Do you have a dog won’t listen and won’t pay attention? Is your dog too hyper? Does your dog know exactly what to do but is just plain stubborn? I hear these complaints all too often from clients. After a little investigating and digging a little deeper into the dog’s daily routine, the issue becomes clear. Your dog’s lifestyle is more like a permanent trip to the doggie equivalent of Disney World. In other words, the dog has too many options on how to entertain themselves, so much so that they never are able to settle down and focus. Oftentimes, these dogs are given full roam of the house at a very early age. This is like turning a child loose in a gigantic, over-stimulating theme park. So many places to run, so many places to hide… so many ways to get into trouble, too! This “all access” approach often … Read More
Multi-Part Series: Loose Leash Walking – Part 2
Welcome back to the multi-part series on training your dog to walk on a loose leash. As mentioned in Part 1, it’s important for you to decide what your training goals are before you start training. In many situations, owners are content to put their dog on special equipment, like a no-pull harness or a head collar to minimize pulling. Some owners would like to be able to walk their dog eventually on a regular collar, without any special equipment. If you fall into the latter category, then read on! Terminology Before training begins, it’s important to review some training terminology. Positive training techniques often rely on the use of a behavior marker. A marker – usually in the form of a sound – identifies for the dog the exact moment that they did something correct, and signifies that some form of reinforcement or reward is forthcoming very soon. This … Read More
Multi-Part Series: Loose Leash Walking – Part 1
In my professional dog training opinion, loose leash walking with your dog is one of the most difficult things you might ever have to teach your dog. If there was one key to training a dog well, it’s consistency, of course. Therefore, if you live with any other people in your home (like most of us do!) and those people aren’t 100% on board with your training, this might be a challenge. Sometimes the even bigger challenge is maintaining consistency with ourselves. Remembering to do the exact same thing over and over and over again can become boring, so we humans like to mix it up sometimes. This may or may not be a good learning technique for certain dogs. Also, as we begin to see success with our dogs, we tend to become more lax in our training criteria and the learning curve in our dogs can begin to … Read More
Too Many Treats Will Definitely Make Your Dog Fat
As a positive trainer, and more specifically a clicker trainer, clients and students will say to me that they don’t want to train their dogs with treats. After some discussion including the benefits of training their dog with treats, it’s also revealed many times that they don’t want their dog to become fat. I can’t admit enough how valid of a concern this is when training your dog with treats. Any dog trainer that would contradict the concern is perhaps misinformed, or holds the secret to effortless weight loss. In that case, I’d love to talk to them! Overall though, I don’t believe there is a trainer out there who would dispute the fact that 1) more food equals more calories and 2) additional calories, without additional exercise, equals more weight. There you have it… The student is right. Guess they’d better not train their dog then. (Can you … Read More
Giving and Getting Plenty of R&R
No doubt you’ve heard of the term “R&R,” as in “I just need some rest and relaxation.” And who doesn’t need a little R&R these days? We work too hard, sometimes we play too hard, and often in the end it’s debatable whether we’re any better for it. Well, your dog needs a little R&R in his or her life, too. I don’t mean rest and relaxation here, although it certainly is true that dogs do need those things to function properly, as well. What I’m really referring to is “Recognition and Reward.” More specifically, your dog or dogs need to be recognized for good behavior and rewarded for it, too. You may have heard this concept referred to as mark and feed, or click and treat, or maybe under some other term, too. Essentially, it means to identify the moment your dog is doing something correctly and then offer … Read More