Welcome to my blog! I love to share what I know about dogs with other people, so thanks for reading this. I know that you’re going to learn all kinds of really cool things you didn’t know before.
Silly Dog
Sometimes I’ll be silly because it’s fun. That’s probably why I’m a good dog trainer. I use dog training as an excuse to be silly and dogs love silliness.
My first labrador’s name was Silly Dog and that she was. She taught me how to be silly as well as how to live with and relate to dogs. We lived together for 15 years and I still miss her dearly.
She was my once in a lifetime dog and usually we only get one of those. But since Silly Dog, I’ve been lucky enough to have another and then another. I haven’t forgoten the many lessons that she taught me, includining, how to communicate with dogs.
Once in a Life Time Dog
Most people only think in terms of training dogs, which is usually a one way process all the emphasis is on getting the dogs to receive information. If you’ve been lucky enough to have a once in a lifetime dog, you know how much time you spent communicating with that dog, which is a two way process.
When you communicate with a dog, it creates a bond that can’t be explained to people who haven’t had the experience. It’s created with 10% chemistry, and 90 % communication. When you love a dog, you communicate in a thousand ways. It’s the communication that builds the human-animal bond and the relationship. In return, it is the relationship that increases the communication process – what a lovely cycle.
Communication in Many Ways
We communicate with dogs through our voices, facial expressions, touch, movements and gestures. In this blog, I have only my words to convey my true meaning. I hope you can ’see’ how much I care about dogs as I write about subjects as varied as the origins of the man–dog bond to the newest techniques and methods of teaching or training dogs. I think it all fits together – our bonds, our communication, and our lives.
The Full Circle Concept
I like to think there is a kind of full circle thing in the works here. In the beginning of human communications, men were communicating with other men (I say men although us girls are pretty sure we started the trend). Then men started communicating with canines.
Now, we’ve progressed all the way from grunting around the campfire to instant Internet communications of the 21st century, but our goal remains the same. Communicate with each other so we can communicate with the dog. Pretty cool.
Tug Games Stimulate Performance not Aggression
Studies have now proven that playing tug games with dogs will not cause a dog to be aggressive.
This common misconception had survived for a long time however, we know now that playing tug is a natural game. Dogs play tug for the fun, which makes tug games are very effective for training.
If your dog has a strong or dominate personality, playing tug can actually reinforce your pack leader status. Follow these two rules.
- End the game on your terms and before the dog is ready to quit.
- Keep possession of the toy when the game is over.
Don’t let the dog win possession as often as you might with a shy or insecure dog. Exhibit your control and strength, by winning possession and keeping the toy. Following these rules will let your dog see your ability to control the toy, the game, and him.
If your dog is a strong tugger get a toy that has a soft and sturdy handle like the Tuff E Nuff tug or two handles like the 2 Handled Fur Force Toy, which will help you hang onto and control the toy.
Dogs learn faster when they’re having fun, or playing. Puppies naturally learn from playful interaction and so will your adult dog. Here’s some ways to keep your training fun!
1. Train with toys, playing tug will reduce stress for both of you.
2. Relax your expectations, training is a process, and each day is just one step in the process. Don’t put pressure on your self or your dog to perform perfectly every day.
3. Don’t train when you’ve had a bad day or are overly tired.
4. Take a minute to sit and relax with your dog before beginning to train. If you’ve had a stressful day, take a moment to appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with your dog.
5. Feel free to be silly, dogs love silliness and it relieves tension.
6. Play motivational games with your dog, race to beat them to an obstacle or toy.
Keep things fun, don’t take any one practice too seriously and reward yourself for staying relaxed and enjoying your time with your dog.
When training complicated behaviors, break those behaviors into the smallest possible components and train each component separately. Then combine the behaviors to achieve the desired result. For instance to teach your dog to fetch the paper from the front lawn, you need all to teach all the following behaviors.
