Evaluation of body postures of Belgian Malinois dogs during a police dog training in Germany

Abstract

Police dog training is a strict training with high level of arousal and stress. In the present study, it was aimed to investigate behavioral tendency to exhibit submissive body posture in Belgian Malinois dogs while performing routine obedience exercises in police dog training. Furthermore, factors causing different body postures in those dogs were evaluated. Accordingly, 6 of the 42 dogs (14, 3 %) were assessed as dogs having neutral - confident body postures during the obedience exercises. Rest of the dogs (85, 7 %), however, exhibited at least one behavioral element of submission. No statistically significant correlations were found between age and submissive body posture, gender and submissive body posture as well as between real criminal contact and submissive body posture. The results obtained in this study show that dogs of the breed, Belgian Malinois are more likely to show submissive behavior than other behaviors such as neutral or attentive behavior in a training condition with high level of arousal and stress.