Frequently Asked Questions

It starts with a real conversation. We ask about your household, your lifestyle, your experience with dogs, and what you actually need the dog to do. From there we draw on our hands-on evaluation experience — including time in the suit — to match you with a dog whose temperament, drive level, and character are genuinely suited to your environment. We would rather tell you a dog isn’t the right fit than place one that doesn’t belong in your home.

David and Sufian are both experienced decoys who have worked in sport, law enforcement K9, and family protection contexts. That background changes how we read a dog. We can feel a dog’s intent, nerve, and commitment in ways that aren’t always visible from the outside. We evaluate the complete picture — not just whether a dog looks impressive in a demo, but how it thinks, how it recovers, and whether it has the character to back up its training in real situations.

That is a non-negotiable part of our selection process. A dog that isn’t solid around children, guests, and everyday household situations doesn’t make our list regardless of its working ability. We are fathers ourselves and understand exactly what it means to bring a protection dog into a family home. Temperament is the first filter, not an afterthought.

Primarily Belgian Malinois, Dutch Shepherds, and German Shepherds — the three breeds most proven in serious protection work. Each has distinct characteristics and suits different types of handlers and households. We’ll walk you through which makes sense for your situation rather than pushing a specific breed for its own sake.

We deliver personally. That isn’t just a convenience — it’s part of how we do things. We want to introduce the dog to your home, walk your family through handling, and make sure the transition goes smoothly from day one. We’re not handing off a dog at a parking lot.

We stay involved. If something comes up — a handling question, a behavioral concern, a situation you’ve never encountered before — you can reach us directly. We’re not difficult to get ahold of, and we don’t disappear after a sale. The relationship continues because we genuinely care how the placements we make turn out.

It’s a path for families who want to be part of the process from the very beginning. We handpick a puppy based on your breed preference and household needs, evaluate it ourselves before it ever comes home to you, and then guide your family through raising it — obedience, structure, and eventually protection development — with us staying hands-on throughout. It takes more time than buying a finished dog, but the bond and the result are different.

We quote per dog, on a call, once we know what you actually need — a number on a web page with no dog attached to it tells you nothing. What moves the price: the dog itself, how much of its training is already finished, how well it holds that training in unfamiliar places, its age, and how much additional work your situation calls for. What a finished dog includes on our end is the dog, its training, temperament and household testing, personal delivery, in-home instruction, written health and satisfaction guarantees, and support afterwards. Serious dogs are not cheap, and the reason is unglamorous: months of daily work by people who do this for a living, plus every candidate that was evaluated, turned down, and still had to be fed and vetted. If price is your first filter, we are probably not the right people to call.

Included: the dog, the training it arrives with, temperament and household compatibility testing, personal delivery, hands-on instruction with your family in your own home, written health and satisfaction guarantees, and ongoing guidance for the life of the dog. Not included: food, routine and emergency vet care, insurance, crates and equipment, boarding when you travel, and any additional training you decide you want later that was not part of what we agreed. If you want us back out for refresher work, we will quote it. Travel for delivery gets discussed on the call, because it depends on where you are. We would rather put all of this in front of you before you commit than have it surface afterwards.

We will not invent a figure, but we will tell you what the line items are. Food, and a working dog eats more of it. Routine vet care plus the occasional injury — these are athletic animals and they do hurt themselves. Maintenance training, including sessions with a decoy on a schedule we set with you. Boarding when you travel, which costs more for a dog like this because not every kennel will take one. Equipment that wears out. And call your homeowner’s insurance carrier before you buy, not after: some carriers ask about breed and some will not write the policy. People underestimate the recurring side of this. It is worth adding up honestly before you spend anything on the dog itself.

It is vendor shorthand, not a certification. No governing body defines those tiers, nobody administers a test for them, and there is no registry you can check a dog against. One company’s level two is another company’s level three, and both are marketing. Real, checkable credentials do exist — PSA, IGP, KNPV, French Ring — because those are sanctioned trials with judges and published results. If a seller leads with a level, ask what the dog will actually do instead: obedience on and off leash with real distraction, whether it releases on the first command, how it works away from its home field, how it behaves when nothing is happening. Then ask to watch it. We would rather describe a dog to you than assign it a number.