- Teach the dog to come when called
- Teach the dog to pickup an object when directed
- Teach the dog to go away from you on command
- Teach the dog to hold and carry an object without letting it go
All of these behaviors must be understood by your dog for him to fetch the paper from the lawn. Once the dog knows all these commands you can link them together one by one to get your dog to bring the paper from the front lawn.
Your Dog Can Be Very Loyal To His Toys!
If your dog really loves his toy, consider getting a second one and keeping it for the future, just in case it’s discontinued or out of stock when you want a replacement.
My dad used to say, when you find something you really like, you’d better buy a lifetime supply!
Manufacturers are constantly pressured to come up with new and better products and they have to make room for those new products so it’s natural to discontinue items.
Avoid Murphy’s law! Put a toy in the ‘toy bank’ now, while you can.
Stimulate your dog to work faster or harder by doing the following:
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Try occasionally offering ‘higher value’ rewards for good performance.
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Try real chicken or cheese treats for a change. Dogs frequently get bored with their treats.
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If your dog is stimulated by having other dogs around, try training with a friend and their dog.
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If your dog doesn’t like training, keep sessions short and reward afterword with their dinner, going for a walk or playing fetch.
Using ‘Timeout’ to change dog behavior is easy and effective. To change your dog’s behavior, put him in “timeout” for 5 minutes when you catch him doing something wrong. Seems too simple to work, doesn’t it? It may be counter intuitive, but it’s extremely effective. Putting a dog in timeout allows him the time and opportunity to figure out what landed him in ‘jail’.
And it’s a good deterrent because dogs hate being separated from their people or their pack. As I explain the finer points of this technique, I think you’ll understand why timeout for dogs works so well.
Dogs Live In The Moment
You must catch your dog in the act for ‘time out’ to work. Dogs live completely in the moment and after their minds have moved on to something else, they’re unable to make a connection to what they were doing just moments earlier. This literally takes only seconds, after which they have no hope of connecting their trip to doggie time out with what they did wrong. With puppies, you have maybe 5 seconds before they’re focused on something new. So in order for your puppy to understand that he’s going to time out because he piddled on the floor, you have to actually catch him doing it. With all dogs, action and consequence must happen simultaneously for them to get it.
Drama Doesn’t Correct Your Dogs Behavior
Don’t yell at your dog, it’s best if you absolutely nothing. If you yell, your dogs attention will shift to you, and away from what he just did. When your dog gets excited, his emotional state prevents him from being able to think clearly.
Just like us when our boss is yelling at us and suddenly we can’t think, when your dog is afraid or anxious his mental abilities plummet. Because he’s in survival mode, he can’t think and you want him to be thinking clearly. So yelling, threatening, hitting or any other distracting behavior may help you to vent, but it won’t help your dog realize what is happening and why.
Gently Take Your Dog By The Collar
Escort your puppy to time out as gently as you can. Don’t say anything. Take him by the collar, or pick him up to take him to the timeout spot. Put him into your puppy timeout spot and leave. It might be tempting, but please, don’t scowl, or physical intimidate your dog. Don’t distract him from what’s happening.
Dog Discipline
Now you can breathe and clean up the mess or retrieve what’s left of your shoes. Meanwhile, your puppy is cooling his heals in a quite spot. The best time out spots don’t have toys or chews and no view. Don’t give your dog anything to do besides figure out what got him into this predicament. I use a small powder room; it’s quiet, and windowless. If you use a bathroom, you can put the trash can on the counter if necessary, and put the toilet paper roll in a safe place if your puppy has discovered how much fun that can be. You can use whatever room is close by that will fit the bill and the fewer the distractions the better, especially for puppies.
Dogs Love Attention
Puppies and dogs don’t like isolation. In the natural world, wolves and wild dogs that are separated from their packs are open to attack and will be killed by competitors. Dogs have a very strong family attachment and strong drives to stay with the pack. Your dog won’t like being in doggie time out. It may seem like a light sentence to you while you’re cleaning up his mess, but don’t underestimate the ability of this technique. The psychological statement is much stronger than you might imagine. Ignore all cries for leniency, make sure your dog serves his entire sentence.
