Tag archives: training

As humans, we gesture, talk, yell, squeal, use sarcasm and other means of communication to get our point across to other people. Unfortunately, we also use some of these communication vehicles when relating to and training our dogs. Which doesn’t work.

In this great article, the author points out 11 things humans do that dogs hate. Among those things: using words more than body language, hugging your dog, petting a dog’s face/head, walking up to a strange dog and looking it in the eye, lack of structure and rules, forcing a dog to interact with dogs or people they don’t like and keeping a tight leash on walks, among others.

The author does a good job of explaining how dogs perceive the world and why these things can interfere with your communication and relationship with a dog (in general, of course). To this general list of physical and psychological actions, I’d add smiling at a dog. In humans, smiling conveys happiness, but in the animal kingdom, even among many other primates, baring of teeth can be an aggressive action (used from either the dominant or submissive role).

Here are a couple of things I thought about that could also ...

Last week I attended the Purina Sporting Dog Summit in Gray Summit, Mo., at the Purina Event Center, which is part of the larger Purina Farms that is open to the public year-round and provides free family entertainment and education. The theme of the summit was “achieving a performance edge” and it featured some of the best trainers and handlers of high-performance sporting dogs from across the country, as well as media representatives.

Just to be in the same room with these trainers and handlers was an honor. The sheer amount of dog knowledge in that room, across all venues, was astounding. As a hunter and hunt-test fan, to meet and talk with the biggest names in the retriever and pointing-dog worlds was overwhelming – trying not to sound like a star-struck idiot was even more of a challenge. Here’s just a glimpse of the people in attendance:

Tom Dokken: Owner of Dokken’s Oak Ridge Kennels, the largest gun dog training kennel in the upper half of the US, and Dokken Dog Supply, Tom invented the popular Dokken Deadfowl Trainer and has been training gundogs for more than 30 years.

Danny Farmer: Elected to the Retriever Hall of Fame in ...

Socialization of your dog is an important step in raising a healthy, psychologically balanced dog. The critical socialization phase however, lasts only until about 16 weeks of age. This has presented people with a bit of a quandary when it comes to successfully introducing puppies to the world but maintaining their health safety.

Popular wisdom says to wait until a puppy has received all of its vaccinations before introducing it to the world. However, the final round of shots for a dog doesn’t happen until around six months of age – well beyond the important socialization period when puppies are less fearful and more curious about things. Postponing socialization – introduction to various stimuli such as automobiles, various environments, different types of people and other dogs – until six months could cause your pup to be fearful of numerous things.

According to recommendations from the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior, if your dog has had its first vaccinations, get them out into the world to explore and meet new friends. Prior to their first round of shots, and even afterward, maternal antibodies help protect your new pup from diseases. When those maternal antibodies begin to wear off and the pup’s ...

New information from the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm reveals that dog bite claims continued to rise in 2013. The number of bites are up since 2012, but the amount of insurance payouts since last year are down – but only slightly. In the last decade, claims, value of claims and average cost per claim are all up. 

In 2013, the value of insurance claims related to dog bites totaled $483.7 million! That’s nearly a half billion dollars. The number of claims was up 5.5 percent with a total of 17,359 claims. Those are just reported claims. That’s a lot of biting going on -- some of these are due to irresponsible owners not taking time to properly socialize and train their dogs, while others are likely due to something that happened in the moment and which was likely a one-time incidence; most of those situations, however, were likely avoidable. 

Before you think it’s just nips and torn pants that qualify for those bite incidences, consider that the average claim was for $27,862 – it doesn’t take much to rack up a hospital bill with a visit to the emergency room.

The top-10 states ...

There's a pretty cool Kickstarter campaign underway (and already funded) for an interesting device that could keep your dog entertained during the day while you're at work.

The Kickstarter campaign is for CleverPet - a Wi-Fi-connected device that challenges your pet and then rewards it with kibble for correctly engaging the unit. It starts off by simply rewarding your dog for responding to what appears to be an audible cue. Then it ups the ante and rewards the dog for touching one of the device's three light-up pads. The third level of engagement requires the dog to touch a specifically lit pad to receive the food-based reward. From there, the unit interacts with your dog by rewarding her only when she solves increasingly challenging puzzles. You can even record your own voice to teach right or left. With the unit's algorithms, it adapts to your dog's learning level so it's not too hard or too easy. For you code monkeys out there, CleverPet allows you to write your own code to come up with new puzzles for your dog.

The unit's makers (comprised of PhD-level cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, dog trainers and animal-interaction specialists), have ...

The kids might be whining for a puppy, and you might actually be considering bringing one into your home.

But are you actually ready for a puppy?

Let’s see.

It’s not the kids’ dog

You can tell your spouse, co-workers, friends, the kids and even yourself, that the new puppy belongs to the kids and they are responsible for it. But that’s a lie.