A guard dog works a territory, largely on its own — a yard, a lot, a fence line. Its job is to make a place unpleasant to enter, and it often does that with little handler control, because nobody is standing there directing it. A protection dog works with you. It lives in the house, goes where you go, and does nothing until you put it into a situation or a situation arrives. The difference that matters is the off-switch: a protection dog is neutral to ordinary life and engages on your terms, not its own. A dog left to decide for itself is a liability in a family home, and it is not what we place. If what you actually want is something to leave alone in a yard, buy a fence and cameras instead.

It should not, and if it did we would treat that as a failure of selection, training, or handling — not as the dog being a dog. Neutrality is the first thing we test for. The default behavior when a stranger walks up is to notice, hold position, and look to you. Protection is handler-initiated and has a clear off-switch, which is the whole point of a trained dog over an untrained one. That said, this is an animal and not an appliance, and we expect you to manage it like one: crate or place the dog when trades are working in the house, do not let visitors reach for it, and supervise children and their friends the way you would around any powerful dog. If you are not going to do that consistently, tell us on the call and we will be honest about whether this is for you.

Not really. Three days, three weeks, three months is a rescue framework, written for dogs coming out of a shelter with unknown histories. A finished adult from a program has been handled daily, kennelled, transported, and worked around strangers, so it settles far faster than a rescue does. What actually happens is this: for the first few days the dog is polite and slightly reserved while it reads your household. The next few weeks are the ones that matter, because it is learning your rules and it will test whether they are real. That part is your job, not the dog’s. Whatever habits you allow in that window are the dog you will live with. The timeline is not the point; the structure you hold during it is.

It bonds to you. Dogs suited to this work transfer faster than most people expect — one that could not would be useless as a placement, so the ability to attach to a new handler is part of what we select for. But the bond follows the work, not the couch. The dog attaches to whoever feeds it, trains it, walks it, and makes decisions for it. If you hand all of that to someone else in the house, that is who it will look to, and no amount of paperwork changes it. The first weeks decide this. It is part of why we deliver personally and train in your home rather than meeting you somewhere: we are handing the dog over to you deliberately.

A little every day, plus real sessions on a schedule. The daily part is not bite work — it is obedience folded into ordinary life. Make the dog work for its food, hold a place command while you eat, heel out of the front door instead of towing you through it. Ten honest minutes a day keeps a finished dog finished. The periodic part is protection work with a decoy, on a schedule we agree with you, because a dog that never sees a decoy again will drift. We will be blunt about the trade: if you are not going to do the ten minutes, the dog gets worse, and that is a handling outcome rather than a training failure. A dog that goes a year with no structure is not the dog we delivered.

Call us early. This is the conversation people put off for months while it gets worse, and it is the one we most want to have. Usually it is not the dog — it is a routine that slipped, a rule nobody is enforcing, or a handler who has quietly been out-negotiated. A lot of it gets solved on the phone or in one session. If it genuinely is not the right match, say so plainly and we will work through the options with you rather than leaving you to sell a trained dog to a stranger on the internet. What we will not do is go quiet and let you sort it out alone. We would also rather head this off on the first call: if what you describe does not sound like a household that should have a working dog, we will tell you then.

Yes, and we would rather you did. Ask on the call and we will arrange what is practical for where you live. Bring whoever else lives in the house, particularly anyone who is uneasy about the idea — their reaction matters more than yours does. If you are across the country, ask to see the dog on video first, and ask for footage of it doing nothing in a house as well as footage of it working. Watch the right things when you see it: not how hard it hits a sleeve, but how quickly it settles afterwards, how it behaves when nothing is happening, and whether it is neutral to you while you are still a stranger. A demonstration is easy to stage. A calm dog is not.

We deliver, in person, and we do not ship. A dog flown alone in a cargo hold arrives stressed and dehydrated, meets its new family on the worst day it has had in months, and the family gets handed a leash and no instruction. When we deliver we see the house, meet everyone who lives in it including children and other dogs, put the dog through its obedience in your rooms and your yard, and hand it over while we are standing next to you. A real share of what you are paying for is that visit. It is also the last point at which we can check that we matched the dog correctly, which is not something we are willing to do over a phone screen.

It depends on the dog, and we would rather give you an honest range than a comfortable one. If we already have a dog that genuinely suits your household, it can move quickly, and the limits are your schedule, ours, and any remaining work the dog needs for your particular situation. If we do not have that dog, we are not going to hand you the nearest available one to hit a date — we will wait for the right one, and that can take months. Build Your Own Pup is longer by design, because you are raising the dog and that takes as long as growing up takes. If you need a dog by a specific date, say so on the first call and we will tell you straight whether we can meet it.