Protection Dogs For Executives
The Weeks You Are Not There

Yes, but a protection dog protects only where it is, so the first question is how many nights a month you will actually be there. If the answer is a few, the dog will spend most of its life with a sitter, a house manager or a kennel, and it will protect them more than it protects you. That is not a flaw in the dog. It is what a dog does: it attaches to the people who feed it, walk it and make its decisions.

For some schedules that makes the dog the wrong purchase. If the worry is an empty house while you are away, an alarm and cameras do the job without boarding or a handover sheet, and our guide to whether you should buy a protection dog at all makes that argument at length. That guide has one paragraph on travel. This page is the long version of it, and it is for people who have read the short one and still want the dog.

The cost side is on the FAQ, where boarding is already listed as a cost the owner carries. Nothing below describes a service we offer. It is what we would want a buyer to have worked out first.

Some kennels will not take a dog trained in protection work, and you want to learn which before the trip. In practice that means calling kennels in the weeks after the dog arrives, saying plainly what the dog is trained for, and getting a yes in writing from the facility that will take it. A second facility is your fallback if the first is full.

Run a trial stay well before you need one. One night, then a weekend, then a week. You learn how the dog handles the building, how the staff handle the dog and how it comes home. Nobody should be learning any of that on the day your flight leaves. It is also the cheapest time to find out the run beside the dog’s has an anxious barker in it.

The questions below are our own list, written from what goes wrong when a working dog is boarded. They are not drawn from a published standard.

Ask which vaccines the facility requires. Do not assume. Boarding facilities set their own rules, so we state no norm. The American Animal Hospital Association’s 2022 canine vaccination guidelines do tell you what to raise with your own vet. They split vaccines into core, which is for all dogs, and noncore, “recommended for some dogs based on lifestyle, geographic location, and risk of exposure.” Rabies is core. The leptospirosis, Bordetella and canine influenza vaccines are noncore in that text, and boarding comes up under all three: they list time in kennels or dog daycares among the leptospirosis risk factors, say that for dogs at high risk an intranasal Bordetella combination vaccine given more often than annually, “for example, before boarding”, may be advantageous, and call the influenza vaccine a per-dog decision, especially for dogs that board or travel, while not recommending it for every dog. AAHA revises these guidelines, so ask your vet what the current version says rather than relying on the 2022 text. Give the kennel enough lead time: the paperwork is the part you can do nothing about on the morning.

No licence tells you whether a kennel will take your dog. The Texas licensing chapter for dogs, Occupations Code chapter 802, licenses dog and cat breeders, defined by five or more adult intact females bred for sale or exchange, and the state’s own licensing page does not mention boarding. We found nothing in the chapter about boarding, which is not the same as saying nothing exists, and section 802.003 leaves cities and counties free to further regulate the possession, breeding and selling of dogs. So ask the facility itself, and check your city.

Whoever has the dog counts as its owner for as long as they have it. Texas Health and Safety Code section 822.041 defines the word for its subchapter: “‘Owner’ means a person who owns or has custody or control of the dog.” We work through what follows from that in our guide to Texas dog bite law, under “Whoever Holds The Leash Is The Owner”, and will not repeat it. The point here is practical. If you travel, a person you pay, or a friend doing you a favour, carries the duties of an owner for weeks, with a dog trained to bite. That is a lot to hand someone who has met the dog twice. It is not legal advice, and a lawyer who knows your situation outranks us.

The practical answer is to split the job in two. The sitter looks after the dog. You stay the only person who works it. What follows is our judgment, with no outside source behind it.

Put the handover in writing. A sheet that fits on one page, read aloud in the room with the dog present, beats an hour of explaining at the door. The sheet should carry the items below, again our own list. Hand over in person, at least once, with the dog watching you do it. Before you leave a dog with someone for weeks, also read what your policy says about the dog; that is the subject of our homeowners insurance guide.

A protection dog has to be neutral to the people who work in your home. That is the standard we state on the FAQ: the default when a stranger walks up is to notice, hold position and look to you, and protection “is handler-initiated and has a clear off-switch.” A housekeeper, a nanny, a driver, a gardener and a security officer are all strangers to a new dog for the first weeks, and some of them will be in the house when you are not. A dog that cannot be neutral to them is not suited to a household that has staff, and it is better to learn that in the first month than at the front door.

Introduce people one at a time, with you there, and on the dog’s schedule. Our view as handlers, not a measured finding. Start with the people who are in the house most: the dog sees them arrive and leave with you in the room, then meets them on lead, then ignores them at a distance, and only then is anyone left alone with it. Irregular visitors such as a pool service or a tradesperson are not introduced. The dog is crated or placed away from them, as the FAQ describes for trades working in the house. If staff have children, or the dog is around a nanny’s charges, read our guide on protection dogs and children first.

The rules do not change when you leave. Crate the dog when the house has people in it who are not family. Nobody reaches for it. Nobody gives it a task. Write that on the handover sheet, and say it aloud on the first day. Staff who like the dog are the ones who bend these rules, because they mean well.

