Relationship Between Sections "A" And "C" In Schutzhund-3 (IPO-3)

2023 Author: Molly Page | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 22:49

Have you ever heard that an experienced handler or SV judge, having watched the work of a dog on the trail in Section "A" of SchH-3, can almost accurately predict the result of his work on defense in Section "C"?

Probably, many watched the Schutzhund championships with the participation of professional athletes and paid attention to the work in section "A" of the first ten winners. I remind you: the dog comes to the place where the trail leaves, and slowly, trail to trail, begins to study it. At the same time, the pace of movement does not change, the speed of working out the track remains constant from beginning to end, in the movement of the dog one feels a restrained striving forward. Notice how the dog is laying down, indicating an object (compare with laying on obedience, “feel the difference”), how it behaves when the handler approaches (look at the dog's ears). At first, one gets the impression that this kind of work by shutshunders is the result of the "tarpaulin therapy" familiar to us firsthand. But let's not jump to conclusions.

Let us recall the problematic moments of the work of our Russian dogs in section "A" of IPO-3: the dog literally rushes to the track, the trail is worked out with an upper instinct, the pace of movement is inconsistent, with acceleration and deceleration, the handler almost runs after the dog, corners are skipped, objects are not indicated: etc., with all the ensuing consequences. Here we will not see those "oddities" that were described above. Most of our dogs follow the trail, as if in obedience - “cheerfully and naturally”, or even with their tail lifted up, like “the border dog“Scarlet”.

In these two cases, we are faced with the following behavioral models: stalking, built on the defensive dominant and search activity, built, at best, on food motivation.

Let's try to figure out what "tracking" is, and what factors cause it

"Tracking" many of us observed (especially in nature, in the forest) when a dog attacked the trail of a wild animal. Remember the thoroughness with which it began to be worked out, many dogs tucked their tails, the hair stood on end, etc.; (at the same time, the dog never accelerated the pace of movement, following the scent trail to trail). Even without experience of social contact with a wild animal, the dog turned on defensive behavior.

It becomes clear that "stalking" refers to the instinctive forms of behavior inherited by the dog as a species in the process of biological evolution, and like any instinctive form of behavior, it is an invariable and involuntary "central program", or instinct, by definition, which are unconditioned chain reflexes. consisting of long chains of reflexes, in which the end of one link serves as an irritant for the next link in the chain. Unlike unconditioned reflexes, instincts in the behavior of animals are realized in a certain sequence, i.e. "Ripen" in animals over time and in the process of development of certain behavioral reactions. So, for example, hunting instincts "ripen" in the course of the game, which does not give an opportunity to gain a foothold ahead of time for the reduced instinctive forms of behavior,parental instincts "ripen" with the help and on the basis of sexual, defensive - on hunting, etc. The triggering function of the realization of the "ripened" instinct is performed by external environmentally significant stimuli - "key stimuli", or releasers.

Thus, to activate the tracking instinct, it is necessary to have certain “matured” defensive forms of behavior and a trigger mechanism for their implementation.

The “matured” defensive form of behavior, which is the basis of tracking on the “alien” trail in Schutzhund (IPO), can only be interspecies instrumental (taught) aggression - instrumental aggression towards a person, and the release (resolver), launching this instinctive behavioral program, should be an individualizing "Stranger" smell.

The behavior of a dog with released defensive reactions on the "foreign" track in Schutzhund-3 cannot be anything other than stalking, which is ethologically conditioned for an animal working on the defensive dominant along the "cold track", i.e. a trace with a relatively weak odor intensity (we are talking about reducing the "noise" effects leveling the individual human odor, the so-called "white noise", or "odor corridor", which to a greater extent uses the dog's visual analyzer and, accordingly, may include other behavioral reactions).

The question naturally arises, why a dog with a balanced psyche and lack of anthropophobia, a dog that works well both in obedience and in defense, not afraid of psychological pressure from a person, includes defensive reactions in the absence of an obvious threat? In order to clarify the current situation, let us consider the reasons for the occurrence of a state of increased anxiety in a dog while keeping an "alien" trace of an hour ago from the point of view of the psychophysics of sensory systems.

1. A qualitative change in the perception of the information content of the olfactory signal of the "alien" trace with the included instrumental aggression towards a person. As you know, the higher the ethological significance of the olfactory signal for an animal, the stronger the reaction of the nervous and hormonal systems, the longer the study time of the smell source. Under the influence of ethologically significant olfactory signals in the body of an animal, physiological changes can occur, similar to those that occur under the influence of the presence of the very individual, the source of the smell.