Teach The Dog To Fight
Do not worry about the grip. That is a sports thing. That works if your protection is a routine line in sport. A street fight is never a routine. Teach the dog to fight and let him win when he does so well that the decoy is overwhelmed AT a CERTAIN LEVEL by the dog. Use small increments of the level. The grip is GENETIC. Dogs will learn what works DURING THE FIGHT. Do not teach the dog to him dangerous things like biceps and chest bites. That again is a sports test of the dog being able to bite front, which the dog genetically know is stupid and extremely dangerous IN REAL LIFE FIGHT. Unfortunately, this dangerous practice permeated into LE and PP training with a vengeance. So biceps bite as a test of convincing a dog to do something which the dog genetically knows is stupid, then this is a valid test, lol. But if you teach that street Personal Protection Dog and the Law Enforcement Dog, he will get killed by a perp with a pocket knife.
However, teach the dog that if his only option is to bite in front or biceps, then do so but do not hang in this danger zone for long, and as soon as there is an opportunity to regrip in the back part of the armpit - there you let him win. Do not teach the dog to default to hanging on the biceps or chest until he is dead! Teach him the default to re-bite in a safer area where he will win. So this is a small part of teaching the dog to fight. Then when the dog is confident that THIS is the correct place to place his bite, the confidence will make him bite full mouth and do it with CONVICTION. and as a routine!!!!!
What's my rebuttal to the argument that teaching a dog to ever re-bite, gives the opportunity for a perp to avoid (or worse, even run the dog, since confidence tends to go down if a dog can't get a bite/re-bite while facing strong opposition)? Just train & proof these situations?
The rebuttal is; how does it give the perp the opportunity to hurt the dog when he is getting out of the most dangerous place to him, which is in front of the biceps or chest. Look, dogs have genetic tools for how to fight. These tools were developed through the survival of the fittest for millions of years. Heck, I have had lizards in the terrarium, and I see dogs using the same elements of their fighting. We are LITERALLY talking 100s of millions of years. Do you think some dog trainers can improve on that? The function of a dog trainer is to use efficiently and effectively the tools. All these tools are instincts and drives. Look, some wolves learn to hunt rabbits or mice. They used their tools to do so that they could get the rabbit. If they use their tools incorrectly, then they get hungry or die. When the wolf or dog fights in nature, the one who fights the best will win. Nature is their trainer there. There is no reprieve. You live or die. Natural selection. Now what we do with the protection dog is a specific kind of a fight. In order to survive, the dog needs to learn to get a rabbit or win breedings rights over competitors. Each enemy has its idiosyncracies. We do not need to teach the dog the tools. He already has them like an apprentice carpenter has his tools. But it takes a teacher and practice for the carpenter and, by this comparison, our dog to master these tools. That is what we are doing in training—teaching the dog to master his fighting tools. It is not our place to make new tools for the dog. Go along with the dog.