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Retraining the K-9 trainer.

© Jewl Wall

It was my honor to meet Tom, a K9 trainer, a couple of months ago. Tom trains dog to go into police military service work and he does some breeding. He recently found out about seizure alert dogs and is interested in learning more about them and then train them for the public. I interviewed him not too long ago.

Tom has been training protection dogs for ten years and then stopped for a couple of years. He now has been training them for five years. He has always enjoyed training hound and hunting dogs.

The first time he became interested in protection dog training, he was given a big German Sheppard that had lots of drive. He recognized his good traits, so he trained him and went on to train four more after him. Then he met a marine dog trainer and they began to train dogs together for a couple of years.

Five years later his daughter came over with a male Boxer puppy. He was nine to ten months old, and he was so rowdy that his grandkids could not play with him outside. Tom advised her that she either have the dog obedient trained or get rid of him. She gave the puppy to him for training. This rekindled his interest in training.

Tom likes to train Belgian Malinois, Dutch Shepherds, because he feels they are the best breed for military and police service. He trains the puppies until they are one year to eighteen months old. Depending on the type of advanced training a puppy will have and method of training, it could take another six months. In this type of police/military work Tom teaches everything from obedience to bite work, tracking, and agility to passive alert odor detection. He trains with either German or Dutch commands.

Tom has had a seizure disorder for a long time. One of his dogs that he has trained is starting to respond while he is having a seizure. Tom is interested in becoming a trainer or helping someone to train his or her dog for seizure alert. He has been learning more about assistance and seizure alert dogs. He has been using the internet for a lot of sources, like message boards and talking to people. He is finding one thing though, people with any experience are keeping their training to themselves. Of course with the demand for dogs, people can not train them for free, unless they have the empathy that another sufferer might have.

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