy. Set up your civil sessions, your scenarios, and make sure as the dog comes into the training area that we're setting up these situations that were not leaving clues on the ground in the form of equipment." — Jerry Bradshaw
The importance of mandatory eye contact and how to generalize for distance work.
Moving from negative reinforcement to positive punishment to move from escape to avoidance.
Training progressions to train mandatory eye contact with your dog.
Transitioning from lure to reward to variable reward.
Key Takeaways:
To get your dog to pay attention to your face, consider putting a food reward in your mouth - like hot dogs, cheese, or chicken.
Build duration before you build distance in your training progression. If they aren't paying attention at 2 feet, they're not going to pay attention at 20 feet.
You have to take the training wheels off as you move between training progression levels.
When you get to trial, you have to operate on an extinction condition - there is no reinforcement or rewards on the field, so it is better to have your dog on a very, very thin variable reward schedule by that point. That only comes through training progressions and systematic generalization.
"If we never get to the point where the dog understands there's a correction for inattention, then that's not going to be a very reliable tool for us for attention at a distance. We want to generalize it. We want to continue to create a systematic desensitization to all the things that the decoy might do."— Jerry Bradshaw
Different ways to deliver pressure reliably to your canine while tracking how the dog is doing while under that pressure.
Understanding the baseline bite pressure.
Reading your canine's body language while in a bite.
How training under pressure is a progressive thing that never ends.
Training emotional regulation in your dog from a young age.
Training under the assumption that something is going to go wrong and, at some point, something will bother your dog.
Key Takeaways:
When we don't bring civil aggression and pressure into the biting, we can get failures in the bite. Build in the training now, build the resiliency, give your dog something to lean into when things get stressful.
When trained to handle pressure, police canines can be used to bring suspects into custody in a way that is safer for both the suspect and the officers involved.
Where most training gets in trouble is when an inexperienced decoy is working with an inexperienced dog, or when training progressions are rushed.
You do not have to go to the lengths of physically hurting dogs in order to create resilience. People do that when they don't actually understand what they're doing.
Stress inoculation is an ongoing training process for the dog's whole life. It is not something that will be finished at any point. It must happen both gradually and variably.
Not everything boils down to genetics. Environment and training are also key to getting the most out of any dog.
"Conditioning is training. You have to show the dog the pictures. You have to run through the processes. You have to be aware of what you can do with this dog and where he is in the levels of training. Stress and pressure then become predictable and addressable by the dog. This is so important. If they never see stuff, it's not predictable." — Jerry Bradshaw
Essentials of Civil Aggression
Season 1 · Episode 160
Friday, July 10, 2026 • Duration 56:44
In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:
Bringing more civil aggression into your sport or police dogs.
Utilizing prey guarding to start training young dogs for proactive defense.
The difference between uncontrolled aggression and expressive aggression.
What to look for in a patrol dog regarding civil aggression.
The three ways dogs manifest a reaction to a threat.
Key Takeaways:
In our training for our police dogs, we're concentrating on these civil aggression essentials and thinking about how that decoy can bring about some of that aggression, and then we can start to minimize the cues that bring out that aggression, and then it becomes much more contextual.
Don't let people make you believe that just because a dog shows expressiveness and aggression in an expressive way, the dog will become uncontrollable and incapable.
Defense is not a dirty word. There's nothing to be scared of. Defense is not a weakness.
When promoting aggression and tapping into the defensive side of the dog, and building confidence in those reactions is ignored, oftentimes the dog cannot figure out how to bring a prey response out of a decoy, which can lead to displacement behaviors.
"It's easier to cap a dog when he understands how to be expressive than to never allow him to be expressive in the beginning." — Jerry Bradshaw
In today's podcast short, Jerry Bradshaw discusses issues with muzzle attacks in the PSA Level 2, noting that many dogs and handlers struggle with this exercise. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the fundamentals of a good muzzle fight and suggests starting with unsuited muzzle work to build civil aggression. Jerry advises limiting strikes in training sessions to manage your dog's frustrations and to gradually introduce other equipment, such as bite suits and hidden sleeves. He stresses the need for decoys to provide accurate feedback and to avoid distractions in early training sessions, especially when starting out on muzzle work.
"We want the dog biting through the muzzle. The muzzle is just something that's keeping him from biting that decoy."— Jerry Bradshaw
Keeping in mind the olfactory and visual cues of a bite suit that we don't often consider.
Reducing equipment fixation, creating habits of engagement, and training the behaviors you want into your dog.
Why your dog needs to believe the bite suit is irrelevant.
Focusing training on the most likely scenarios your dog will encounter.
Key Takeaways:
Too much suit work creates a false sense of security for your dog.
Active aggression is a trained response, usually to an invasion of territory or other behaviors soliciting that reaction. Through classical conditioning, we can train dogs to show that behavior in training and, in turn, active scenarios in deployment.
Create a habit of engagement. During the development of your younger dogs, you want to develop that habit so they know where they're going to bite, so they don't get into a state of choice paralysis.
Train leg bites - it is typically the easiest and most likely place the dog will be able to get a bite on in most engagements.
