Train Your Furry Best Friend
Effective and fun dog training for all ages and breeds.
BeFore your First Session, Please read:
Think Like a Dog
- Dogs thrive on approval and want to be successful in the training process, but they find the process perplexing at first. You are asking them to do things that they would never be required to do in the wild.
For example:
- Dogs never walk in a straight line. They have evolved to process their world through smell, and their bodies generally follow their noses. They are also pack animals, so they move in a fluid way as they send and receive information about prey. Learning to heel is a process of unlearning how they would normally move in space with someone in their “pack” (you).
- Dogs bark to communicate, so they are baffled when you yell at them to be quiet. This is especially true when they are warning you of a possible danger, and their perception is that you are disregarding the danger. They hear much better than we do, and they hear a larger range of frequencies, so they are always barking at a stimulus, not at random.
- Dogs are hunters. For puppies, their play is practice for the survival skills they need. Nipping and biting their littermates is part of this process. They are generalizing the behavior to you, so they are surprised that you don’t like this form of play.
- Humans’ brains are more evolved than dogs’ brains in two important ways:
- Dogs will learn isolated words and expressions, but they “hear” you by combining what you say with the pitch and tone of your words, your facial expressions, your posture and body movements, to understand what you want from them. Dogs will respond best to training if the positive reinforcement is in an upbeat voice with a higher pitch and show your pleasure with your expression and posture. They will understand better that you are correcting them when you make your voice lower.
- Dogs can’t reason they way we do, so they will learn from positive or negative reinforcement only of the last thing they did. Timing is crucial to making sure your dog understands what you want. For example, if your dog runs off and doesn’t respond the first five times you say “come,” but then comes to you on the sixth time, if you then say “bad dog” when he gets to you, your dog will think that coming to you was the undesirable behavior and avoid it in the future.
Tips for Success
- Dogs are motivated by food, attention, praise, affection, and play. Each dog is unique, and it might take a little while to figure out what is most motivating for your dog. Often, the absence of attention is sufficient for your dog to modify its behavior. It might be preferable to a correction in some circumstances. Typically, praise and food are used in training, but when you fade out food you should still praise your dog.
- The sequence for training is always:
Cue → behavior → reward
- If you can’t immediately give the reward (generally if the reward is food), you can add a mark, such as the clicker. The sequence is:
Cue → behavior → mark → reward
- The mark should occur exactly at the moment the desired behavior occurs. You will make mistakes at first, but you will get it!
- Saying “no” to a dog is less helpful than giving them specific information about what behavior you want them to stop. If you teach your dog “leave it” to mean “keep your mouth off” anything they are trying to eat or bite, they know specifically what they were doing wrong. The command “off” means “get your front paws/your whole body” off of the guest who walked in the door, and also your couch.