Category: Obedience Training - Mannerly Mutts Making Dog and Owner Dreams Come True in York Maine

IDEAS ON HOW TO MAKE YOUR TIMID DOG MORE CONFIDENT

1/2/2023

Do you find your dog to be timid or fearful around things that don't scare most other dogs? If you have also wondered about the reasons this can happen, there are a few as follows:

1) Puppies not socialized or handled by breeders. Usually these guys recover very well, but they may present as very fearful at the beginning.
2) Adult dogs that have grown up without proper socialization and exposure to the outside world.
3) Puppies that have experienced a traumatic or very scary experience during the fear stage.
4) Adult dogs that experienced Number 3 during the puppy fear stage, but their owners did not realize it or did not work with their dog in the meantime. Often owners might think something like this will pass, but for many dogs it just gets worse unless they are helped along the way.
5) Traumatic experience as an adult dog. (As an example my first dog got to experience a microburst at night with us one evening. All our screens on the windows blew in, and the power was instantly out. After that, Jazzabelle was very afraid of any thunder and wind storms, which we helped her with later.)
6) Incident that may have happened that you did not see happen.
7) It could be that a medical reason, like loss of hearing, is causing them some distress. In case of sudden behavioral change, you should make an appointment with your vet.
8) So many more possibilities may exist that caused this.
9) You may never know the cause.

Bottom line is that you have to move your dog forward. They may not fully recover, but you can greatly improve their lives and their thoughts on the trigger (thing that scares them).

Treat Training and Luring Insights

9/22/2022

Today I am going to go over the very commonly used practices of treat training used with luring to train your dog.   Most of this training falls under the category of positive reinforcement. That is the practice of adding something to increase the likely hood of a behavior.   In this case, we are talking about food rewards.

CONSIDERATIONS WHEN TRAINING WITH FOOD:

Most puppy training starts with food training.   Puppies are maturing, and do not have the focus of an adult dog.   They are discovering the world with their paws, nose, eyes, and mouth. Therefore, humans need a good reward method to catch their attention for any period of time.

Adult dogs will have more maturity and focus (usually). Therefore, the first section does not necessarily apply to them.   Although, these are things you may want to consider, especially if your adult dog seems at all flat when training.   Both young and old dogs need a distraction free place to start learning at first.

Corrections, What Are They and How Are They Used?

1/4/2021

Dog owners tend to wince at the suggestion of using a correction. So many dog owners associate the word "correction" in dog training with punishment or treating their dog harshly. This is not what is meant by most dog trainers or dog sports enthusiasts.

My definition of a dog training correction is to further advance a position, speed, or behavior through communication the dog understands to mean what they had just done is not what was wanted and therefore offers another option or stops something. Some examples of corrections are verbal markers, spatial pressure, and the use of some training equipment. Please note that corrections should not be used, generally speaking, until the dog has started and advanced through the first stages of dog training, which is teaching. Once a performance can be reliably predicted to a standard, then you are ready to correct errors or non performance.

How to Use Steps to Build Up to Your Ultimate Training Goals

12/28/2020

Izzie is our model for this blog.

The ability to teach dog training commands that are later on reliable and functional depends upon how the ability to break them up into steps and then layer onto them different environments and distractions. This is also true when you are modifying your dog's behavior or changing your dog's perception of things that might make them defensive or scared. Many dog owners are not aware that going slower and methodically is going to give them a much better chance of reaching their dog training or behavior modification goals with their dogs.

Dogs neither understand English nor read minds. It is the dog owner's and trainer's job to break commands down into parts which can be taught well, and then advance the command by increasing things like the three Ds (duration, distance and distraction), which was discussed in our previous blog post.

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.

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.