Alright, dog trainers. This time I will be talking strictly about the IGP and strictly about the padded stick in protection. Many of you know my position. And that's why I've been asked lately quite a bit to either write an article or to say something for a club presentation and basically, present good arguments. Why do we need the padded stick back? So this one goes to all my Schutzhund friends around the world, and let's get it going. IGP began as a Schutzhund - a protection dog program - with serious applications in the working dog community. Just look at the names today, and this will make you worried.

For those of you that need translation. IGP stands for International Prüfungs-Ordnung, which is the German version. In English translation, what IGP stands for is international trial rules. Now Schutzhund means protection dogs or protection dog. But we are doing IGP, we're doing international trial rules. So what are we doing? Are we enforcing international trial rules or are we training protection dogs? This is not a performance kind of art. It's not choreography. It's not theater. It's protection. People joining the sport today, I would say, have never actually seen or leave the program when it's still evaluated what it was designed to evaluate. Today, it seems like they're inheriting a modern version stripped from its essentials.

And when I'm talking about the essentials, the essentials I'm talking about is that confrontation element. And many genuinely believe that the program actually evolved. I don't think it evolved. Something got removed. So what I want to talk about, it's not nostalgia. It's about functional validity. It's about why the padded stick must return exactly as it existed before the removal. Because without it, IGP cannot legitimately assess the fight character and courage of protection dogs.

How did we get here today? There has been a slow but steady psychological erosion inside the sport, and people pretend this erosion is evolution. It's not. The original bamboo stick, the reed, it's thick. That era, those times, that was too much. And we knew it. Any time you hit the dog, it leaves welts. It leaves bruises. It was not necessary. We corrected that. We evolved. We replaced it with the padded leather stick. That was the proper compromise between realism and ethics. And that version remained stable for over 20 years. Then something else happened. Not science, not careful reasoning, not canine welfare research. Politics, optics, fear of activists, the perception game.

The lesson we learned from Austria... Austria had been bending to activist demand pressure since I can remember. Step by step, piece by piece, they chipped away at the sport from the outside. It's literally the boiling frog metaphor applied to policy. They don't slam the ban in one move, they dismantle it through small increments. Each sold under ethics, modernization, welfare. First, the first savers have to have a stopper. Next, no stick hits allowed. And eventually what happened? The entire sport gets banned by the Austrian government. This really should be a lesson for the entire IGP world. Appeasing external ideology did not protect the sport there. It only accelerated the destruction. And the irony is that even when the World Championship was held in Austria, it was agreed not to use stick hits in order to respect the Austrian law.

That's okay. When the Paris stick hits were later removed worldwide, Austrian activists didn't stop with that compromise, they went further with the insanity. IGP itself became illegal in the entire country. For the rest of the world, we didn't lose the stick hits because the sport submitted to some external pressure. There was no evident pressure to do so. This is what is so puzzling for many of us. How come one day it was decided that we don't need the stick hits? Is this some hidden agenda and is what happened in Austria going to just roll in across the whole world?

Let's talk about why stick hits existed. It is about function, not abuse. The padded stick hit was never really about punishment. It wasn't cruelty. It was not hurting the dog. It was a confrontation stimulus. The same way any real adversary would attempt to create pain, pressure and doubt in a real fight. Of course, there always will be someone or some groups that will do stupid things to dogs. However, it is silly to believe that banning something actually works. It never does. We can't just throw the baby with the water every time there is an issue. So we can look good on the surface of things. Because of drunk driver accidents, we don't want to ban cars or ban alcohol, right? Protection without actual opposition is not protection. I'll repeat this. Protection without actual opposition. It's not protection. It's acting. The helper waving a stick and yelling without consequence produces no internal shift in the dog. That's what we would call shadow boxing. It's a theater and everyone is involved. Helper dog, judge. All subconsciously know the difference.

Usually when we talk about these martial arts analogies, they show it perfectly. On a recent podcast, we were comparing karate to protection dogs and protection work without the padded stick hits, it's basically what in karate is called kata. This is choreography. It's beautiful, impressive, skilled, but not fighting, just moving around in a perfect fighting form without actually fighting. Karate even labels the distinction clearly. There is the kata, which equals a form demonstration and Kumite, which is, the full contact fighting. And here is the key. Full contact fighting is where the genetic makeup is revealed. You cannot - nobody can - evaluate fighting capability by form. You evaluate it by impact. This is kind of where Mike Tyson “fits” perfectly here.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. When the dog is actually struck, the belief in confrontation changes instantly. The physiology changes. The dog is in a fork. It has to choose. Do I withdraw or do I engage? No stick hit. No belief in real fight. No genetic exposure. And genetics cannot be faked with a chain of behaviors. You can make a dog bark for a toy with intensity. You can train picture perfect control. You can stage perfect blind searches, but the existence of this behavior does not mean the dog is genetically prepared for confrontation. It means that the dog has been trained in rehearsed predictability. Once the dog realizes the program no longer contains real adversity, the entire sport leans towards performance. Towards acting, and very much away from selection.

Schutzhund worked because it filtered nature, not because it builds illusions. Without the hit, a dog can be technically brilliant and still genetically fragile. And no training layer can replace genetic reality. I'm going to give you - take the gunshot. The gunshot example. Gunshots proved that principle. Every serious dog evaluation system in the world uses gunshots. Why? Because gunshots are a temperament exposure mechanism. You can say we can desensitize the dog. Yes, we can condition the dog. However, when a sudden, unexpected gunshot occurs, the dog still exposes who they are temperamentally. No serious selection and breeding program will ever remove gunshots from their evaluation processes. Why? Because everybody understands the purpose. And the stick hit is the exact same category of test, except it's directly tied to the fight. Removing this while keeping gunshots is logically inconsistent. It betrays functional testing logic. 

