The management are always right…………yet again….

Well after a weekend off and the possibilities beginning to sink in about our future at the CCTC Dog Training wing, we have been introduced to the new faces that are going to turn us around and get us up to the management’s liking. We have been told that we are not fit for purpose, what ever that means? Without any disrespect to those new faces involved, they have clearly been told that we have some problems and need to be sorted out. We have been painted a new and erroneous shade and the paint is still not yet dry.

Despite regular feedback from confused handlers are very supportive but who know less about somethings and have only been given the management side of the picture and will all be interviewed, at some stage. What exactly is going on.

To make things worse and more confusing, the management’s general who has been allocated to resolve our issues, with or without us, has now told us we have done nothing wrong. With all our collective years of experience we know that something stinks but it is clear that the generals are after someone or some of them after something.

We face weeks of being re-chipped by people who don’t know the first thing about training working dogs, have never handled a working dog but think that it is some kind of stroll in the park. We should be able to say exactly what state of development any dog should be at any given day in any given exercise during a course that lasts for up to 12 weeks. Despite all dogs learning at different paces, becoming proficient at different paces and some excellent dogs pick things up late in the course and sometimes overrun by a week or two for some individuals. Their philosophy seems to be that anyone who is any kind of trainer can train the handlers to train the dog. All the ‘knowledge’  to do this is contained in the manual.

The type of prescriptive layout the generals want may suit most of the other areas of training but dogs need a great deal more flexibility as they are not blessed with the same level of understanding and ability to learn as human counterparts within the CCTC. The assessment methodology is also different prior to selection and through constant assessment and evaluation done by proven and experienced dog handlers-instructors, many dogs complete to the licencing criteria level.

Yet the generals have been in touch with one of our neighboring family of forces at the Shire Constabulary to see what they do, to see if our methods are any different to theirs and as bad as the generals think they are, also to see how their ideas and implimentation are so much better than ours and what we do, also to see if they get their blades honed any sharper by a level of great shock and horror at what we seem to be doing so badly. All this in total secrecy of course. In fact, nothing beats open and two way cross border collaboration to exchange views and improve what you do.

Some early warning of this secret tryst became apparent after an unnamed source spoke to another unnamed source wanting to know what the hell was going on. The doggie related interests mirror thousands of other similar interests and it became fairly obvious that there was some form of witch-hunt underway, with the generals already having their agenda set and their views of individuals clear in their own minds. Despite anything else, nothing was going to alter their perspectives or their plan. At least we knew some more about how we were all being pre-judged by our own generals.

So we are expected to re-write everything we do at the behest of people ignorant of what we do, how we do it and in contravention of the really big plan we use ourselves  based around our training and care manual. They appear to have missed the fact that dogs are only part of the issue and appear reluctant to add the human factor into the equation, making up the ‘team’.

Some of the spiders are beginning to crawl out from under the leaf litter on the ground and it will be interesting to see how things progress, or deteriorate, depending which side you are on that is how it has become.

The management?    Well they are always right…………….Rank over knowledge, experience and credibility every time.