Blog

Effective dog training techniques for success are all about building your dog's confidence through small victories. When your dog experiences consistent success, they become more motivated, eager to learn, and confident. Achieving these small wins makes training feel rewarding for both you and your dog. Our goal should always be to train in a way that sets our dogs up for success and ensures they know how to "win" during each session.

While perfection isn't always possible, rehearsing correct behaviors as often as we can is key to developing a solid foundation. By learning to read your dog's abilities and responding to them, you can ensure each training session is a productive one.

For many dogs, stillness is a challenging concept to grasp. Especially in sports-bred dogs, which are highly motivated by movement, training methods often focus on encouraging and rewarding action. As a result, teaching stay behaviors can be more difficult. However, introducing the concept of stillness can help your dog remain calm, composed, and focused in various situations, benefiting high-energy or anxious dogs in particular.

Chin rests are useful for so many things! It's one of my favorite behaviors to teach. I use chin rests for obedience behaviors, such as teaching a close front and getting a quiet hold, but it's also useful for cooperative care, consent, and start button behaviors. In addition, chin rests help the dog be still, so it's helpful to settle the dog and lower arousal.

Position changes are a skill needed in both rally and obedience. Taking the time to teach a good foundation will make the more advanced position changes much easier. In this blog, I'm working with Excel, who wasn't quite two when I videoed these sessions.

Excel is a dog who finds movement very reinforcing, and therefore, stillness is difficult. For this reason, I spend a lot of time reinforcing him for doing nothing. This helps with anticipation and also helps him keep his body quiet and still. If your dog is like Excel, reinforce for waiting for the next cue and stillness even more than you reward the movement behaviors.

Dogs like us, dogs can experience frustration when they are not part of the action. This is commonly referred to as FOMO (fear of missing out).

Staying in heel position is a fundamental behavior in rally and obedience training. To ensure your dog maintains heel position throughout a course, building value and enthusiasm for being in that position is essential. In this blog post, we'll explore engaging games to increase your dog's excitement and success by finding and staying in the heel position. You'll enjoy happier and more successful performances by teaching your dog these games!

Generalization is a crucial aspect of dog training that enables dogs to apply learned behaviors in various situations. When teaching a new behavior, the environment and cues significantly shape the dog's response. However, if the cues are too closely associated with specific contexts, the dog may need help generalizing the behavior. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of generalization and provide practical tips on teaching dogs to respond to cues regardless of the environment or contextual cues. 

For those who have just brought your new puppy home, this lecture is for you! Puppies need some time to get settled into their new homes, get acquainted with human and pet family members, and become accustomed to their new routine.

I find that often, we are really eager to get our puppies started on socialization - and forget that everything in their life is already really new to them during this stage. Before you start taking your puppy out and about, we want to make sure that he or she is comfortable in their new home first! Puppies are hard wired to have a 'home base' and going from one home to the next—cold turkey—isn't really something we can avoid, but we can make it a bit easier by giving the puppy some time to adjust, and develop their new comfort zone in their new home base, before expecting them to deal with more and more new things.

Consider the puppy's first week with your family as 'orientation' week. During this week, the priority is to help the puppy get settled in and become accustomed to their new world, family and routines. This week does not require any road trips or excessive adventuring (perhaps you'll need a trip to the vet for a required checkup, shots or meet and necessary trips like this shouldn't be avoided—but you can definitely avoid extra or frivolous adventuring during this time).

What we want to establish during this orientation week are things like: Who are the puppies' family members? Who will do the puppy feeding and what time do meals occur? When is it time for bed and time to wake up? Where will puppy sleep and where will they be during the day? Who are the other pet members of the family and which ones can the puppy interact with, and which might need some separation for now? Which doors lead to the outdoors for potty business? How often does puppy need to potty? What are some of the regular sounds and smells in the neighborhood?

If you want to learn the sport of K9 Rally, there are so many great resources out there! I see this question all the time: "I want to learn rally, where can I start?" There are YouTube videos, phone apps, free blogs and articles, and so much more. So why consider taking a rally class or working with a coach? 

Do you have a new dog or puppy? Are you struggling to find opportunities to train with them because your older dog kicks up stink? When a second dog is added to a household, things can change in unexpected ways. One of those is that training stops. 

Why is that? 

Usually it is because the first dog objects strongly to being 'left out' while the new addition receives attention and play/food.

This is both difficult to deal with and causes us to feel guilty. Training is no longer fun and rewarding for us so we stop doing it. Rest assured, the guilt thing is totally normal. If you've not had two dogs before it can be a bit of a shock and the dynamics certainly get turned upside down.

Clear communication and clarity are really important in dog training. The more clear we can be with our dogs, the faster they can learn what we want. One area that can sometimes get a little messy is marking behaviors. Most trainers understand that the correct behavior should get some kind of marker, like a click or a verbal marker such as "yes". But often, novice (and sometimes advanced, too!) trainers will mark and move all at the same time. However, it's very important that we isolate that marker cue!

While doing a chicken camp with Terry Ryan, she would always say "click THEN treat." What trainers often are told is "click and treat" or "mark and treat", but if you specify "mark THEN treat", it makes sense to put a pause in there.

So why is this important? Does it really matter?

Well, yes, it does.

