"I'm A Decoy First" - Khary "Smoke" Lee

This is an exert from a longer interview dropping soon on this channel. A good decoy can go a long way to improving a dog's performance. Every training session is loaded with behavioral feedback to the dog. The decoy is the one in control of that feedback. Would you allow an untrained person to work your dog in obedience, or handle him in tracking? When you use an unskilled decoy you are doing exactly that. The decoy trains the dog in patrol work. Behaviors shown by the dog are either rewarded properly or not, and if we do not reward the dog for releasing, or coming back on a recalled attack, for example, we run the risk of seeing these behaviors deteriorate as the dog makes his own reward system by taking dirty grips or running through his recalls.