The transition phase was where we would say the magic was, basically kind of the most important part of evaluation was not the strike itself. It was the 2-4 seconds after and the guarding phase and the transition phase. Today's helpers are trying their best to compensate for the absence of stick hits. They will kind of pull the sleeve high to maintain some pressure before the out. They stay active to simulate some kind of resistance. And of course, some dogs will refuse to out because of that.

But that's a training mechanics problem and it can be fixed through training. How dogs handled the stick hit was not a training problem. It exposed the dog's genetic and internal fight threshold. This is the important difference if you want. One is technique and the other is nature. When you remove actual adversity, trainers start building beautiful chains of behaviors that look correct, but are in many ways disconnected from the original purpose. A dog should search the blinds for the decoy, not to pop up balloons. A dog should guard the helper to dominate and show courage in the guarding, and not to bark for a toy reward. Which, basically, what happens is it just shifts the emotional state completely to play interaction.

Of course I agree these are super creative, cool ideas. They are clever ways to isolate the behavior and teach it out of context. Out of purpose. But protection shouldn’t be a tricks catalog. Protection has meaning. Behaviors must reflect the purpose behind them. Judges, in my opinion, need to call this out when they see it. If they see it. Sometimes, the fakes are so good that the points have to be awarded, then that's fine. If this is the route somebody chooses as a trainer to go, that's okay. But since the stick hits got removed, I've been hearing this argument quite a bit, actually. Like, you know, we would say, well, “Mondioring doesn't have stick hits and they do just fine evaluating the dogs’ fighting instinct.” No they don't. I train in Mondioring. I've been involved with Mondioring since the foundation of the sport. I was living in Belgium at that time.

Mondio is built on systematic desensitization from a young age showing the dog that any scary props are basically harmless. The entire philosophy is built on that training illusion that nothing is going to harm you. On the other hand, actual impact cannot be desensitized. Actual adversity is not symbolic. Actual strike pressure can not be rehearsed into harmlessness. When we used to have the padded sticks, some dogs would not like it and basically stop engaging in the confrontation. And yes, we used to see this. It was an important part of the selection process for breeding working military dogs and so on. When a dog decides that they know that they don't like the hit, there is always some master trainer who would promise to fix the problem. And typically it would go like this: they would spend months and months desensitizing the dog, basically showing that the padded stick is nothing to worry about. Eventually, with time, some dogs would believe the lie. However, when test time comes and there is a different helper and the dog gets tapped with that padded stick, they quickly realize that they have been lied to.

It always failed. Just like the example I gave you with the sudden loud noise in testing. So my argument - one of my arguments is that IGP protection is losing its identity. IGP protection today is becoming a technical performance sport. Choreography sport. The core of protection, the pressure confrontation moment basically has been taken out. And without confrontation. Any obedience inside protection no longer means the same thing that it used to mean. There is a difference between obedience inside an aroused mental state versus obedience under adversity. These are not the same things. These are not equal skill sets. Arousal and adversity are very different things. A dog trained exclusively in obedience is not the same organism as a dog who can execute obedience while in a real fight mindset.

This is why the original Schutzhund combination of tracking obedience and protection was so respected by everybody. It wasn’t a silly behavior sequence. It was a whole organism test. Remove the confrontation element, and all that meaning goes down the drain. It collapses.

There is also a much bigger application that most people overlook. And that's the ability to control a dog while the dog is in a fight state. It's not just a sports novelty. It has also direct value to pet training and real world scenarios. Knowing how to convince a dog to cooperate with the trainer, with the owner. When the dog absolutely does not want to. When the dog believes “I'm just going to handle that situation right now by myself, and I don't need anybody to tell me what to do. ” When the dog emotionally commits to taking care of business. That ability to be able to learn how to control is priceless. And these concepts - training concepts from IGP can be applied in many different other areas. This is not about - I'm not talking about crushing the dog or forcing some universal suppression that the dogs are just afraid of their shadow. It's about teaching an agreement, like reaching an agreement under conflict, through cooperation, under adversity.

This is a level of relationship and clarity that general obedience sports will never access, because they never operate inside the fight state. IGP protection done correctly, teaches trainers the skill of guiding behavior through conflict, not avoiding it. And that has far more significance done than the sport field alone. The necessary correction. This is not a debate about nostalgia. This is not resistance to modernization. It's not some kind of emotional attachment to the past that we have. This is about function. This is about selection. This is about truth. If IGP wants to remain a protection sport, it has to restore the padded stick hits exactly the way they existed before the removal.

None of this symbolic waving and modified version, not the intimidation circles actual contact. Because without confrontation there is no protection and without protection, there is really no justification to call this sport a protection dog sport anymore. If we don't correct this now. I think we can agree that the genetics we lose will probably be irreversible. 

So what do we do? Where do we start? I think that like in your countries, with your breed clubs and competitions, bring back the padded stick hits. You're the majority. This sport is yours. This is by no means over. It cannot be over because too much is at stake. Have the conversations and don't give up on Schutzhund. Don't be afraid to call the sport “Schutzhund”. Don't be afraid to say protection dog sport. Tell it how it is and defend it. Trust me, we can defend the sport, if all of us take that position. Right now, we are pretending to run a protection sport. And I say pretend because the most essential protection test does not exist. Once a protection sport begins kneeling to outside ideology instead of maintaining internal standards, we already saw what the final outcome was like. Austria proved that we know now. You have a voice. So speak up.