Good questions all. Accountability comes into play when considering the dog for certification. If he is not capable of a great many things, he wont certify. Certification carries with it quite literally accountability that has to stand up in court. Hard to outline here but it requires a dog that is spot on. They can usually be certified for the street at around 18 months.( very generally speaking...)
As far as handling the dog when he snarfs the food, chases the cat etc. What I do is back up in my training, sometimes to basics...the pet people call it a "leave it" command. Reinforce the 'leave it' by re-directing the dog and rewarding heavily for the proper actions( which are to focus on you or the search) Granted there will be that occasional dog that never gets over the food thing( again the importance of early socialization...if you didn't have the luxury or raising the dog, it may not happen, theres a neurological reason for ingrained behavior..) And thats when you go to my first post, and get another dog...
Adversity is also an excellent question because we deal with it in spades in K9. I will use the example of a combative suspect.( thats about as adverse as it gets) Again it goes to extremely early training and socialization. A good breeder/trainer will take the prospective K9 pup from about 5 or 6 weeks and begin playing tug with it, stroking the dogs head and body all the while to get him used to being touched during the tug.As training progresses the tugs get bigger and harder, as does the touching..the dog now gets stroked with sticks and hands and some pressure is applied. More progressive and the tug morphs into the bite sleeve, the trainer morphs into basically a human tug toy. A whip or baton is wielded, and glancing blows given the dog on the bite. Again the whole thing is a scenario of incremental introductions. The end result is a dog on the bite that you can have a real fight with, and it doesn't do much more than ramp him up.
The key during this incremental introduction of adversity is to maintain the dog in prey drive.Prey drive goes by many names but its all the same thing, ball drive, play drive,positive fight drive etc. As long as the dog is enjoying what he's doing, he's controllable. If he goes into defensive drive, he may very well shut down or worse, become truly aggressive, and true aggression is uncontrollable. ( for instance in prey drive our cert. standards are for the dog to release his bite "out" within five seconds of the command being given ) If the dog has gone defensive...he wont listen and he wont release.
Again it all goes back to taking a negative and pairing it with a positive, done properly it can actually act as a motivator. ( Which is why you see our bite decoys screaming, flailing weapons and acting aggressively towards the dog...the dogs love it!) I have decoyed a lot and a good dog can kick your ass big time one minute and literally be rolling around with you playing on the floor the next.
