Timing: Timing is the ability for the dog to associate either a positive or negative outcome in response to his specific behavior.
In this case, the dog must understand that displaying aggression will be met with a negative outcome, and he must be able to ASSOCIATE this negative with his behavior (the aggression).
Consistency: Being consistent means that every time your dog exhibits a specific behavior, he must get the same response.
As mentioned before, mother nature knows how this works very well. She protects her rose bushes by putting thorns in them.
Have you ever wondered why dogs don’t jump into rose bushes?
Because every time they do, they get pricked by the thorns! So in other words, they receive a NEGATIVE association every time they exhibit this behavior.
Motivation: Most people know about timing and consistency.
But motivation is what separates the Big Dogs from those who sit on the porch and watch. Being motivational simply means that everything you do must have MEANING! In other words, if a cop were to give you a ticket (a correction) for speeding, but the ticket is only for $2... is it going to be motivational enough to get you to stop speeding? Of course not. But what if that ticket was for $2,000! I bet you’d stop speeding pretty darn quick! And that’s because the cop’s ticket had meaning, thus it was
MOTIVATIONAL. Make sure everything you do with your dog is motivational, be it praise or corrections.
In regards to aggression, your dog must associate a good, motivational correction every time he displays his aggression...
and then when he decides that showing aggression IS NOT in his best interest, give him lots of motivational praise to reward him!
To be honest, if you’re having aggression problems with your dog (and hey, let’s face it... you probably wouldn’t be reading this part of the book if you weren’t!)... then you need
professional help.
Dog training, especially learning to train a dog with an aggression problem, is a lot like learning how to drive an automobile. Education is important, however, you really can’t learn how to drive a car by reading a book. You need to get behind the wheel, with dad in the passenger seat telling you when to put the gas on, and when to brake. After a while, you get the feel for it, and pretty soon you are able to take the car out on the road by yourself. Dog training is the same way. I can tell you what to do, but unless you really see it, it’s difficult to transfer theory into application.
How To Speed Up Training Results By Using The Ball And Food Drive!
What is a drive? Is it something you do on a Sunday afternoon with your dog in the passenger seat of your convertible Buick? Well, yes.
Aahhh, but in terms of dog training, you ask? A drive can be generally thought of as an extension of a dog’s instincts.
Dogs have several drives; Ball drive, food drive, sex drive, fight drive, defense drive, hunt drive, herding drive, etc...
Ball drive and food drive are the two primary drives used by professional dog trainers to get fast, impressive results, make the teaching phase of a new exercise easier to understand, and to preserve attitude. Additionally, using either the food or ball drive can make your dog a “ happy worker,” rather than the type of dog who merely drudges through his obedience routines.
Avoid the amateur’s pitfalls. The amateur dog trainer will make the mistake of using a ball or food treat as a bride, rather than as a motivator. You may be asking yourself, “ What’s the difference?” Quite frankly, the difference is that, using a ball or food as a bribe means that your dog is working for the bribe, but not for you. This creates the type of dog who will quickly learn that, if he doesn’t get food, he doesn’t have to work. And if you can’t coax him with a ball or tasty treat... it’s, “ Hasta la Vista, Baby!”
The true professional will use the ball and food drive as a motivator. This means that the dog knows that you are the pack leader and that you will make him perform the desired behavior.
But by using the ball and food drive, you are able to motivate your dog to perform such exercises with joy and attitude.
Two techniques for building strong ball drive:
Ball drive technique #1: Ball-on-the-wall game. Back tie your dog to a garage door, or a tall wall that has a hook or an
eye-bolt. Attach the dog to a short leash (two to three feet, depending on the size of your dog), and make sure he is wearing a soft leather flat collar— something which will not hurt his neck when he strains against it.
The idea here is to playfully throw the ball against the wall near where the dog is tied. Your dog will begin to jump and prance for the ball. As he begins to get excited, encourage him.
Occasionally (once or twice a session) let him win by getting the ball. Drive is built through frustration.
When your dog appears most excited about the ball, end the session. If you work past his most excited state you will actually decrease your dog’s drive. Frustration without the chance of ultimately winning lowers drive.
If you put your dog away right before his interest in the ball reaches its highest peak, the result will be that the next time you bring him out to play the ball-on-the-wall game, his interest will peak even higher! And this creates stronger ball drive.
Ball drive technique #2: The Ball-on-a-String gadget.
Start by taking an ordinary tennis ball. Use a knife to puncture two half-inch slits— one on each side. At a local hardware store, purchase a piece of string, approximately the same width as a shoe-lace, three feet in length. Next, use a piece of wire, such as a bent coat hanger, to guide the string through the ball, and tie a knot in the end so the string will not accidentally slide back through.
