반려견이 나와 함께하는 훈련을 사랑하게 만드는 7가지 팁

strap on that leash and head out the door down to the city to visit. Walking on a loose leash requires a lot of slices. And I certainly wouldn't be doing that the first day I have that puppy home. All right. So, break the behavior into small slices. You have a much better chance at creating a positive condition of motion response. Why? Because with a small slice of behavior, the chance of your puppy or your dog getting things right dramatically increases. I see this with people who try in the sport of dog agility to use lures to get seesaws or dog walks or contacts. And you're trying to get the whole thing. Chances for stress, fear, mistakes, astronomically higher when you haven't broke the behavior down into small bite-sized pieces. Bite-sized pieces of success. Number three, what are the competing reinforcements in that dog's environment when you're training? Because if there's like, you know, you're training at the bunny farm and they're like, Oh, but that's over there. Oh, oh, oh, I don't… You're going to create some anxiety in your training. That anxiety is going to be put into the behavior that you are trying to create. Also, the dog's focus going somewhere else and you having to bring them back. That's a point I'm going to bring up a little bit later. What do you do when your dog loses focus in your training? That's such an important point. So important. I leave it to the very end. All right. So, minimize the distraction. I talked about that in podcast number 167. Minimize the distraction in the environment. Maximize the success. What happens with success? Dopamine spikes and positive condition emotional responses. Number four, another biggie. When you have a dog who seems to be like enjoying what you're doing, or if you yourself are enjoying what you're doing, you tend to keep doing it. So, I see people who are training in agility and the dog is kind of going at like half speed, but they're like, oh, we're doing it. We're doing obstacles. I don't care if my dog's going half speed. I'm just going to keep doing it. That half speed is an emotion, guys. Half speed in agility, half speed in any dog sport is an emotion you are building in to the behavior. And you think, oh, my dog will get faster when he learns to like this. Oh, nay, nay. Slice the behavior in short, short sessions. I have this book. It's called the Streaker Journal. And when you become a recaller, you will receive a Streaker Journal. Do you see what I did there? I assume everyone listening to that at some point will join our Recallers program.

Now, Streaker Journal. I wrote this in 1998. And what it is, there was a rescue dog. I named him Streaker. And he was a little Jack Russell Terrier. I think he was about 14 months old. It's all in this journal. And he was turfed out of his first two homes and marking all over in the house. Had no interest in food, no interest in tugging, no interest in balls. Originally was bought for a sport prospect, but the people said, there's no hope. He has no desire to be a sport prospect. He wants to be a coach potato. And I'm like, I think dogs can be both. And so, I took this dog on, I think it was right around Christmas. And I trained him in short sessions. How short do you say? Well, sometimes the session was like 16 seconds long. And I documented everything in this little journal and I wrote it all down. So, here's one, 30 second session, 45 second session, two minute session, woo, woo, woo, woo. Eight minutes we worked up. So, as he progressed, I had longer and longer sessions. But within those two to three minutes to five minute sessions, there was also moments in between, which we call balance breaks. That is point number five. I talked about balance breaks in podcast episode number 57. I feel super important where you are training something, you have some success, you break the dog away and you change their physiology. You're getting their breathing, their heart rate up. You're doing some chase games. And if your dog doesn't like to tug, you can use chase food and then chase you. We're changing the dog's physiology. And then we go back to training. And we do this for two reasons, one for the dog and one for you, because it's impossible for you as a trainer to maintain the kind of focus that you require to be the best you can be for your dog without taking a break every, I don't know, 45 seconds. You know, a minute is probably the maximum that I would ever train a dog. I probably do it in 30 seconds to 45 second breaks, a little balance break, and then we go right back to our work. All right. So, point number four is short sessions. Point number five, balance breaks and balance breaks. Number six, I'm kind of reverse engineering this. Number six is your dog's buy-in. That is what I call the game on position. So, for my dogs, it's super easy. If I'm starting with a puppy, usually the training starts from a crate. So, I'll play some crate games and then I open the door. They're buy-in saying, yes, I want to do this. If you're watching this on YouTube, my dog Feature, who just loved to work and always had opinions about