Dogs Have A Short Attention Span
While your puppy is in timeout, he’s trying to figure out how he got into this predicament. It’ll take a few moments for him to settle down and get over hoping that the door will open right up again. Then he’ll start thinking, but he can’t think for very long. We already know that dogs have a very short attention span, so 5 minutes in solitary will do. He won’t be able to keep up the thought processes for longer than that. After his memory of the event that got him here is lost, there is no reason to keep him there any longer. He won’t learn any better with more time. Dogs are excellent problem solvers but their memories are short, after 5 minutes they’ve exhausted both.
Release Your Dog
When you release your dog, don’t say anything, just open the door and walk away. Go back to what you were doing. The show is over and your dog doesn’t have the ability to connect his previous actions with any scolding now. A reprimand now doesn’t make any sense, he would think that he’s being scolded for being in timeout, which will sponsor fear when going there next time, and decrease the effectiveness of this technique.
Sherlock Hound I Presume?
Dogs are expert detectives. It will only take a few trips for him to realize timeout is a consequence of his behavior, and he’ll change that behavior if you’re consistent with this technique. Once your dog makes the connection his behavior changes. The quicker he makes the correct assumptions about his actions the quicker your problems are solved. If he doesn’t get it immediately don’t worry, a few more trips to timeout and he will get it.
The Perfect Dog
The more you use this method, the better it works. Your dog will figure out that timeout means he’s done something that isn’t acceptable. He’ll start thinking about what he was doing as soon as he realizes he’s on his way to the lockup. You never have to say a word, he’ll already be thinking about it and that’s the best part. You have a dog that is thinking about what you want and adjusting his behavior to please you. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Links to Puppy Class 101 articles:
Links to Helpful General Knowledge Articles:
It’s difficult for us humans to understand what dogs think. We can’t actually get inside their heads to see what they comprehend. However our knowledge of brain structure and observations of how dogs learn leads us to believe there are things dogs can’t understand and other things they appear to be very good at.
One of the things they don’t understand is ‘concepts’. They can’t conceptualize because they have very small frontal lobes. The frontal lobes are the part of the brain that processes higher reasoning and concepts. Since they lack this part of the brain, we’re pretty sure they think in very specific terms and their abilities to draw some types of conclusions are limited. This assumption is supported by observations about how dogs learn.
What Dogs Know
Humans understand the ‘concept’ of ‘sit’. If someone asks us to sit, we can sit inside or outside, on a chair, a step, at a table or on a log, it’s all the same to us. They can ask us to sit, take a seat, rest a moment, take a load off or put our feet up and we understand all of that in the larger concept of ‘sit’.
Dogs don’t have the ability to take a concept like ‘sit’, and apply it to differing circumstances. We call this global thinking, humans can globalize, dogs are specific.
How To Train A Dog
If you trained your dog to ‘sit’ and only practiced in the house, you might be surprised to find that he didn’t seem to understand that command outside on the lawn. With the change in surroundings and/or circumstances, it’s a different situation to them. Most dogs won’t recognize the signals because those signals only apply to the situation in which they were taught. I say most because some dogs, like guide dogs, which are specifically bred for this ability, have some limited abilities to globalize.
Once your dog understands ‘sit’, you would need to teach another command to get him to jump up and sit in a chair. For dogs, sitting in a chair is different than sitting on the floor. And chairs are different too. An upholstered chair is different from a kitchen chair, to a dog it’s not the same thing. Dogs think in very specific terms.
Training Dogs With Consistency
Many highly trained dogs that compete in agility, or do police work, will only work for one trainer. They won’t work with any other person. Even with the same words, commands and requirements, it just doesn’t add up when someone else is giving the signals. It’s too different because dogs are so specific in their thinking, and perceptions. In their minds, commands come from their trainer, they don’t come from other people. They don’t understand those commands because they didn’t come from the correct source. The good news is that we can easily show dogs that their commands work in all situations simply by practicing in different locations.
