Angel Landrau

As a child, Angel Landrau was fascinated by animals, and kept and tried to breed just about anything with fur, feathers, or scales. Later he worked in the family business training Thoroughbred race horses, and from them he learned the futility and danger of trying to force cooperation from a powerful animal. He learned to work with the animal instead. Enlisting in 1998, Angel spent 24 years in the US Air Force and 20 years in the DoD Military Working Dog (MWD) Program, retiring as a MSgt from Lackland’s 341^st Training Squadron, where he served as MWD procurement evaluator, training evaluator, and NCOIC of training. Angel then served as Multi-Purpose Canine Teams Training Advisor for the US Army Special Operations Command, and was eventually recruited to return to 341 TRS as a civil servant to test and select candidate MWDs, consult on DoD training doctrine, mentor MWD trainers, and work with special cases. Angel’s experience in temperament-testing and training spans literally thousands of patrol and detector dogs. His special interests are developing solutions to the most difficult and dangerous behavior problems, and developing substance detector dogs with real effectiveness in the deployed environment. In Stewart Hilliard’s words “Angel Landrau is the most creative and thought-provoking technician of practical working dog training I have ever seen– his solutions for  technical problems are startling in their originality, and his talent for stimulus control approaches genius.” Woven throughout Angel’s tightly- integrated system of training is the principle that the handler-dog relationship reigns supreme, even in the “drivey-est” animals. Angel’s motto is “the rubber ball is not the reward, the opportunity to interact with ME through the ball is the reward.” With this insight Angel is able to successfully train dogs that no one else can.