Malinois and German Shepherd Problems in Service Dog Careers

Martha Hoffman 2024

Why do German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois bark at everything and act “reactive”? Why doesn’t extensive socialization and training always help?

This creates a huge problem for those who try to train them as Service Dogs. Barking in public is a behavior that in the US can allow gatekeepers to make SD handlers leave public places.

The barking  is derived from frustration barking.

Frustration barking is a form of barrier frustration. It easily leads to barrier aggresssion.

Working line GSD and Malinois are bred for bitesports. Barking at a motionless helper/agitator is strongly selected for in breeding. Even non-working line GSD have this trait very strongly.

When barking in the trial, the dog is inhibiting itself from biting the sleeve and is waiting for the cue from the helper to bite. That causes some frustration.

The dog is trained to believe that their pushy barking actually causes the helper to move. The reward is to bite the sleeve or the suit.

Prey-aggression is strongly selected for in these breeds. They need to desperately want to catch the prey: the sleeve, for bitesports competition dogs, or to catch the suspect in police work.

Although there is no physical barrier, the barrier is mental. Without a cue from trainer or helper, the dog must not bite. The barking releases energy.

And in police work, the dog is sometimes not supposed to bite a motionless suspect. Barking alerts the officers to the location of the cornered suspect.

It is an excited eager prey-motivated barking in most dogs, as if they had treed a squirrel. It is a good behavior for winning points in a trial, but the dog might be judged as only  wanting to play tug with the sleeve. Not remotely wanting to fight or bite the helper.

Prey-aggression barking is very different from social-aggression barking. Many working line GSD and Malinois are selected for intense social aggression to humans. These are usually intended for military and police function.

For dogs with “defense drive” or “civil drive” which are terms meaning true social aggression and intense desire to dominate and overpower a human, exactly as if was another dog that it desired to fight with, the barking has a more serious sound, and is a threatening challenge to the helper. They are highly valued in police and military work.

Those dogs are respected for being brave and serious contenders. Judges can tell the difference easily between prey aggression and social aggression. But, the dogs with prey-aggresssion are more easily controlled and often more precise for trial competition winning.

But these two reasons for barking are both undesirable for SDs.

This breeding for frustration barking and frustration aggression causes HUGE problems for people with pet or Service Dog Malinois or GSDs. Even a poorly bred pet or American type GSD has this trait.

The slightest frustration causes barking at anything the dog focuses on. Any barrier to forward engagement triggers it; cars, fences, or being forbidden to advance. A leash is a very triggering barrier that causes the most problems in public access training.

But why is barking such a strong genetic trait in protection breeds such as Dobermans, Giant Schnauzers, Belgian Malinois,  and others?

Any dog bred for protection is very useful even if it is a fearful coward that would run away from any confrontation by an intruder….IF IT BARKS AT A BARRIER.

Intruders don’t know if the dog will attack or chase or not.

A human attacking a person with a barking dog doesn’t know whether the leashed frenzied dog will attack or run away if the leash breaks.

This is why the average person should not get a GSD or Malinois as a Service Dog prospect unless they can get early professional help, to select a breeder trying for SD temperament, inhibit reactivity/barrier frustration, control the dog, and prevent the barking that starts around 4 months old, especially in working bred GSD.

That first walk where the pup barks at everything, is the death knell for its future SD career, unless the barking is addressed immediately.  Even with professional help, whining and barking might not be stopped.

I recommend that buyers should only hire in-person trainers with experience of these breeds and their unique temperaments. Other trainers may fail. The multitude of strong useful instincts in these breeds means that each individual puppy has a different balance, and each instinct must be carefully brought out or inhibited. Online advice is often useless and counterproductive.

Working-bred GSD and well-bred Malinois are popular because they are trainable, healthy and stable. Their protection image is valued by people who feel endangered for whatever reason. The puppy buyer educates themselves and decides not to buy a European show- line GSD or and American-style GSD with it’s health issues and often fearful temperament. So they seek out working-line breeders.

But then the owner gets in trouble with the pup’s intense working instincts, aggression, and high activity level. The dog is sensitive to the owner’s fear and anxiety, and seeks to find out what in the environment is causing the person to feel fearful or tense. It interprets the owner's anxiety as a cue to seek out and confront danger. Once the dog focuses on a possible cause, even if it's not a threat, it goes into instinctive mode of protecting the owner. If it's a fearful dog, it attempts to protect itself by driving away the threat.

In addition, an essential trait in protection work is for the dog to escalate aggression logarithmically in response to any challenge. An attacking suspect must be met with overpowering force.  But when the owner attempts to challenge the dog, the dog may react with escalation of aggression instead of backing down, inhibiting itself, and acting appeasing in a social relationship. It threatens and bites.

But if the dog is never challenged by the owner, and never controlled or corrected for unwanted responses, then every difficult instinct in the dog’s repertoire is set free to explode in uncontrolled intensity.

The fact that the dog adores its owners and independently finds tasks to do for them, and has empathy for them, and trains easily for many tasks and behaviors, doesn’t balance out all the problems that arise for them in pet or Service Dog function careers.

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Debbie Greco wonderful! I know a few breeders who select for Service Dog temperament in GSD. They are aiming at family-suitable plus wiring temperament, but coincidentally, Service Dog function requires the same traits.

Fidelco Guide Dogs has been breeding for more than 50 years. They have successfully selectively bred GSD to have a perfect temperament for Guide and Service function.  They still have variation in litters, I've read, but even  their non-Guide-suitable pups excel in many other functions like detection and pet.

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Belu Morison it seems to arise around 3 or 4 months,  when pups start to notice the unusual, even if they aren't in a well-defined fear period. Even a really outgoing puppy is going to get excited by new things.

And pups  usually gets walked outside more often in busier places with dogs and people, once they have more vaccinations.

So they start to encounter many things they are eager to interact with, or perhaps feel cautious or fearful of.

The barky pup that is desperate to reach its goal of interaction, gets labeled "reactive". Which is sad. Because that label means the pup is categorized as fearful or aggressive.  

Reactivity is a neutral trait. Neither good nor bad. It is simply a description of how easily an animal's nervous system reacts to a stimulus.

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Vicki Leigh I adore GSD. They have incredible empathy, and the ability to independently find tasks to accomplish for people. They can  nurture baby farm animals and protect from predators. They have great instincts to keep people in a family monitored and kept in a group to be supervised and helped. They learn to alert to unusual symptoms and medical conditions on their own. The well bred ones can distinguish real threat and do not overreact to harmless people and situations.

The working line dogs are usually more stable and confident. The pet-bred are often unstable and fearful.

But the most common complaint by people who try to train them for Service Dog function is that they vocalize excessively, whether barking or whining, usually simply from frustration, and not from aggression.

It's a genetic trait that is part of the package in many guard function breeds, but most GSD people I think would agree that they need training not to bark and whine excessively.  

Service Dogs in the US can be asked to leave public places if they bark or vocalize. This barking tendency can affect their ability to do public access training.

I attempted to show the root causes for the tendency to bark and whine.

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