Mannerly Mutts Making Dog and Owner Dreams Come True in York Maine - Blog

How to Measure Your Goal Progress and Success When Training Your Dog

11/20/2020

Many dog owners and dog training students quickly get stuck in one place or feel that they have reached an impassable point. This cycle can make dog training students bored when they can't go onto something more challenging in dog training or behavioral modification of their dog. Meanwhile, with an understanding of how to advance their training and get to their goals, those goals are probably within reach by tweaking what they are doing or finding professional dog training help to bring it forward. How does a dog owner honestly measure their success in dog training and/or behavioral modification. This is the topic of this blog today.

How to use dog training commands for common dog owner problems

10/26/2020

Many dog owners, who have trained their dogs, do not realize the tools for working on many dog behaviors that are problems to us are the training commands themselves. The ability to use these commands repetitively in different situations can help build the types of reactions that dog owners prefer from their dogs in many situations.

Patterns and Structure, How Do They Help with Dog Training and Behavior?

10/19/2020

Patterns, as I define them in dog training and behavior modification, are manufactured predictable events. That is they are a sequence of steps that become predictable with repetition and consistency. Remember, canines do not share our human language. We can not tell them what is coming up, but our actions to create patterns and structure can place them on more predictable ground.

As humans we take this for granted for ourselves, but if you think about it, our every day patterns and structure lend to the feeling of safety and security for human children and adults alike. Of course we can talk to each other should an unanticipated event comes up. Can you imagine how scary some events are to dogs who do not have that sort of heads up? We can make everything smooth sailing (or smoother sailing anyway) by adding a little pattern and structure to certain parts of our canine's day.

What is your dog's bliss? How can finding their bliss help?

10/13/2020

Leon loved fetching as a wee young thing. We both learned about this skill together, and had a lot of fun doing it.

What do I mean by your dog's "bliss"?

The activity or item that eventually or immediately drives your dog to do it more or want to engage with you more.
This is something the dog is going to eventually be clear about. You can experiment with to find it and start the process, but ultimately you need to pay attention to whether it is truly motivating your dog OR do you just expect it would motivate your dog.

Engagement and Motivation

10/5/2020

Engagement in dog training is the ability to create a relationship with your dog where you are the reward. Engagement done well will have your dog insisting on continuing the activity with their owner. In other methods of training, there are some elements of this as well, but the engagement that I am talking about is much more. Engagement in dog training is more about play with their owner or handler to create that very strong bond and work ethic. As with anything, it can have it's pluses and minuses. I really enjoy this method, because I get to play with my dog and train. The thing that motivates me in this method, is seeing my dog have fun while we are doing it. Why do I also use other methods other than Engagement and Motivational methods? One reason is this is a bit slower process than some other methods in the shorter term. Sometimes if you really need to stop your dog from jumping on your elderly relatives, while including them in your family activities, you might want to take a faster course of action. Of course there are ways to control what you dog does by confining them more, but I like my dogs to have certain freedoms during the day, where this perhaps might not happen if I was only using this method. It takes longer not in time per day, but the progress to build to a goal in general will take more time. There are reasons to want to spend a longer period if time in training your dog. I will go over that at a later date.

How to work with and be realistic with the dog or puppy you have right now

9/28/2020

Dog lovers know that a dog's physical appearance as far as size, hair length, hair color, ears shape, curly or flat coated, age, and so on. Dog's are also individuals, and these internal characteristics do not show on their outsides. These personality traits and temperaments can vary wildly from playful, wary, suspicious, defensive, resource guarding, driven, active, laid back, and so forth. Add to the mix that some dogs have some training or real life experiences that may be useful as a dog owner or trainer creates a training plan. Recently, one of our blogs went over why there are so many different methods, techniques, and tools that help a dog owner to train their dog.

A professional dog trainer will look at the dog you have right now (as best they can in the time they have) to determine the right path to start down. A dog owner who is honest with themselves can begin to assess this too. None of these traits determine how well a dog will be trained, but they do guide you to what ways will most likely efficiently and effectively train your dog to the best of your ability.

Why are there so many dog training methods and different techniques to train dogs?

9/22/2020

If you have ever looked into finding a complete dog training plan for your dog, you probably found a confusing amount of information out there. Some of one method's rules probably contradicted another's method rules.

Does this mean some people are using methods and training and that don't work? Why can some methods be so different, but still seem to get great results for the dog training team?

Glossary of Dog Training Terms

9/21/2020

Tommy is our dog and a client surrender. He is our oldest dog right now at age 14. He loves this bed.

Through my experiences, readings, and discussions; these are the definitions that I have been coming up with to define terms that I use in dog training. It's important to note that other dog trainers or canine professionals may mean different things when these same terms are used. However, I try to remain true to these definitions, such as these, when I speak on dog subjects.

Aggression ( I tend to untangle my definition from overlapping with fear or dominant as to the best of my ability) A canine with the confidence of forward moving action in order to further a goal.
Associative Learning-As per wikipedia "Associative learning is the process by which an element is learned through association with a separate, pre-occurring element."
Behavior Modification In dog training this is a series of steps and exercises that seek to improve a behavior in the domesticated canine that is seen as unsuitable to the human family or handler's purpose. (IE being a pet dog, a police dog, a therapy dog and so on) IMO the possibility of behavior modification is greatly enhanced by the knowledge of dog training, and in most cases I feel dog training is necessary to communicate to the dog in order to get to behavior modification practices.
Bribe-Relying on constant rewards (usually readily handy like treats or toys) to get the performance of a command.
Bridge-Transferring a reward like a treat to a noise like the noise of a clicker in it's place (much of the time).

About Perception Modification and Desensitization

9/13/2020

In general, training a dog involves teaching a command that can be understood by your dog using a verbal cue or signal. Unless you also know how to teach your dog to be focused, calm, and confident in certain situations, you may be constantly struggling, because you have missed another important piece of the puzzle.

That piece is behavior modification, which does not just apply to dogs with behavioral problems. This can also be for active dogs to learn how to chill in environments that might be exciting in order to do their work or focus on training with you.

Four Steps of The Dog Training Process

9/10/2020

A common question that I get asked as a dog trainer is "How long will it take to get my dog trained to do XYZ?" That question does not have any concrete answer, and of course it depends on a variety of factors. Age, temperament, owner commitment, behavioral challenges, and increasing distractions all change this answer. When I am training a dog here, I feel that I need at least 21 days of consistently working the dog on training commands and behavioral exercises to get a dog owner on their way to picking up where I left off easily (or easier). Training does not just happen in one day or in one environment. Dog training, as dog trainers understand it, when you have reliability of a command (and very dependent on whether you are talking about an adult dog or a puppy) without the need of going through much effort other than the verbal command at least four out of five times in various environments and distractions. That actually takes much more than three weeks if you want a full set of commands that can be worked in that way. It also depends on if this is a family's needs for their family dog, if this is a working dog, or if this is a sports and competing dog.

I don't know if most of the dog owning public is aware of the levels that we pass through when teaching a dog a certain command. Here are the four levels that I usually think of:

1) Demonstrate to the dog what you want him to do.You can do this by positioning or luring your dog into position. Dogs need to be shown what to do, because they don’t naturally know the things we take for granted that older dogs have already been taught. Obviously they don't understand our verbal cues, and need to be shown what they will correspond to in the future. In the Demonstration phase, the command is verbalized in conjunction with the luring or placing the dog into correct position.