Training Without Conflict Podcast
Episode Forty-Nine: Dave Kroyer
Fri, 08 Nov 2024 22:00:00 GMT
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Today, I’m joined by my good friend, Dave Kroyer. Dave’s a well-known name in the dog training world, and we’ve known each other for over 20 years. This conversation is just the two of us talking about our experiences with dogs, sharing stories, and covering all sorts of topics. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.Ivan Balabanov is a 2-time World Champion dog trainer, Ot Vitosha Malinois breeder, trainer of Premier Protection Dogs and founder of the revolutionary Training Without Conflict® dog training system.For more information about Ivan Balabanov and information on how to train your dog using the Training Without Conflict® system, check out: https://trainingwithoutconflict.comhttps://malinois.comhttps://premierprotectiondogs.comPlease like, comment, and share with your dog friends💪🏼
Chapter 1: Who is Dave Kroyer and what is his background?
What's going on in Dave's world today?
Um, you know, I, that is a really good question because sometimes I wake up every morning and I'm not really sure it, it is interesting because I've done so many things as far as within the dog world. You know, when I, when I got into dog training, I, a lot of people don't know this, but I was a high level agility competitor before I even did the bite sport stuff.
And then I was doing AKC obedience. I'm also a nose work judge. It's funny because in my life, I find everything coming a little bit kind of full circle right now where I'm finding, of course, I still love dog sports. I'm very involved. I have a relatively young German Shepherd that I'm still competing with. But I find myself...
on a daily basis, just wanting to spend time with my dogs, not even training or doing that thing. More like if we go back 30 years ago, where I just go for a walk in the woods with the dog and enjoy being with a dog. Like that. Of course, I still train my dog every day. Of course, I still go tracking.
Of course, I do lessons in the morning and I teach my virtual classes and have to keep my website updated. But everything's kind of come really full circle where I just like hanging around with my dogs. And maybe doing nothing with them.
And the other funny thing is in my life, it's come full circle as I'm back in the music industry, which is kind of interesting because I never thought in my life when I left that, that I would come back to it. But that's kind of what's in my life. I'm, you know, a lot of people and you know this because you've probably had these times in your life.
If you're in between dogs or you're getting a new dog ready and you're not at competitions, people think you're done. Where's Ivan? We haven't seen him for a while. Or where's Dave? We've not seen him for a while. We're always still here. We're the old guys that never have gone away. It's just sometimes maybe we step back or we're preparing a new dog or we're not.
I've really backed off of social media a lot in the last probably two years. And People will wonder, well, is Dave still training? Of course I'm still training. Of course I still have a dog. There was a point around 2017, I think after I went to the FCI with my German shepherd, Anton, the FCI World Championship, that I took two years off, but it was two years off from IGP. Why?
Because I was concentrating on my Malinois ring. And I told myself, well, he was on the back burner for a while when I was training Anton. So I'm going to he's going to be at the front now. And that's when I started doing all more than the French ring thing and and won NARA championships and stuff like that. So, you know, we're never gone. You're never gone.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do dog trainers face during competitions?
level one level two level one level one in any dog sport is it's about is that dog a prospect does it have a promise is it right is it is it worth it and and and that's really where we should focus on and But monitoring overall, I think it's just going way overboard
with impossible scenarios to where you are forced as a handler to start to cheat and to do to do things that are not really based on training but you you start to invent cues that nobody else would know so you can help your dog because those scenarios become so ridiculously impossible not difficult but impossible and and that's where the uh appreciation for
The other ring sports in my book, it's, it's higher. And again, I don't want to trash Monduring because that's my game now. I'm going to play it, you know, but I wish that we. And I'm still, I'm with you. I love the sport. Right.
I think, check this out, Ivan. If you go back and watch world championships from, we can go back 10 years. This is what I tell any, if I have a client or if I have a colleague, if they're going to the world championship for Mondial Ring, like Ring 3, I say, here are the two things you need to get. You must get these. The search and escort. Mm-hmm.
How many dogs never make the find, right? Because they have the decoy sitting in a tower. And I get it, okay? There were 50 dogs entered and two found it. But, you know, we're making it so crazy that... It's not even a matter of training. It could be a matter of luck then, right? Like, did the dog find it? And you need to get the send away.
If you get those two, you're looking probably pretty good. I even know that my dog at one of the world championships, who was incredible, you know, it was the dog that you, the Joe farm dog, who was an incredible dog. Like actually one of my favorite, hardest biting dogs I've ever owned.
I never even got to see him do the search at one of the Mondial Ring World Championships because he never found it. Here's a funny little story about that. I had got information earlier in the year that the hide, this is secret information that some friends were giving me. I had people on the inside in France, right? They said, Dave, they're going to be blowing fog out of the find.
You know, like fog from the air, right? It's going to be coming out of the find. Smoke, right? Yeah. So I went out and bought us a fog machine. And that whole summer I trained with the fog machine and we get there and they do the dog in white and they use the fog machine. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be awesome. My dog's going to see that fog and go right there.