it. It doesn't have to look like they're crazy. It just has to look like they're focused, they're sharp, their ears are on the top of the head, they're on their paws. And you know, yeah, let's do this. Let's, and I release them from the crate instantly. When you get buy-in guys, what you get is the distractions start to melt away. If you always get buy-in before you train, if you're just taking your dog off the couch and say, yeah, let's do some shaping here, it's kind of like, I was sleeping. Oh yeah. We're going to do some shaping now. Okay. Are you going to give me a cookie? Okay. That's good. Yeah, that's good. Buy-in is you're establishing that emotion of, don't you just love this? Right from the very first moment you say to the dog, let's go. Game on. And if I was dealing with a dog like Streaker, that's all I worked on for my first few sessions is getting him to say, I love this. And I trained him in the lower level of our house and I would get him out of his kennel. It was in the kitchen. We would go downstairs. And at first he was like, oh, I guess, can I mark on this? Can I mark on that? And I would rush him through the house on leash. We wouldn't even think about marking. We'd get into the lower level to my, what I call the training den. And then I would just do, hold you back and chase a cookie. And you got that. I might do two of those. And then I hold you back, put on the leash and go, let's go. And I'd run back upstairs and put him back in his crate. And after doing two or three of those, guess what? He was getting super excited about getting to go to work. It didn't take me much more than a couple of weeks before Streaker was living in my house, just like one of my family pets. And shortly after that, I had a waiting list of people wanting to adopt him. He was such a cool driven dog. Yes, he tugged. Yes, he loved tennis balls. Yes, he'd worked for food. All of the things that people said he wasn't. It took me just less than a month to create all of that in that dog, just by following the things that I'm talking about right now. Every session starts with buy-in. You do a little bit, you take a balance break, you re-engage, you take a balance break. And on a balance break, you can end up putting them back in a crate or up on a hot zone, a dog bed to create that re-engagement. Okay. And my final point number seven, this is a biggie. Believe the dog. Always believe the dog. You are teaching your dog. Your dog is teaching you. Your dog's responses is giving you feedback on the effectiveness of what you've done.

Is the session short enough? Is the slice that you're trying to train small enough? Did you get buy-in to begin with? Have you done balance breaks at the most appropriate time? So, when your dog in the midst of working stops and scratches, or more obviously goes off and has a big poop or goes and visits somebody or just starts sniffing, all of this is telling you somewhere you missed. And so, you have one of two things that you can do. You can put the dog up either in their bed with a handful of cookies or in their crate with a handful of cookies. Take down your video and evaluate, were there things that you missed up to this point? Or you can re-engage. But if the dog has gone off and left you, there would be no re-engagement for me. That dog is giving me a neon sign, your training was flawed. I would put that dog up and evaluate, was it how I manipulated my environment? Was it the slice of the behavior? Was it the length of the session? Was it my mechanics as a trainer? What happened? Now, I'm not saying every time a dog gets stressed, we stop the session. What I'm saying is that dog getting stressed is giving you feedback on your training session, on how you set it up and how you've been executing on that session. And so, I either put the dog up and go and look at my video, or if it's just that the dog kind of looked away or just started sniffing, I might stand still until that dog re-engages with me and I go, okay, let's try that again. And I might try it again. If I get half speed, if I get disengagement, if I get anything that says the dog is not in this game, then I put them up and I say, let's go back to the drawing board because something was flawed in either how I planned this or how I executed it. Guys, it's just so important that you believe the dog. When you believe the dog, you will make good training choices that is always in the best interest of the dog. And that's when every session builds on the last. It builds in momentum, it builds in success, it builds in buy-in from the dog. And when the dog's loving it, you're going to love it.