RECENT POSTS
Training for Your New Puppy
September 18th, 2009
Getting a new puppy is always an exciting time. It’s also a crucial time as you start developing the relationship with you and your new puppy.
For young puppies, it is imperative you use a lot of encouragement, praise and rewards (positive reinforcement) to train your new addition. As soon as you get home, start your training right away…the sooner the better.
Work on developing good habits and preventing the bad habits from the start, as opposed to trying to correct bad behaviors later on. Keep your training sessions fun, consistent and short. Start out with easy commands and build from there. Really celebrate the successes, and reward your puppy for good behavior.
Developing a strong sense of trust between you and your puppy is essential…the puppy needs to trust you, and you need to trust the puppy. Avoid harsh corrections, punishment, and any other kind of negative punishment. The goal is to make your puppy enjoy the training sessions and look forward to them, not be afraid or anxious.
It is important to remember you are dealing with essentially a baby. Don’t create unrealistic expectations…it takes time to learn new behaviors. Be flexible, loving and patient. This is all new to the puppy, and he is not going to learn it overnight. Don’t focus on the mistakes, focus on the positive behavior, and the bad behaviors will eventually subside.
Have fun with your puppy…they grow up so fast! But keep in mind this is a very important time, as you are laying the groundwork for his life with you and your family. You are also developing a relationship and bond with your new puppy, so this time is precious and critical.
——————————
K9 Cuisine is a provider of premium dog food. We’re committed to providing our customers with the knowledge, and the products, to help their faithful friends be the best they can be.
Tags: dog training, encouragement, good habits, new puppy, positive, praise, puppy, relationship, training
Posted in K9 Care, K9 Training | No Comments »
Reward-Based Training
July 21st, 2009
Grisha and Peanut
Reward-based trainers focus on what the dog does correctly, and builds the ‘perfect’ dog from that foundation. So rather than a chunk of ice that we’re chipping off to make a statue, think of reward-based training as being made from clay. You can build it up exactly how you want to, without fear of making a wrong move and ruining the whole thing.
Dog trainers often fall into two camps: reward-based trainers or more traditional trainers that focus on punishment. There’s another camp that’s in between that calls themselves ‘balanced trainers’, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll lump those two together and say that anyone who punishes via force or fear falls into the more traditional camp. I’m a reward-based trainer, and I’d like to tell you what that means, why I do what I do, and what got me started in the first place.
When I got my first dog as an adult, I took a class at a big-box store. I already had a little aversion to prong collars, but after a couple of sessions with Spoon being too interested in the other dogs, the trainer convinced me it was a good way to get control. And it was, for about two weeks. At that point, I realized that I had put myself on the opposite team from my dog. Instead of working together to make progress, I felt like it was always me versus Spoon.
Here’s how I fell out of love with the prong collar…
I had heard a little about clicker training, but the teacher for my class told me that it was a silly gadget, that I’d be stuck using it forever. But the books I was reading said that wasn’t true, and they just raved about clicker training. One day, my curiosity got the best of me. I took a little lid to a juice bottle and used it as my first clicker.
The idea was to pair the click sound with a treat, so every time I made the juice lid pop, I fed Spoon a treat. I decided to click and treat every time she looked at my boyfriend. So when she’d glance at him, I would click and feed her a dog treat. She didn’t look at him because I asked her to, but because it was a small apartment and there wasn’t much else to do. Half a baggie of dog treats later, she would take the treat and snap her head back to him as soon as she could, to earn the next click.
Wow! I was hooked. I soon learned that to add a cue at this point, I just needed to say it right before she did the behavior, and only click/treat if I had asked for it. So I said, “Where’s Steve?” and she’d look at him (because she was going to anyway) and I clicked and treated. Five more times and then I didn’t say the cue. She looked anyway, but just like the Simon Says game, Simon didn’t say “Where’s Steve?” so no food for that. Then back to cuing and feeding for when she did it.
Once she got that down, we didn’t need the clicker – that was just to tell her what I wanted in the first place. For years, we’d play hide and seek in the woods and Spoon would always be able to find him.
After the little clicker experiment and the teamwork I felt, popping her with a prong collar made me a little sick to my stomach. I tossed it in the trash. From that point forward, I’ve been doing reward-based training with my dogs and loving it. I even started a business in 2003 called Ahimsa Dog Training, and we use reinforcement for regular training, but also for big problems, like aggression. I picked the name “Ahimsa” because it’s a Buddhist doctrine of non-violence toward all living things. Punishment is so seductive that I wanted to pick a name that would keep me on the reward-based path.
I’ve since learned that you can’t really combine rewards and punishments, or you end up with ‘poisoned cues’ – so my instincts to trash that collar were right!
Look for more stories from reward-based dog trainers from around the world!
Our website is http://ahimsadogtraining.com (or just DoggieZen.com if you’re typing it in). Our blog has a huge number of articles on dog training.
On Twitter, my name is @doggiezen.
Tags: dog, dog training, dogs, positive, reward based training, rewards, training
Posted in K9 Stories, K9 Training | 4 Comments »