How Dogs Think
The thinking that dogs do well, I call ‘connect the dots’. They’re experts at ‘what comes next’. Here’s some examples that I’m sure you’ll recognize. You pick up the car keys and the dog knows you’re leaving. The rattle of the car keys, predicts that you’ll be going out the door. If your dog likes the car and wants to go with you, he’ll run to the door because he’s hoping that ‘what comes next’, is he gets to tag along. You never taught the dogs that the keys mean you’re leaving, he observed it and put one and one together.
What Dogs Remember
Some more examples, the can opener predicts dinnertime. The leash predicts a walk, the doggie shampoo predicts a bath. In each of these cases, your dog has done simple addition 1 + 1 = 1.
One thing, plus one thing, equals one thing. The car keys alone don’t predict that you are leaving. It must be YOUR car keys. If a guest picks up her keys, your dog knows the difference. If someone who never takes the dog with them picks up the keys, your dog won’t respond. So it’s not the keys alone which triggers a response. It’s you and your keys together. Here’s some more equations:
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Mommy + doggie shampoo = I’m getting a bath
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Daddy + car keys = daddy is leaving the house
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My dinner bowl + on the kitchen counter = I’m eating soon
Dogs are experts at this kind of addition, which is very specific thinking.
Doggie Math
Dogs pay attention to food and fun. They’re happy to perform to get the goodies. So we’ll use food and play to get them doing the math we want. Here’s our basic equation that we’ll be adapting to meet our needs:
All you have to do is show them the ‘what’. With training (experience) the equation can become anything you want, for example:
All their thinking runs along these lines, their thought processes are that simple. They can add two things together to predict a result and they can do that extremely well. Dogs are expert problem solvers and solving this kind of math is what they do extremely well.
Dogs Need Specifics
The reason I told you about how specific dogs are is because you need to know that to a dog, ‘come’ and ‘come here’ are not the same. ‘Sit’ and ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Good Sit’ are not the same thing either. Dogs do very simple math, the following equation is too difficult for them to process:
Dogs can’t do that math. Eventually they might learn all the permutations of the ‘sit’ word separately without your realizing it. But this kind of training will take much longer than being specific and consistent. Using one word, every time, in exactly the same way will allow your puppy to be a star!
Links to Puppy Class 101 articles:
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I’ve read training articles and general interest stories about dogs, which imply there isn’t much going on in our dog’s brains. I beg to differ. I think that they’re thinking and feeling quite a lot, and learning all the time, especially when they’re young.
Dogs Learn From Experience
Dogs learn from observation, and experience. In the natural world there aren’t any doggie schools, wolves and street dogs learn by watching each other, testing situations and gauging responses. To learn something useful, they experiment, and process the results, positive or negative.
Incidentally this why Time out works so well as a training tool, it gives your dog the opportunity process what just happened.
Dog Families
Dogs live with us instead of their natural canine families, So they watch and learning from us! In the natural world, dogs interact with and have learning experiences all day long, in our world our dogs are sequestered in a house, and only get input when we’re around. You’re the whole world to your dog. You’re the mommy, daddy, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles. What ever they’re going to learn, they’ll get from you, because you’re their primary, and sometimes only, being with which they’re allowed to interact and observe.
Accidental DogTraining
Our dogs are glued to us like we’re the new HD TV. We don’t realize but they are monitoring our reactions and responses, they’re keeping one eye or ear trained on us constantly. And they’re making connections and assumptions all the time. They take in an amazing amount of information and process it the doggy way. Yes folks, Big Brother is watching YOU, except in this case he’s a little fluff ball with a big grin and a wagging tail.
Dog Training, Torture or Treat?
It’s not uncommon, for a student to ask me if training will ruin their dog’s spirit. No, it won’t ruin their spirit, it will ruin their bad behavior and strengthen your relationship, because training is the interaction that dogs CRAVE. Their lives are about interaction, they’re social and pack animals with strong family ties. Training isn’t torture and your puppy won’t be emotionally stunted because training gives them attention and feedback they desperately want.