This is your puppy, and soon-to-be adult dog. Don’t try to fool everyone else or yourself. After about two weeks, the kids’ attention will shift to something else – school, sports, cartoons, sitting on the couch. If the kids have soccer practice, homework, slumber parties or whatever else, the feeding, exercising, potty-break and clean-up responsibilities fall to you – more than likely that will happen even if they don’t have something going on.

Even if your kids do consistently take responsibility for the dog, you’re probably going to have to remind them to do it. In essence, you’re taking on another child for the next 10 to 15 years. Are you ready for that?

Equipment

Before you bring a puppy into the home, you’ll need a few basics: food and water bowls, a crate and blanket ...

Great trainers don't just run drills or take their dogs into a field and let them chase birds. Great trainers start each session with a goal and specific task to accomplish. They set up drills and scenarios that help teach the dog bits and pieces of a larger concept. By micro-focusing on areas that might prove problematic to the dog, they can anticipate trouble and administer well-timed corrections, praise or avoid the issue altogether.

If you're not anticipating how your dog is going to behave to a situation, you're not really training; you're just reacting. If your dog makes a mistake because you didn't anticipate the problem, you're effectively teaching him to do it wrong. To train after reaching that point requires that you correct the dog to teach him that's not what you wanted.

Sometimes negative reinforcement is the way to go and what is required, but to wholly rely on it is not only lazy, it's unfair to your dog.

With a balance of positive and negative reinforcement properly administered, you can teach your dog how to react to very complex scenarios. And, as George Hickox and Dan Irhke both pointed out at a ...

There’s generally two camps when it comes to training: the positive-only camp and the aversive camp. Positive-only trainers eschew any use of punishment and use rewards to motivate, reward and shape behaviors. The aversive camp, in an overly simple explanation, tends to shape behaviors by punishing, in one form or another, the wrong behaviors – which doesn’t necessarily preclude rewarding proper behaviors. This is simple carrot-and-stick training: do this correctly, get a treat; do that incorrectly get punished.

Chad Culp, a certified dog trainer in California, does a great job outlining the carrot-and-stick approach to training. However, he takes it further and discusses a study done with human children (you can read it here http://www.thrivingcanine.com/beyond_carrots_sticks). The basic premise being that continual rewarding reduces, even destroys, intrinsic motivation (which is very interesting) – the child, or dog, no longer wants to work for the pure joy of it; they hold out for a reward. This has been one knock from the aversive side of the aisle: that sooner or later that cookie isn’t enough of a reward to counter the desire to carry out the undesirable act.

The knock on aversive training is that it can destroy ...

As entertaining, happy and hard-working dogs, golden retrievers have become one of the most popular breeds in the world. They consistently rank among the most-registered breeds in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, and serve many roles with an unrivaled eagerness to please.

Developed in Scotland in the 1800s as a water dog used to retrieve shot fowl, golden retrievers descend from a non-descript “yellow-colored” retriever, two extinct breeds (the St. Johns water dog and the Tweed water spaniel), Irish setters, the bloodhound and wavy-coated black retrievers. This combination of dogs set the stage for the modern golden’s characteristics: love of water, superb scenting ability, trainability, biddable disposition, desire to retrieve, soft mouth and intelligence. A well-balanced dog, golden retrievers possess soundness of body, character and intelligence (author Stanley Coren ranks them as the fourth most-intelligent dog).

While they were originally bred to retrieve waterfowl for hunters, and they still perform this duty today, golden retrievers have successfully crossed into all roles of canine athlete and assistance dog. Owners of golden retrievers compete in field trial and hunt tests, agility, flyball, obedience trials and the conformation ring. They are also used extensively in search and rescue, detection (from ...

According to a recent report, dog bites account for one-third of all monies paid out to homeowners’ insurance claims – nearly half a billion dollars in 2012. 

While the $489 million paid out for dog bites pales in comparison to the estimated $2 billion spent on canine reconstructive-knee surgery (TPLO operations), it underscores the burden of responsibility every dog owner shares.

If you think a dog won’t bite, you’re wrong. No matter how small, cute or friendly a dog appears, if has teeth, it can bite; and all dogs have approximately 42 adult teeth that evolved to slash, tear, grip and kill. Or as the U.S Post Office puts it: “There are 70 million good dogs … but any dog can bite.”

The postal service released the slogan on a poster in support of National Dog Bite Prevention Week, which was May 19-25. Postal workers are the third most-bit victims, behind the elderly and toddlers.

Young children, with their jerky, unstable motions, uncanny ability to surprise and eye-level height with canines, suffer the most and worst bites. The disfigurement of a child takes only a moment, but can last a lifetime. Those lasting bites are also the ones ...