You're increasing the probability of real engagements every time you deemphasize the cues of odor and visuals from suits.
"We want to camouflage these suits with different visual patterns, randomize the visual cue of that suit, and so that means different colors, textures, covering those suits with, jeans, jackets, raincoats, sheets, layers of blankets, right, all of these things to make the picture look a lot less like a guy in a bite suit, and a lot more like what a suspect might look like on the street."— Jerry Bradshaw
Today, Jerry outlines the 2026 Police Canine Services offered by Tarheel Canine Training. They offer instructor courses multiple times per year, unit canine training, and sell green dual and single canines. The selection process is low-stress, with dogs undergoing four months of training before handler courses. They also provide handler course-ready dogs and SWAT integrated canines. You can also look to Tarheel Canine for seminars that cover tracking, detection, street readiness, and high-risk deployments. If you're looking to get individualized training for your dogs and departments, reach out to Tarheel Canine.
Getting your dog off the bite as quickly as you can when the threat has diminished to a reasonable level.
The importance of being proficient in more than one option for your dog when you're in an engagement.
The importance of your dog being willing to accept lower value rewards in the presence of a potential bite.
Mastering verbal, mechanical, and manual release protocols.
Transitioning from negative reinforcement to positive punishment - from escape to avoidance.
Key Takeaways:
Practice your call-offs in stressful situations during training. You're practicing for real-life situations, and real life is not going to be stress-free.
Trying to pull your dog off will create more opposition and make it more difficult to release the dog. Pushing into the bite will often make it easier to release your dog via the gag reflex.
You don't want to use your handcuffs as a standard breakstick stand-in, so that you are not creating anticipation and an association with handcuffs and releasing.
Not every release protocol or piece of equipment is going to work best for every dog. You will have to try different things to see what works best for your dog.
It comes down to handlers needing to, in training, work at being proficient in the proper application of all the correct methods to get the dog to release. We have to be able to start getting them to realize, based on a training setup, what's going to be the more appropriate approach to getting a dog to release in that situation.
Rewards make behaviors repeatable. Failure to reward releases and training makes biting something to fight for, and we don't want that dog constantly coming out thinking this is the last time he's ever going to get it, and he has to fight with all of his life to get it back.
Back to the Laboratory in Bite Work
Season 1 · Episode 156
Thursday, April 23, 2026 • Duration 01:23:39
If your dog won't counter full, won't push into the fight, or spins away when you approach, this episode is for you. Jerry breaks down exactly why these bite work issues happen and how to rebuild the foundation so your dog bites harder, fuller, and with real confidence.
In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:
Drive channelling as a confidence builder for your dog.
Bite work problems and their solution strategies.
Inducing counter bites, getting appropriate pressure when biting, and encouraging pushing into the bite.
Reasons to train your out before your bite work and not create an association that may create an out you don't want.
The three types of pressure you need to account for are creating desensitization to distraction objects.
Key Takeaways:
If a dog doesn't know how to fight out of its problems, you may get displacement and avoidance creeping in.
Training bite work in young dogs may require different techniques than those used for training with older dogs.
When you train with a crutch, you will, eventually, need to wean yourself off the crutch.
Make sure your decoys aren't bailing. Make sure they aren't sidestepping, dropping their arms, or pulling the dogs into their chest. That is only going to make it worse.
It is very important to be able to get your dog out in many different ways. That is going to require desensitization to anything you're going to bring near the dog's head.
We have to work on type, intensity, and duration of pressure, and our goal is to desensitize objects early in training. The more the dog can see those things, the more he can negotiate through weird stuff that he hasn't seen before; the more the dog will understand what he's supposed to do and how he's supposed to do it.
Attention, Direction & Draw
Season 1 · Episode 155
Thursday, March 26, 2026 • Duration 01:01:57
In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:
Thinking about the end game from the beginning of your training.
Creating neutrality through all kinds of distractions.
Look at me, look at me, look at that, and look at that while giving commands for your dog.
Balancing the draw to fight against drift.
Key Takeaways:
Attention is the dog's anchor. Give them a point to focus on that allows them to be neutral to everything else around. You have to control a dog's eyes to control their behavior.
You want to lay the foundation for sending on command, not sending on agitation, and discriminating between the two early on in your training.
Create neutrality through time on the field.
No matter how advanced your dog is, keep working on your fundamentals. That is where the strength lies when you are in actual scenarios.
"One of the most important fundamental exercises of attention is teaching the dog to look at me, then look at that, and then look back to me, and then look back to that, and change it up for the dog where I point the dog at different things that might be of concern to him." — Jerry Bradshaw
"If our training never matches what an operational situation is going to look like, then the out procedure, whether it's a physical one or a verbal one, is going to be far different than anything that we've trained in the past, and it's going to look very different to the dog."
"One of the things that we know is that the grip itself is the barometer of how the dog feels when he's biting. So if the dog doesn't feel super confident about biting, he's going to create a little bit of distance between himself and the perceived conflict, which could be the helper itself." — Jerry Bradshaw
