War Dog Training in Great Britain
The French had trained dogs for years but not on a large scale until December of 1914. M. Megnin, a noted trainer, was granted permission by General de Maudhuy to establish a training kennel for the French army; this resulted in a large training school at Satry. At this time French dog clubs were asked to co-operate, each was assigned a different region and provided dogs native to these regions; including sheep dogs - de Brie, de Beauce, Alsatian and the Belgian, collies and Airedales were imported from England. If the AKC dates are accurate, Taki was probably serving in the army when this training school was established.
In the summer of 1915 Colonel Richardson visited the French front to see the dogs of the 6th Army stationed at Ville Coteret, in the fall he visited the 7th Army in the Vosges sector and met his old friend Major Megnin who was in charge of the kennels at Gerardmere. Colonel Richardson returned to England with the knowledge of how French messenger dogs were trained and later applied this knowledge at his training facility. Interestingly enough Richardson's dogs (and presumably the French dogs) were trained with a reward system, punishment was forbidden.
While the dogs in this article are not Belgian, they were trained at Colonel Richardson's school in a manner learned from the French and, perhaps, similiar to the war dog training in Belgium.
- References
- "British War Dogs", by Lt-Col. E. H. Richardson, circa 1920
- "Colonel Richardson's Airedales", by Bryan D. Cummins, 2003