Training and Care 
67 
of Shepherd training. While an absolute firmness 
is necessary at all times, this can be accomplished 
by a patient insistence on the part of the trainer. 
This will soon be recognized by the dog and he will 
take this quiet demand for obedience in good part 
and respond without resentment, in fact, there will 
develop in the apt pupils as they progress in their 
training an intense eagerness to work and to please, 
and these are the individuals that finish into the star 
workers of the field trials. 
The Shepherd’s ability as a working dog has been 
utilized in many directions: First of all as a herding 
dog, then for police work and as a trained guard 
and protector, as a trailer of lost children, as a war 
dog in sentinel duty and as a dispatch and ammuni¬ 
tion bearer, as a sanitary or Red Cross dog in the 
finding of hidden wounded, and he has been success¬ 
fully used to the gun as a trail dog. 
The direction and method of training can only be 
treated here in a general way; to give this in detail 
would require a volume in itself, especially in the 
very thorough and concise German methods. It is 
doubtful whether we in America will ever spend 
the time to do this as completely as the Germans. 
The speed and bustle of our American life does not 
make for the calm, dogged persistence that marks 
the success of the German trainer, and the remuner¬ 
ation would not be great enough'to encourage any 
great number of professionals, and again those who 
have taken it up in a professional way with success, 
and-also the German trainers who have come to us, 
are all men with qualifications that give them better 
opportunities in other walks of life in America. 