Host Melissa Breau with panelists Jessica Hekman, PhD, DVM; Kim Brophey; and Sharon Carroll to talked about "It's All In How They're Raised (Or Is It?)" during our lunch break for the Lemonade Conference on February 12th, 2022 — and we've shared it here for those who missed it live!

I watched the dog and handler carefully. They were practising their heelwork and it looked lovely! The handler strode out, confident and sure; her dog trotted along next to her, attentive and happy. Then I noticed the fly in the ointment…

"Can you do that again for me please?" I felt bad about breaking into her 'happy place' but that's what I'm paid for, so that's what I was going to do. 

"This time, can you do it without food on you?" Her face fell. Yep, I'd found the problem. Her dog looked lovely because she had food in her left hand. Oops. 

Fear and anxiety underly many of the behavior issues in dogs. Understanding the subtleties of how fear works can help us prevent and address it more effectively.

First, it's important to understand how fear develops in the first place. Certain things are innately frightening for animals. This is controlled by genetics (by definition, innate refers to behavior that is not learned). MacLean et al. 2019 found evidence for heritability in a number of traits in dogs including fear. Exactly what individuals are innately fearful of will vary from species to species. The sensitivity to stimuli and intensity of fear will vary from individual to individual. 

As we know, dogs also learn to become frightened based on their experience. Dogs that have higher levels of innate fear will be more susceptible to learned fear as well because there are more things that are frightening to them in the first place.

The development of conditioned fear occurs through the process of classical conditioning where the dog learns to associate a previously neutral stimulus (such as a white lab coat) with an innately frightening stimulus (such as restraint and pain at the veterinary clinic). If we want to get technical, the lab coat becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) for the unconditioned stimulus (US) of pain and restraint. Eventually, the CS of the lab coat comes to produce conditioned fear, which is the conditioned response (CR). The context that the US occurs in can also come to produce the conditioned response. In this example, the veterinary clinic itself can trigger fear, since that is where the pain and restraint are occurring.

A few weeks ago, I did something bonkers. I decided to get a cat. That might not seem so strange until you realize that I live with a dog who kills things. Breezy is a 9 yr. old husky x border collie. He has killed birds, rodents and rabbits. He would have LOVED to add 'cat' to that list.

Historically, Breezy has been totally unable to function cognitively with a cat in the vicinity: lights on, no-one home. He couldn't eat, take treats or respond to his name. When we have stayed with friends who have cats it has taken at least 24 hrs before he could be distracted from trying to access them. Even when he could be distracted he went right back to hunting as soon as he could. With a couple of near misses out and about, cats were BIG on his radar!

So why the dickens did I want a cat? Well, I wanted to train another species. So, in a fit of impulsiveness, Speck, the 12-week- old kitten, arrived. I'm pleased and relieved to be able to say it has been a total success.

Here's how I did it... 

Why use multiple markers?

For our dog to select the appropriate behavior for a given cue or context, their brain needs to have established associations among sensory stimuli, selected behaviors, and rewards. In training scenarios, typically the rewards are treats, toys, personal play, or a behavior the dog enjoys, and we associate these with the specific behavior/s we desire.

One part of the brain plays an important role in learning such stimulus-action-reward (antecedent-behavior-consequence) associations. However, another part of the brain is focused on reward-prediction error.

So, what is reward prediction error (RPE)?

Most of us use reward markers to tell our dogs when they are right. Some people use clickers, others use verbal markers. When the dog is rewarded for something, he will be more likely to repeat that behavior. Location-specific reward markers take that a step farther by affecting how the dog might perform the behavior in future repetitions.

A location-specific reward marker is much like it sounds — it's a marker that tells the dog not only that he or she is right, but also provides information on where the reward will be delivered. By being strategic about reward placement, we can affect the tendencies of the dog over time.

"My dog loves jumping on the furniture and running across the back of the sofa. He would be great at agility!"

To my dog training friends… professional and hobbyist:

How many of you rolled your eyes?

Be honest! I know I have!

The idea that a "pet person" could think that because their dog liked jumping on the furniture – likely "out of control" – they could compete in agility?

How many of us have disparaged the thought, deemed that owner ignorant of what is involved in training for agility, and becoming competitive in the sport?

Or in freestyle (my dog loves to walk on his hind legs!), or flyball (my dog loves tennis balls!), or obedience (my dog has a great stay!). Pick your sport.

We were all there once.

Few of us entered the world of training and dog sports knowing what we know today, nor does what we know today mean we won't learn more tomorrow. We were once one of "those pet owners."

A past discussion with my fellow FDSA instructors led me to explore the topic of focus for this week's blog post (thanks Shade for bringing up this topic). And thanks to all the instructors who joined the discussion. I've written about focus quite a bit, but somehow I always find more to say. Focus is a multi-faceted concept and the more I explore it the more I find to explore even further. This particular discussion had to do with defining focus and distinguishing focus from engagement. Denise Fenzi and I wrote about this in our last book "Dog Sport Skills: Focus & Engage!" It's a common question and I have some thoughts on all of this. Of course I do!

To start, let me provide a working definition of focus. Merriam Webster's definition, which I really like, defines focus as "a point of concentration". When we think about a dog's focus the question should be "focus on what?" I have identified four major subtypes of focus and will briefly expand on each.