KNPV Guarding an Article Exercise

CCPROTECTIONDOGS.COM

The Koninklijke Nederlandse Politiehond Vereniging (KNPV) is a dog sport originating in Holland that uses a number of exercises in an attempt to mimic situations encountered by police k9 units. One such exercise is centered around guarding an object.

For dogs with a natural protective instinct, training to guard an article should not be a difficult task. The same guard drive that a canine would have experienced in the wild to protect food, a den or young puppies, can be applied to any object. For the K.N.P.V. exercise, the dog's are trained to ignore distractions such as a people walking past the article, and to attack the decoy who will attempt to take the article. The article can be any object, but medium-sized objects such as a bag, or coat are often used. After the dog has taken a bite on the decoy, the decoy will  step back, at which point the dog will return to the article without any outside command.

As with many K.N.P.V. exercises, the idea behind it is well-intentioned, but the execution of the exercise as a sport is inevitably unsuitable for a real world scenario. The scenario that this exercise depicts is one in which someone has carelessly left something of value in a wide-open, public space. Imagine that you have something of great importance that you need protected, but instead of locking it inside of a building, within a contained, fenced-off area, you have left it out in the middle of a park. This is, essentially, the K.N.P.V. scenario. In a real scenario, Protection Dogs are most often used to prevent intruders from entering a specific area rather than guarding a specific object. This is due to the simple fact that if you have an object valuable enough to hire highly skilled Elite Protection Dogs to protect it, you are better off preventing intruders from even coming near the object rather than waiting until they have fully grasped it.

Although we have great respect for the KNPV dog sport, one should always remember that it is only a sport. Guard Dogs and Personal Protection Dogs should be trained for real world scenarios, not for sport.