The talk for tomorrow has the long and intriguing title of “Professional Secrets to Dog Training” but really… none of it is a secret. We have 50 minutes to present the talk to an over-filled room (65 attendees, more have called to ask if they can sneak in!) at Read more…
There are a lot of books about success (and not) and looking at why certain individuals or groups of people are successful (or not). I’ve been reading a lot of these over the last few months. A few observations: (Other than that reading many books on the same Read more…
One of the things that many dog teams will say, especially those working on competition training or behavior modification, is “I just think he would do so much better if you were training him.” And the thing is, most dogs would do better with a trainer handling them. It’s not Read more…
In basic training classes, this is one of the questions I ask about each of the problem areas. Example 1: Client: My dog jumps on me every time I step over the gate into that part of the house! But he doesn’t jump up on my husband!Me: How important is it Read more…
Most dogs can fairly quickly to get to this point in class. For some teams, it takes longer to get to the dog demanding work. The first things we look at are making sure the dog is comfortable (worried dogs have enough to think about other than work) and Read more…
We recommend practicing in lots of environments to get very fluent and reliable behaviors. It’s especially important to practice in the environment where you most need the behavior. For safety reasons, we can’t just let your dog off leash in the front yard to work on recalls. And we don’t Read more…
By then end of a class session, half the students have typically met their goals and are happy with the progress made. The other half asks, “what’s next?” What are your goals? If we haven’t met your goals, we should probably keep working. We can talk about class Read more…
After leash reactivity class we try to always ask “Which part was the best and which part was the hardest?” It’s very, very interesting how most people will then tell the best part.. and the “worst” part. Part of that probably is that “worst” is considered to be the opposite Read more…
Sometimes at training group we talk about whether or not training is “too hard.” We struggle with parts of it. Our dogs aren’t perfect (except for Griffin….). And how do we expect people to succeed when they don’t want or need to know everything about training? Sometimes I Read more…
Four times this week the topic has come back to training enthusiasts needing to be better at breaking down behaviors into separate components. Once you’ve trained a behavior, you often have one (or more) ideas on how to teach it to another dog. Being able to take a behavior you Read more…