After you’ve done this, you will now have a “ ball on a string,” an item which commonly sells for $9 in Southern California pet stores.
Bring your dog out of the crate after an hour or two, and make the ball jump and roll. Every time the pup thinks the ball is “ dead,” you should make it jump again, just enough to keep his interest. Pretty soon, you should be able to work your dog into a frenzy over “ killing” the ball. Just like the ball-on-the-wall
game, quit when your dog is most excited, and the next time you bring out the ball-on-a-string, your dog will be even more excited. Soon your dog will be ball crazy, and you will be in a position to use the ball to motivate your dog to do anything!
A little known fact about increasing food drive: In general, food drive is the result of your dog’s genetics. However, dogs with a strong food drive can have their desire to eat squashed by owners who engage in habit of “ free feeding.” To encourage food drive, give your dog access to his food for only 10 minute. At the end of this 10 minute period, if the food isn’t gone... too bad! The dog must wait until his next feeding time.
Secondly, you can feed your dog once, instead of twice-a-day, and this should also boost food drive.
A third technique, employed by the trainer who has limited time to get results, is to feed the dog only during training.
This results in a dog which learns to be super-motivated for food, because training has become synonymous with feeding time.
But instead of simply being able to gobble his food down, the dog learns he must work for his chow! This technique can be construed as being a bit extreme, but will build food drive even after you have returned to a normal feeding schedule.
How To Teach Your Dog To Never Bolt Out The Front Door Again... Without Permission, Of Course!
• How to get results with this technique in less than five minutes Owning a dog who consistently bolts out the front door means putting up with a dangerous (not to mention annoying) habit. Most dog owners don’t realize how easily this habit can be fixed.
There are two primary ways to teach your dog to actually choose not to bolt out the front door.
The first technique reminds me of a three-panel “ Sunday Funny Pages” comic strip I saw in the Los Angeles Times a few years ago. The first panel contained a picture of a mother telling her girlfriend over the phone that she has just hired a
professional dog trainer to teach Fido to not drink out of the toilet. In the background, her three-year-old son is standing next to Fido as he drinks out of the toilet.
In the second panel, the three-year-old son reaches for the toilet seat and proceeds to slam it into the back of Fido’s head, while he’s drinking the toilet water. Fido is shown seeing stars!
And finally, the third panel shows the mother speaking again on the telephone with her girlfriend... now two weeks later...
saying, “ Yes, the training worked miracles! Fido no longer drinks out of the toilet!”
With this first technique, you can achieve super-fast results by employing the same theory.
First, put the leash and collar on your dog. Next, stand in front of the closed door with the leash in your left hand and the door knob in you right hand. Your dog should be standing on your left side.
As you begin to open the door, your dog will start to bolt.
However, now is the time to show him that you have no
intention whatsoever of keeping the door open long enough for him to run through. Immediately slam the door closed. And don’t worry if you happen to clip him in the nose a little bit. The next time, you can bet he’ll be much more cautious about not immediately running out the front door. And besides... a little clip on the nose isn’t going to kill, maim, or injure your precious pooch!
Gradually start moving the door open and closed, just like the blade of a fan, very quickly. Every time your dog starts to think about going through the door he will see it again slammed in his face. At the same time, tell him, “ Wait.”
Ultimately, you can get to the point where you can leave the door open for longer periods of time, because every time your dog makes any kind of move towards the door frame, he learns that the door will slam shut.
It’s very simple in the dog’s mind. “ If I walk through the door, it’s going to close every time and I might get bumped in the face,” your dog thinks, “ Better not risk it and wait until my master tells me its cool.”
When you are ready to walk out the front door with your dog, give him a release command so that he knows when it is okay to walk through the door.
This release command is extremely important. Without it, you may never get consistent results because your dog really has no way of knowing that there are certain times when the door will slam shut, and other times when it won’t.
Once your dog begins to understand this simple concept, you can start with some creative proofing exercises.
The first proofing exercise I suggest is to tie a long line to the door knob and practice slamming it shut from a distance. Place your dog’s food bowl on the outside of the doorway, and stand far enough away so that your dog thinks he can sneak out and
get the food. This teaches him that, even if you aren’t near the door, he still is not allowed to bolt outside without your permission.
The second proofing exercise is to have a friend come in the door from outside, and just as the dog tries to bolt, the door is closed (by the visitor on the outside, rather than from the inside).
This makes for complete reliability. Practice these techniques over a period of a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll see that your dog will really start to look towards you for permission before walking out the front door!
Handling Tips
For Dealing With The Dominant Dog!
The most important aspect to establishing yourself as the pack leader to your dominant dog is to view your relationship as one which requires you to demonstrate you are worthy of your dog’s respect.
How do you do this? By convincing your dog that he’s in
“ boot camp” until he demonstrates that he respects you as the
“ leader of the pack” rather than himself.
