Rebel, a three-year-old Malinois, is the first police dog in the Northern Netherlands to receive ‘positive’ training. That makes it a lot more social. But make no mistake, Robble will sink his teeth into you if necessary.
Rebel and his supervisor Albert de Vries have been a team for about three years now. “He came to our family when he was six weeks old. Rebel has recently been certified as a police dog. The first to be positively certified,” says De Vries. “I did that by training, here on the training field at the TT track in Assen, but also at home.”
“This instructor has succeeded in turning it into a search dog that can bite. And not a bite dog that can search, as it used to be,” says Ronald Verheggen. He is a national domain holder for police dogs. “I can see the difference myself. Where you used to walk around a cop with a dog with a big bow, you can now almost pet him.” Although that is not the intention. “No, the police dog has become more social, but absolutely not social. If necessary, it intervenes.”
The police has about 400 officers who work with a dog. In 2019, there were 360 bite cases involving police dogs. That has now been halved due to this different way of working. The main reason that there are fewer biting incidents is because the police dog no longer runs loose, but remains on a leash. “When a burglar was reported in a business building, we always let the dog run loose through the building to look for the burglar. And when it found it, the dog often bit the burglar. That is one of those biting incidents that we don’t want anymore,” explains Verheggen.
The officer now goes through the building with the dog on a leash to track down the burglar. “But if someone is a gun threat, or a serial rapist who wants to run off, the handler will definitely send them after it.”
More police dogs are now being trained in this way. The dogs trained in the old way also go along with the change, says dog handler Simke Nettinga. “We really change the behavior of the dog handler and then the dog goes along with it. We make the dog want to work for us instead of having to work for us.”
And that is not only nice for the boss, but also for the dog.