Is it ever finished?

Hello Dog Owners!

It’s autumn and the leaves are coming off the trees with increasing haste and it’s getting dangerous!

“How can a leaf falling from a tree be dangerous?”, you ask.

Well, maybe not a leaf, but conkers!

One fell on my head as I was walking minding my own business training a clients dog and it got me thinking….

Would you say that training your dog seems like an endless challenge?

Just as things are looking up and you’ve hit the next level of obedience, it just as quickly comes crashing down again and Fido seems to miraculously forget everything he’s learnt.

Practically overnight!

I’ve been having similar issues with Joey over the past week or so, which is making us revisit some of our basic training strategies and looking at reinforcing the correct behaviours … once again.

It can be frustrating, but it’s important that we remain calm – it’s to be expected!

It’s all about reinforcing the basics and the training that you have done, going forward.

This week we’ll be focusing on the idea of training, it’s scope, duration and simplicities.

WHEN TO STOP TRAINING YOUR DOG

Last year a client asked me what seemed like a simple question:

“When do I stop training my dog?”

I was about to give an answer to this seemingly simple query, but instead a whole host of questions filled my mind, including one that I think was of utmost importance…

“What does the owner expect from training and how do they envisage it working?”

Over the months from then, the answers to these questions has become a little clearer. It would seem that some owners…

• expect months or years worth of problematic behaviour to be solved in just a few sessions.
• expect a trained dog to remain trained without any further training.
• expect a trainer to train their dog and then the dog be 100% perfect with them, without any additional work by them.
• expect a trainer to solve their dogs problems without the owner doing anything.
• hardly ever consider the mental health of their dog.
• don’t seem to realise the importance of building a quality relationship between them and their furry best friend.

These are just a few of the uncommunicated expectations and oversights of some owners.

How do I know this? I know because I asked them!

I’m not saying that all owners are the same, of course they’re not.

There does seem though, to be an increasing number of owners that are under the illusion that all their issues with their beloved four-legged friends will generally be solved by somebody else and in super-quick time,

…or…

They just need to do a few basic things and Hey Presto! All the problems with their dog just vanish, all without them needing to learn any skills upfront!

…and…

When their dog doesn’t show significant signs of improvement after a couple of sessions, they seem all too eager to throw in the towel.

And I blame the unrealistic content and miscommunication of social media articles mainly for these unrealistic expectations.

As it always has done, content creators on social media only show the things that they want people to see, only communicate information that they want people to hear and leave all the other bits out.

They don’t show you the 12 previously failed recalls that they had before they got the 1 perfect one that they posted online.

How many people post images of themselves and their friends all smiling and laughing online?

Loads! Probably hundreds of thousands … or more.

I have witnessed people doing things like this on numerous occasions and they all pose for the photo with laughs and smiles and as soon as the photo is taken, they all sit down and look miserable, staring into their phones and practically ignoring each other.

But the photo goes up labelled “Having a brilliant time! Wish you were here!”.

It’s all false.

Just as unrealistic as social media content can be, owners’ expectations about training their dog can also suffer from this same issue.

Let’s take Fido again.

Fido has been running away his entire life when he is off the leash.

He has never been trained to come back, although in the beginning he always used to hang around with his owner and be fairly attentive.

Now, it can take his owner a good half an hour sometimes to get him back and as a consequence they have stopped letting him off-leash to run around.

Fido is 3 years old. How long would you expect it to take to build a reliable recall with Fido?

A week? A month? 3 Months?

The fact of the matter is that Fido has been practising this behaviour for so long, almost every single day, that it is likely to take months to achieve even a basic, acceptable degree of recall and it could be unlikely that he will never have a reliable recall.

Is it worth the bother to train him on recall then? Hell yeah!

Even a basic recall in familiar places is better than no recall at all anywhere.

But expectations need to be managed and Fido’s owner will be training him on this one thing alone, maybe for years to come, in order to keep it as responsive as he can be.

And if you have a super-anxious rescue dog, you can expect months and years of managing and guiding your dog through their recovery journey.

Learning is a life-long process for all of us. Why should it be any different for our dogs?