Tip #1: No excess luxuries for your pugnacious pooch.
Until you clearly establish yourself as dominant to your dog, there should be no freedom for him to decide what he can do. If he’s not in the crate (or kennel run), he should be doing only one of four different things: Being trained, fed, exercised, or allowed to defecate. Pretty soon, working/training (i.e., doing what the pack leader says) will be something he looks forward to in his day. Secondly, he will learn that you are in complete control of his life, not the other way around. YOU are the one who decides when to go on a walk, training session, or whatever exercise YOU decide to do.
Tip #2: Spit in your dog’s food. This sounds disgusting, right? Instinctively, the most dominant dog in the pack eats first... which means that his scent (saliva) is on the food. The subordinate dogs in the pack can interpret this as a form of marking, thus you are saying, “ It’s not automatically your food!
It’s my food, but I’m letting you have some, because I’m more dominant than you.”
Tip #3: When I say “ Jump,” you say, “ How high?”
Show your dog that you never issue idle threats and always mean what you say. If you tell your dog to lay down, make sure— no matter what— that in the end, he will be laying down.
Never give a command you cannot enforce.
Building dominance is a process which can take several months to
achieve. If, when you first get your dog, you do not establish yourself as the pack leader within the first week or two of your relationship, it will be a longer process to re-establish your relationship later in your dog’s life.
My View On the Problem With “ Clicker Training”
Clicker training has become the New Age buzz word amongst the humanist-oriented dog training bunch and the book and pet product promoters eager to capitalize on this latest trend.
Based on theories of operant conditioning first expounded by psychologist B.F. Skinner, and later popularized by dolphin trainer Karen Pryor in books such as Don’t Shoot The Dog, clicker training involves attaching a positive, motivator (such as food) to an event marker (such as a clicking sound made by a child’s toy known as a ‘cricket’) in order to improve timing and allow the dog to more easily understand which behavior he did correctly.
The problem I have with clicker training is not inherent to the use of a small child’s toy to assist in training a dog, (which, it could be argued, strays away from the natural way dog’s communicate with each other), but rather in the promotion and word of mouth associated with this behavioral approach which closely resembles the ramblings of a college boy newly converted to Evangelism.
Furthermore, clicker training has quickly evolved into the poster child of those who view traditional dog training as something closer to torture for the dog, rather than as a method of training new behaviors.
The weak point of most clicker trainers’ arguments is in the assumption that using compulsion (giving a dog a correction) is the same as a punishment and/or force. In reality, a well timed correction, with proper motivation (but not too much motivation) is merely a method of telling the dog he did something wrong.
Imagine trying to learn how to drive with an instructor who only told you when you were doing something right, but refused to tell you when you were doing something wrong. Sure, you might eventually learn how to drive (if you didn’t kill yourself first), but the fastest and easiest method of learning is to know when you are doing something right as well as when you are doing something wrong.
I feel there is a definite place for clicker training in a trainer’s bag of tricks...
however, it should not be to the exclusion of every other trick in the trainer’s bag, especially when those tricks may work faster in certain circumstances.
Five Secrets You Must Know To Housebreak Your Dog In A Hurry!
More dogs are given away every year due to
housebreaking problems than any other behavior problem.
Housebreaking is fairly easy if you follow a few simple steps.
Whenever I get a new dog, or when I advise my clients on issues pertaining to housebreaking, I generally follow four simple rules:
Housebreaking Rule 1: Anytime your dog is in the house with you, he needs to be watched like a hawk. What this means is that, regardless of what I may be doing, I need to keep one eye on the dog and one eye on whatever else I may be paying attention to. If you can't keep one eye on your dog at all times, then you must confine him. Confining your dog means putting him in a crate or in a kennel run or some type of
enclosure where he cannot make a mistake-- which in this case is urinating or defecating in the house-- without getting a
correction. In sum, you must never let the dog have free reign of the house until the dog is 100% proofed, and until that time, you must never take your eye off your dog if he isn't confined in a crate or an enclosure.
Housebreaking Rule 2: If and when your dog has an accident-- because you were keeping one eye on the dog and one eye on whatever else you were doing-- you will always be in a position to give the dog a sharp correction upon error. This means that your dog will be developing a negative association with the action of defecating or urinating in the house. One of the reasons dogs defecate and urinate in the house is that they feel comfortable doing so. It is much more pleasant to urinate or
Housebreaking Rule 2: If and when your dog has an accident-- because you were keeping one eye on the dog and one eye on whatever else you were doing-- you will always be in a position to give the dog a sharp correction upon error. This means that your dog will be developing a negative association with the action of defecating or urinating in the house. One of the reasons dogs defecate and urinate in the house is that they feel comfortable doing so. It is much more pleasant to urinate or