Police K9 Instructor courses are offered only to police officers who have experience as a police K9 handler. These courses are designed to prepare police K9 handlers for the role of instructor/trainer. The training emphasis is on developing skills necessary to conduct initial training and in-service training for a law enforcement K9 program. Course lengths are from 6-12 weeks depending on the experience of the student and the course(s) selected.

Narcotics/Explosives Detection 

This course teaches various K9 detection training methods, K9 selection testing, handler screening and selection, understanding and teaching proper foundational obedience, understanding the K9 olfactory system and it's capabilities, K9 drive building, teaching best practices for deployments, K9 team problem solving, administration, and much more. 

Patrol

This course familiarizes the student with various K9 training philosophies, methods and techniques. Other skill development areas will consist of Patrol K9 selection testing, handler screening and selection, understanding and teaching proper foundational obedience, K9 olfactory system, teaching the Patrol K9 team functions of apprehension, article search, building and open area search, and scent discriminate tracking. Best practices for deployments, K9 team problem solving, administration, and more is taught in this comprehensive course.

Contact us to discuss your particular needs and we can recommend, based on your experience, the amount of training you will need to reach the level of competence needed to become a successful instructor. Our experience is most student instructors need additional exposure to a variety of K9 temperaments which can only be gained by hands-on work with K9's. During the course we provide the student with the opportunity to train with a large variety of dogs enabling the student to gain the knowledge and experience needed. Only by working with diverse K9 temperaments can skills be developed that enable the student instructor to analyze problems and form solutions when teaching new K9 teams or problem solving with existing K9 teams.

Our instructor courses are offered throughout he year in conjunction with our K9 handler courses. This allows the student instructor to participate as an "assistant" instructor along side our school instructors. Working with our experienced instructors training new handlers, the student instructor learns to recognize and solve the many problems encountered by new handlers. Working with new handlers, utilizing various teaching approaches and training techniques, the student instructor gains the skills needed to successfully train the human element of the K9 team.