The dog in white dog never found it. They have a meeting. 10 minutes later, they say, we're not going to use the fog now. Yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 3: How do different dog training sports compare?
I can give you feedback and tell you what I would do, but my goal as a teacher, if I'm teaching you, Ivan, I wanna teach you so you never have to ask me for help again, right? Of course, that could put us out of business, but that's my goal. Here are the laws of learning. If not everybody abides by the laws of learning, I can't help that.
I can suggest, I can show proof, you and I can show proof all day long, right? That these laws of learning actually work. Of course, I wanna teach it and I wanna explain it. Here's my problem that I deal with mentally in my head. As much as the fear for... I don't even have this discussion with anybody, with people. I stay out of it, don't care. I've got my life to live.
But there's as many dangerous force-free people are there as people that make stupid pressure, right? Like there's both sides that are dangerous. I think I see I see people like that, the dog daddy guy or whatever. I don't even I don't even like sometimes people say, oh, did you hear about so and so? And I'm like, who's that person? I don't follow this stuff.
But is it it's a weird time, I think, in our history, because we're even it's getting to the point that. You know, there's a culture of people who say, well, you can't even tell your dog no, or he cannot even be in a crate, or he just needs to roam free, and who cares if he gets run over by a car? Like, that's a whole different thing, a culture. I don't know.
I don't have the energy to fight that culture. I wish I did have the energy to fight that culture. But all I can do is stand my ground and go, you can say whatever you want to say, blah, blah, blah. But I've got the video. I've got the performance. I've got this to prove that what I say is true. And Such a rabbit hole we're going down. I know, I know.
When we talk about, quote, the force-free culture or people, the trainers, I always remember back early 2000s when I actually would go to websites and, you know, would be excited to go to Ivan's website and see what he's doing. And it could still be there. I don't know. I've not been to your website in a trillion years. But you had something like how to pick a dog trainer. or something.
And it was really cool. It was something that I always wanted to write or say my whole life. Well, there's a thing that we, if you want to see who's a dog trainer, we have things called competitions and you can train your dog and step into this arena with us all. And we can, you know, half this out who's a good dog trainer or not a good dog trainer. You're a two-time world champion winner.
How am I going to dispute, even as much as I know about dog training, I'm never going to dispute anything you do in your training because you've proven it. You put it on the field. Versus a social media influencer who has quadrupled the number of followers you have, quadrupled the number of followers that I have, but I've never seen him train an animal in his life.
I've never seen him train an animal. Like you can't show me you've trained an animal, not to mention argue with me about what is this and what's that. So it's become this thing where... How can I even have this conversation with so-and-so-and-so?
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Chapter 4: What are the key differences between IGP and French Ring training?
When I say love, he plays with the cats, he plays with the horse, he plays with the chickens. He loves to see all the small cats and all the animals. And you would think that dog would have some massive predatory thing. I guess in theory he's a Malinois, right? But Now my shepherd, I got to keep an eye on him, right? Like he sees something and the eyes just dilate and it's a different thing.
Now it's not been, I've seen him chase some animals. He's never caught anything. He's never said, he's never finished the cycle and said, oh, this leads me to this, which satisfies my drive state of, predatory killing and capturing. He's never had that, but believe me, it's in his eyes. I can see that. You could see that in one second if you saw him, you know?
Yes. Yeah. It's a, I don't know why we cannot make that a distinction and come to some agreement. Like I, you know, like we jungle. I mean, this was early 90s and I used to work at SPCA in San Francisco and I would go to my office in the morning And I would have no idea what kind of animals there will be.
Cause somehow, whenever something got accepted in the SPCA, there would be like a, a literally like a hamster and a rabbit and a, and I would let him, and I would just go in my office off leash and he just goes and he mingles with whatever animals are there. And he does not see, he sees them as, as buddies.
And then there is this other dog, just as you said, like your shepherd, and he's like, dude, I mean, really, I don't know if I'm going to eat you. I don't know exactly because I haven't had that experience, but I'm locked on target. And I think it's the same also when we talk about
like like where i'm going with this is just sometimes we go way overboard and that's why i brought the the resource guarding but it's the same with so many aspects in dog training just because we think oh we're good dog trainers let's hit it let's fix it it's like a dog doesn't like It just really has a high suspicious level of people. It's like, okay, you walked in my training room right now.
Who the fuck are you? And then there is the other dog is like, hey, what are we gonna do? So why is the urge to try to fix something that is very... When you think in the first place why people had dogs, I would think it's because, especially big dogs, is to protect, to alert, to, you know, you feel some sort of safety because you have that kind of dog. And where I live, I like to have this dog.
It's like, hey, who are you walking in here? But in the pet world, these dogs immediately have to go through therapy. Right, right.
What's wrong with them? Instead of appreciating. People are even... Right. It's what we... What me and you may appreciate as a... a good thing with the animal, they're making it a bad thing. But I, this all becomes, I've been, it becomes a study of people almost over dogs. It's really a study of people, right? Like why are you, people sometimes like to create problems with their dogs.
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