TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – The 60th Security Forces Squadron hosted their fourth annual working dog competition April 14 and 15 at Travis Air Force Base, California.
The two-day competition had 42 handlers from 26 police departments who completed tasks in narcotics and explosive detection, agility, obedience, search and aggression stages.
“Our overall goal is training,” said Staff Sgt. James Miller, 60th Security Forces Squadron military working dog handler and competition organizer. “It is a competition. We do hand out trophies, but we’re here to learn from each other. Different police departments have different tactics. We’re there to learn their tactics and they’re there to learn from us.”
Day one was strictly detection, said Miller. Teams were tasked to find narcotics and explosives. Day two was built-in with agility, obedience, search and aggression stages.
“Agility is our basic obedience course,” said Miller. “It incorporates some daily activities we might see in the field. We have stairs, tunnels, A-frames and catwalks just to make sure the dogs can complete the tasks.”
Agility guarantees the dog is capable of performing the task and to verify the dog will listen to the commands it’s given, said Miller.
“Obedience is everything you learned in basic,” said Miller. “You did marching movements in basic training. We do that same thing with our dogs: left-face, right-face and about-face.”
For the search phase of the competition, efforts were made for a real-world feel.
“When we get a dispatch of a suspect that’s hiding in a vehicle lot, at that point you’re going to cut your dog off leash,” said Miller. “Your dog should go out and search the vehicles and alert on the vehicle that the decoy, or in this case the bad guy, is in.”
During the aggression stages task, the dogs faced distractions.
“For distractors, we had a decoy out there with a bunch of toys,” said Miller. “A lot of our dogs are toy driven. We literally threw a bunch of toys out for the dog and made sure the dog would run past and attack the decoy.”
The competition ended with a catered award ceremony.
“Western States Police Canine Association has rules,” said Miller. “Whichever county or department that hosts the competition cannot compete, to make it fair. However, we were able to have our explosive dogs compete; and they won first place overall.”
Handlers strive to bring new and innovative training to their four-legged teammates.
“There is more than one way to train a dog,” said Miller. “Every dog is different. Every dog learns different. If you can find out something that works for their dogs, we can definitely bring it back to home station, and try it with our dogs to see if we can develop our dogs to get better.”
The next working dog competition is scheduled to be held in Stanislaus County on May 20.