Dog Connections
Your puppy is observing you all the time whether you’re aware of it or not, and your puppy is learning every moment that his eyes are open. How do you suppose that he quickly learns the sound of the car keys means your leaving the house? It’s because he’s been connecting the dots and learning what things mean without your realizing it. He learned that the sound of the keys predicts your leaving the house by observing what happens and making connections.
Because they’re always drawing connections, you shouldn’t limit your training opportunities to certain places or certain times. Your puppy is always watching and learning from everything you do, take advantage of every opportunity.
Aid Your Dogs Learning Process
Your puppy is constantly looking to you for direction, so you can very quickly have a responsive and obedient dog. Ask for a sit, or down, or handshake with every treat. Insist the puppy waits while you go out the door first. Every time the puppy nips you, bump his nose. Every time he potty’s outdoors you give him praise and/or a treat.
Training is happening every minute that your dog is awake. Choose to take part, interact with him and show him how the people world works. You’ll both be glad that you did.
Links to Puppy Class 101 Articles:
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We humans are bigger, stronger and arguably smarter than our dogs so it’s our job to be their leaders. Not only because we’re bigger and stronger, but also because we provide their food. In the dog world that makes us the boss. Dogs are good with this system; in fact it’s their system, and their rules. We’re just living by them. They naturally look to us for leadership, protection and guidance. Because we’re bigger, stronger and we provide them with food.
Where’s The Dog Rules? Or, Trouble in Retriever City
The trouble starts when we humans don’t play by the dog rules. Many dog owners don’t realize how the dog world works, so they fail to accept their rightful place in the pack. They never even realize they are supposed to assume the position of pack leader. Many people think puppies are like people, if you treat them nice and explain things, they’ll behave. That’s true, but only if you can explain things the way a dog can understand and set some rules and enforce them.
Dog Insecurities
The American old west was an exciting and dangerous place because there was very little protection from dangerous people, and few lawmen. Every individual had to take matters into their own hands, make their own decisions about right and wrong, dangerous or safe, shoot or don’t shoot. Its no wonder the people of that era always look unhappy in their photographs. They weren’t happy. They were stressed out from everyday insecurities and worries. Dogs that live in homes without a clear leader live in an old west world, they don’t have the security they need to relax and be happy.
Cowpuncher Puppy
Dogs that live in unstructured or leaderless homes live in an old west world, they have no protection from the dangers of the world.
It’s your job to protect your dog by defining the their rules, rights, and boundaries. If you have a shy dog and you fail to live up to your rightful duties as ‘sheriff’ or ‘pack leader’ by providing the structure your dog needs, he could be insecure and fearful his entire life. Insecure and fearful dogs are generally dangerous. They often growl and bite to defend themselves and their possessions from perceived dangers.
The Well Balanced Dog
If you have a naturally well-balanced dog, with a happy go lucky attitude, you got lucky. Your dog probably won’t have serious behavior problems in the absence of your leadership and protection. If your dog isn’t naturally pliant and relaxed, he’ll need you to provide a solid structure of rules in order to feel secure.
How to Make Your Dog Happy
By setting rules, boundaries and limitations for your dog you’ll be assuming your rightful role of ‘sheriff’. And once you’ve established that you’re the pack leader, your dog will assume that you’re not only in charge of him, but that the whole world obeys you and your rules. Wow!
Pack Leaders Rule
Once again, we benefit from the doggy brain structure! As far as your dog knows, when we control him, we control the entire world! It sounds incredible, but it’s true. Because dogs brains have a limited capacity, once they see us as trusted leaders they can relax and be secure that their entire world is a safe place because we’ve made it so.
All we have to do is set rules we can live with, and keep them. That’s all the power we need to set our dogs free from anxiety for their entire lives, by providing the structure and the rules they need to be happy. You have the opportunity and the ability to give your dog a very happy life, make the rules.
Links to Puppy Class 101 Articles:
Links To Helpful General Knowledge Articles:
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