OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday
AN internationally renowned dog training expert believes that up to 90% of South Africa’s police dogs will have to be destroyed because they are “fear biters” and “psychologically too sick” to be rehabilitated, Afrikaans daily Beeld reported.
Beeld quoted Hans Schlegel, owner of the international K9 training school in Switzerland, as comparing compared South African police dog training methods to those of American slave owners in the eighteenth century.
“A professional training programme does not exist in South Africa. Non-whites’ unnatural fear of dogs was used here as the cornerstone for dog training,” said Schlegel, who is regarded as among the top international experts in this field.
The police training programme is at least 50 years behind that used in Europe and is largely to blame for the incident in which six members of the East Rand dog unit set their dogs on illegal immigrants in a so-called “training session”, he told Beeld.
Schlegel said he had never seen the likes of the attack in his life, noting that the dogs in the video did not obey their handlers and sometimes had to be pulled off their victims. This disobedience pointed to an “enormous” training problem and nobody should hazard going on the street with the dogs, he said.
Schlegel told Beeld he had warned the Pretoria dog school two years ago that its training was archaic and that it was training “fear biters”. At that time handlers were eager to learn new methods, he said, but, because of budget constraints, the programme could not be implemented.
Up to 90% of the dogs he saw during his previous visit attacked victims out of fear and in self-defence. “You cannot trust those dogs. The worst is that I saw such dogs daily in South Africa. Many handlers were scared of their own dogs.”
He said violence, pain and brutal aggression was used to train the police dogs. “They don’t trust anybody and cannot socialise with other dogs or people and are kept in cages after hours.”
Police would in future have to breed pedigreed German Shepherds themselves and subject the puppies to the new training methods from an early age. The police should also only select dog handlers who were emotionally stable and calm.
Schlegel heads training programmes in nine American states. Germany, France, Greece, Austria and Canada also train dogs according to his programme, including to track down explosives, narcotics and weapons and to work in rescue operations, reported Beeld.