If you have an executive protection team, tell its lead about the dog. We do not know a given detail’s procedures and will not guess at them. From the dog’s side the questions are plain. Who on the team has met the dog? Where is it when they arrive? Who, if anyone, is allowed to command it? The honest default is nobody but you. In our view, a team that has not been told there is a bite-trained dog in the house, or that assumes it is theirs to direct, is a risk to the team and to the dog.

The dog attaches to the person who does the daily work, so keep the handler role yours. Our FAQ says it directly: 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.” For a traveller, that is the practical risk. If a house manager feeds it and walks it every day, and you are there a few nights a month, you have bought a dog for the house manager.

Keep the roles apart. Staff handle care, the feeding and the walks. You take the parts that carry authority whenever you are home: the training minutes, the commands that matter, the release, the greeting at the door. It will not fully fix a month of absence, and we will not pretend it does. The FAQ says the first weeks decide who the dog bonds to, so a buyer whose calendar is full for those weeks should move the purchase rather than the trips. Our guide to the first ninety days covers what those weeks involve.

Keep the dog’s routine the same in every house, and treat each house as a new place to learn. Our view as handlers. The same crate, the same feeding times and the same rules in the same words do more for a dog than anything about the building. Walk the boundary of the second property with the dog on lead before it is ever loose there, and do not assume the fence you trust at the first home exists at the second.

Licensing and tags are set by each place, so check each place. Texas requires an owner to have a dog vaccinated against rabies by four months of age, unless state rules provide otherwise. Cities add their own layer. Dallas, to take the one we could read, lists failing to vaccinate a dog for rabies and failing to microchip it as offenses. A city-run reproduction of the code says an owner commits an offense if the dog is not wearing a collar or harness with a current rabies tag attached, or if the dog has no microchip. That reproduction is not the official code, which we could not open, so read the text for the city you live in. We have not checked any other city and will not guess at them. Dallas is an example of how local the rules are, not a summary of yours.

For the dangerous-dog and owner-duty rules that sit on top of tags, see our state-by-state comparison. Check the ordinances of each city where the dog will sleep. A dog that is unremarkable under the law in one city can be a regulated animal under the next.

Use a restraint or crate that has been independently crash-tested, and check the size yourself. The Center for Pet Safety runs a voluntary certification program, in which a manufacturer commits to “meet independently developed safety standards”, with listing categories for harnesses, carriers and travel crates. When we read the page, it showed no harnesses, the crates listed were kennels and carriers, and the listing gave no weight ranges. So we name no product as suitable for a large working dog. Read CPS’s current list, then confirm with the maker that your dog’s weight is inside the tested range. A dog that rides in a crate every time, from the first week, is far easier to move than one meeting a crate for the first time at the airport.

Anyone who drives the dog needs the parked-vehicle rule. It is in our guide to protection dogs in Texas heat, with the cabin-temperature figures behind it, and a driver who stops for lunch has to know it as well as you do. Put it on the handover sheet.

Crossing a state line, the receiving state sets the rules, and they can turn on how long the dog stays. Our out-of-state buying guide quotes USDA on that point and walks through Florida’s health certificate and its exception for a pet travelling with its owner, along with the one-trip logistics of moving a dog by road. None of that is repeated here. What matters to a dog that commutes is that entry rules are written around visits. New York, the clearest example we read, asks a dog arriving from another state for a certificate of veterinary inspection issued 30 days or less before entry and a current rabies vaccination from three months of age. It then lists exceptions: no certificate if “the animal is staying in New York for less than 30 days”, and none for a New York resident dog with proof of a current dog licence and rabies vaccination that is coming back from travel out of state within the past year. So the same dog can need a certificate on one trip and not the next, depending on which home counts as its residence and how long it stays. Other states differ and change their rules, so check the destination’s own page before each season, not once.

One question we did not find answered. Florida’s exception is written for a pet “traveling with its owner”. If a driver or house manager ever moves your dog without you, assume the exception may not cover the trip until Florida’s agriculture department says it does. APHIS’s advice is to ask the destination state’s animal health official, and that applies to every state on your route.

Cabin rules, which airlines still carry a large dog in the hold, crate sizing and heat embargoes are all in our guide to flying with a protection dog. For a traveller it is the flying half of the question on this page: the same dog, the same handover, a different set of paperwork.

A dog needs the same person doing the same things, and a stand-in cannot do all of it for you. The FAQ on maintenance training says a little obedience every day keeps a finished dog finished, and that protection work with a decoy follows a schedule agreed with us, because a dog that never sees a decoy again will drift. A stand-in can run the everyday obedience on the sitter’s list. The decoy sessions cannot be handed to a house manager, and weeks away are weeks of missed ones.

Our view, as trainers and not a measured finding: a dog handled by three people, each with slightly different words and different tolerance for its habits, drifts toward whichever of them is easiest. That is another reason to choose one stand-in and keep them, rather than a rotation, and to write the commands on the handover sheet in the same words you use. We have not found a study on this and do not cite one. If you cannot do the ten minutes when you are home, and a stand-in cannot do the rest, the honest answer is the one in the first section.