Article here -
K-9 Pit Bulls Show Rescue Dogs ‘Have What It Takes’ To Be Police Pups
It’ll be interesting to see how this works out given that the pitbills I’ve seen in public have been pretty dog aggressive if they come upon another pooch. My biggest question, however, is the cost of a shepherd type police dog. Are they really $20,000 each as cited in the article?
I’ve had Pibbles, and they don’t have to be dog-aggressive.
One reason for the expensive GSDs, I’m guessing, is that police and search & rescue probably get their GSDs from Germany. Dogs in the US have been overbred, and tend to all sorts of problems, and don’t make very good dogs for the police, military, S&R, etc. Even Seeing-Eye, if someone requests a GSD, gets one from Germany-- or did. I met someone at the National Federation of the Blind Convention several years ago with a GSD who explained it to me, but told me that Seeing-Eye really didn’t like getting GSDs and tried to talk people out of it. He had some good reason-- he lived on some family property and did a lot of walking on rough terrain, which I guess Labs don’t do as well on as GSDs. I guess shepherd dogs in general have thicker pads, and Labs have webbed toes, which shepherds don’t. That’s the main reason, I think, for people wanting GSDs.
I’d assume $20k includes quite a bit of basic training - a young but mature dog ready for final matching to a handler and detail training. Not just a puppy.
It also includes the pedigree. I know someone who got a “pet quality” (as opposed to “show quality”) Collie with papers, and it was still a few thousand dollars. If you want a dog vetted for police work, and then you add flying the dog in from Germany, and the chaperone’s ticket, fee, plus whatever it costs to negotiate getting the dog, and then there are probably tariffs or duties, and who knows what kind of other things-- getting a German Shepherd probably costs close to $10,000 just to get a puppy into the US.
I presume that even well-vetted, some dogs that get here don’t make the cut, so probably the amount of money spent in total is divided by the number of dogs who “make it,” to get the cost per dog. If two out of three dogs make the final cut, then the total cost for each dog is $15,000, if each one originally cost $10,000. Maybe the police sell the wash-outs (who are still high quality dogs as far as pets go) for $2,000 per. That still means each dog cost $14,000.
And I’m totally WAGging the wash-out rate. It could be much higher.
True they don’t, and don’t have to be obsessively friendly to people which is also different than the ‘standard’ personality of herding dogs, more wary of people they don’t know. But dogs are individuals, and human training can have a big effect.
However our ‘pit bull’ type dog is true to the breed tendency of APBT’s: she must ingratiate herself with every human (and does a hell of a job), but she’s extremely aggressive toward other dogs. Training her to bite people when ordered or not to fight other dogs, both hard to imagine. But she’s set in her ways, not a puppy to be molded.
I had a Pibble/GSD mix, who totally had a Pibble personality. She slept in my bed, and liked to be spooned.
I started training her not to jump on people when she weighed only 7lbs, because I knew how big she’d get. By the time she was an adult, she would walk up to new people and sit at the feet and wait to be pet. I had to explain what she was doing.
She also had a puppy ethic. If she played with a little puppy, she’d pin it very gently a couple of times, and she’d wrestle, and go belly up, and let the puppy pretend to pin her. She did it with the cats too. One of our cats liked to play with her, and sometimes he’d do a flying tackle (several feet in the air) to her flank, and she’d follow over very really dramatically, like the 10lb. cat really knocked over 80lbs of her. It was so funny.
You’re missing the key sentence from the article you link to:
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Pit bulls are notoriously stranger-friendly, and (while dogs are individuals) generally poor choices for apprehending fleeing suspects and/or bite work (you typically want a “guardian breed” for that).
However, they can be quite good at nose work, such as the drug sniffing mentioned in the article. The all-time record US drug bust dog is Popsicle, a rescued pit bull.
It’s more conceivable our ‘pit bull’ could be trained to sniff drugs than bite people, but her sense of smell isn’t very good for a dog either. I can tell her animal detection ability is inferior to our previous hound-type. She would be really good at fighting other dogs (she was owned by a reputed dog fighting breeder pre-rescue though probably just used to breed, not a fighter herself). And her emotional intelligence dealing with humans, from the general POV of making them feel good, is really uncanny even for a dog. But any kind of police work, probably not. But like you say, they are individuals.