If we stop practising playing the guitar regularly we become rusty and not as proficient as we once was. Over time, if we didn’t play at all, it is likely that we would forget almost everything we learned.

This is similar of all human behaviour and also that of our dogs too.

Just like we need to practice over and over again, so do they.

If they don’t regularly practice the skills they learn, it becomes very likely that they will forget what they have learned, become rustyand instead, these once perfect behaviours may increasingly be replaced by the things they practice more regularly instead, such as not coming back when called, sniffing, chasing rabbits, lunging for other dogs, jumping up at people and rolling in fox poo!

So the answer to the question, “When do I stop training my dog?”, is quite simply….

Never! Well, until the end.

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USING SPATIAL PRESSURE

In the last edition of the newsletter when we spoke about using an implied or explicit Stay command, we spoke about the use of Spatial Pressure. But what is it and how do we use it?

Spatial Pressure is simply using your body to put a sense of pressure on your dog to encourage them to behave in a certain way – usually moving away from us, or coming towards us – without words and usually to enforce the behaviour command we have asked for.

Similar to how we feel if somebody moves uncomfortably close to us, we can use the same sense of discomfort to apply a sense of urgency and authority to our request, towards our dogs if they are spatially aware.

For instance, if we ask Fido to ‘Sit!’ and then we walk away, as soon as he starts thinking about breaking the sit and begins to move towards us, we can apply spatial pressure by quickly moving back towards him, sometimes using our punishment marker “Aah!” and/or any hand signal we have conditioned him to recognise, to gently encourage him to place his bum firmly back down on the floor.

All without us needing to repeat our command – which we should, of course, refrain from doing!

I use spatial pressure almost all of the time, especially when teaching a dog to go into a Sit from a Down position, or wanting it to stay in a position I have asked them for.

If they refuse to get up from laying down and sitting, then moving in close towards them can produce enough pressure to get them to pop right up into a sit, especially if coupled with the appropriate hand signal, lure and treat!

Similarly we can use spatial pressure to encourage our dog to leave the food we hold in our hands, by pushing our closed hand quickly towards their muzzle when they try to take it from us, wait until they pull their muzzle away, mark using a Reward Marker and reward.

I also use spatial pressure to encourage a dog to walk backwards from me, when teaching the Back command.

Spatial Pressure is a lovely, subtle, body-language technique that can help to gently reinforce what you are asking from your dog and it works wonders!

Why not try it and let us know how you get on?

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IN = OUT

It’s no mystery.

The formula for success is partially what you are prepared to do with the other part being what you actually do do! (although, it would appear that they have been extinct a fair while now!).

The old saying that “You get out what you put in”, couldn’t be truer for dog training.

Take a look at your dog.

Take a good look.

What do you see, apart from that furry ball of cuteness looking back at you?

Do they have the skills to behave themselves in public?

Can you take them for a meal at a dog-friendly restaurant and have them settle down for the evening?

What about street skills?

Sitting at curbs, observing roadside boundaries and being impartial to traffic and other passers-by?

Do they walk nicely by your side everywhere you go and calmly walk past other dogs, regardless of the other dogs reaction?

The effort we put into our training is observable in our dog’s behaviour. If their behaviour isn’t what we want it to be, then it is a good indicator to us that there is more work to be done.

The question is whether you will rise to the challenge?

Or, will you simply not bother and just accept that it’s the way things are as it seems like too much effort to put in the work to change it? Or, that you don’t know how.

Remember! Anything is possible.

Especially if somebody else has already achieved it.

I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely heaps of work to do with Joey, my little rescue dog!

Why not have a gander at your dog and contemplate … what is your dogs behaviour telling you?

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So as the dark nights settle in for the next 5 months or so and the Sun has difficulty in remembering to rise early in the morning, ask yourself what your dogs’ training plan is for the Winter months.

And if you haven’t got one?

Well that may be a topic for discussion in our next newsletter, so make sure you check in for that.

That’s it again for now though…

Remember to let us know how you are getting on with your training and how beneficial the training tips are, by hitting reply to this email. We’d love to hear from you.

See you in a couple of weeks.

Until then,

Happy Training!

“Maybe” is never an option.

– Stuart