There will be room for discussion, exercises and demonstrations, so the number of participants for this seminar will be limited to 20 people. The seminar will be aimed at people who have experience in working with detection dogs.
The seminars are organized regularly. If you are interested, please inform us through the link below and we will inform you personally when the next seminar is scheduled.
Many organisations that utilze detection dogs recruit dog handlers from their internal staff. These people are then well aquainted with the way in which their organization works, its goals, and have an idea which role the detection dogs play in this process. They will like dogs, and sometimes have an affinity to training through obedience or other courses followed with private dogs. But there is no performance pressure there.
Working dogs, however, have tasks that need to be performed in an efficient and reliable way. Therefore, the training of these dogs needs to be efficient and reliable too. Handlers that work with their dog often do not have the necessary training experience. FDTA can provide different services to assist the education of handlers, varying from offering tailor made seminars on scent detection, learning theory, and logical training programs, to more practical courses where handler learn to set goals in training and achieve them.
FDTA can offer services to government or private organizations that use working dogs to perform their task to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the training and use of these dogs. Working dogs require regular training, handlers need to be able to conduct this training in a timely, effective and efficient manner, and a quality control system has to be in place to ensure that the dog/handler teams are optimally capable of delivering the required performance.
By reviewing the initial and maintenance training process, analyzing performance problems and bottlenecks and measuring the performance of the teams, FDTA can provide insight into the quality status of the working dogs. FDTA can also offer solutions that will have a lasting effect on the manner in which the teams are utilized, either through advice or through implementation of such advice.
Articles published in Canis in 2014 – 2015 by dr. Adee Schoon.