Testing Protocol

By David Reaver

Adlerhorst has the most comprehensive procurement program in the industry. We travel to Europe 6 to 8 times a year seeking out dogs for Police Service. It is important to us that each of our customers finds a dog that is suitable, however, due to some serious problems with testing dogs immediately after their arrival in this country, we must adhere to the following testing criteria.

All the dogs will be stressed for the first few days, some for up to two weeks. We have found that adding more stress to an already stressed dog may result in lowering their immune system to the point where they will almost certainly become sick. Kennel cough may turn into pneumonia, which can cause a lung infection, which has been fatal to some dogs.

We have experienced numerous cases of heat prostration of varying degrees when dogs are tested repeatedly, even on days when the temperature is mild. Generally, the temperature here is 15 to 30 degrees higher than in Europe.

It is not unusual for the dogs to have traveled 1,000 plus miles in a van across Europe just prior to being shipped in a crate an additional 6,000 miles.

Most dogs are tested and selected with specific agencies in mind. This means you may not test each dog in the kennel to select one or two. We will almost always have several suitable dogs for you to test.

As the dogs arrive here, they are trained in a sport. Their orientation toward biting is not a man, but equipment. (Suit or sleeve). With proper training techniques a sport dogs drives, measured on the equipment he is trained on, can be transferred to accepting the man as prey, within two weeks.

Any attempt to measure a dogs desire to bite a human Vs equipment prematurely may make it difficult to balance that dogs drives in the future. Our goals should be to develop the same drive on the man as the equipment, if a dog is made defensive in early confrontations with a man, he may forever be to defensive.

The end result not only is a dog that doesn’t bite well, but a dog that will not search well. A dog will not search for someone he has to defend himself from when he finds them!

1. Dogs are to be tested on the equipment they have been conditioned to. We will advise you of the equipment.
2. Agencies that want to conduct tests where the primary prey is the human may notify us. We will have dogs for you to test approximately 2 weeks after returning from a buying trip.
3. A member of our staff must be present throughout the testing process. For your safety, as well as the dogs well being a staff member must handle the dog during testing.
4. If two agencies are interested in the same dog, we will test them for both at the same time, using our handler and an agitator of your choice.
5. No dog may be tested more than once every two hours.
6. At the first sign of mental or physical fatigue the dog will be returned to a kennel.

We provide a guarantee with all our dogs. If a dog does not perform at the same level observed in Europe, we will guarantee the dog will transition properly from sport to police service within 2 weeks with proper training.