09 Lis How to Train Your Dog Fairly and Clearly
I have already written about how important it is to have a good training system to follow and rely on when training your dog. Every good system should be based on some kind of step-by-step progression, from easiest to hardest, gradually increasing the level as the dog is gaining a better understanding of the exercise.
Why you don’t want to hear “I don’t know” from your dog
One important thing I always try to avoid in my training (and you should too) is the moments when your dog doesn’t know what he is supposed to do. Not knowing what he is supposed to do is stressful for him, especially if he likes obedience training with you (which I hope he does!) and wants to satisfy you and be a good boy (which I definitely know he wants!).
Furthermore, knowing exactly what he or she should do is one of the three cornerstones of good obedience, as we already know. Stressing about not knowing what to do during a particular exercise will lead a dog to not enjoy the practice and associate it with unpleasant feelings. This is not what we want at all!
An unsolvable paradox?
But this presents us with quite a dilemma. If you are teaching something new to your dog, then it’s only inherent that there will be moments when he doesn’t know what he is supposed to do. After all, the exercise is new—he has never done it before, and he doesn’t know what he is supposed to do just yet.
Your dog may be comfortable with what he’s been taught already, but the moment you show him something new, he won’t know what to do at first. So, if you really wanted to shield your dog from any stress whatsoever, you wouldn’t even be able to try to teach him anything new. This would be quite a bummer since you both really love training obedience, don’t you think?
Well, what can you do to minimize this inevitable stress of not knowing? How can you resolve this tricky dilemma?
I have found that the most effective method to achieve this is to have a system with a large number of individual steps when training each exercise.
Steps to success vs. leaps to failure
Imagine your training process for a particular exercise (for example: heeling) as a road of a specific length; in this example, we’ll say it’s 10 meters long from start to finish. In this scenario, you may have 5 steps in your system to lead your dog down this road. That means each of them is about 2 meters—that’s one hell of a long step you want your dog to take each time!
There is a huge difference in what your dog knows and is comfortable with between the starting line at meter 0 and meter #2. There is a whole lot of “I am really not sure what I should be doing right now…” in-between those 2-meter long leaps.
Now, let’s say you have 10 steps instead, which would make them 1 meter long each. That’s a bit better, although 1 meter is still a pretty long distance to call a “step.” Your dog will still be a bit unsure with each successive step, and it will take him a long time to get comfortable with these steps, but this is far better than before.
However, I still believe that this is just not good enough. My system has more than 20 successive steps when training for heeling. Just heeling. That may seem like overkill, but believe me—it isn’t. The larger number of steps reduces the 10-meter journey into nice, 0.5-meter-long steps—one after the other, comfortable, short, understandable steps, and with way less “I don’t know and therefore I am stressed” troubles for the dog along the way.
There are no shortcuts in life nor training
There are obvious downsides to breaking an exercise down into so many little pieces. One of the main ones is that it takes longer. It’s definitely more work to walk 10 meters with 0.5-meter steps than to sprint along the way with 2-meter leaps—and I know there are systems promising to teach a dog how to heel in just a few months or even faster.
I know my system takes more time than most, and I’ve sometimes even had clients complain about it. They tell me that “the other trainer said that my dog should already be heeling at this age.” Well, congratulations to the clairvoyant trainer who can make this assumption based solely on the age of the dog.
My response to this is always the same: don’t look at how the dog heels in training. Look at how he heels at the trial/competition and especially at his second, third, and later events. Hasty work is often sloppy work.
When rushing to teach a dog a new skill, there is not enough time to build joy, trust, concentration, and a full understanding of every aspect of the given exercise—and these are exactly the things that will manifest themselves into problems further down the road when your dog has some trials under his collar.
As I have said: train for the sake of trials, not for the sake of training itself. One aspect of this philosophy is to give your dog enough time to really understand and enjoy the exercise. So yeah, it takes time. Everything in life worth doing takes some time and effort.
Knowledge is power
The second obvious downside to having many small steps when building up to learning an exercise is that you have to remember much more information with this method. You have to know the steps, know the order in which you should train your dog to learn them, and know how they logically build upon each other. It’s much easier to remember just five steps compared to 20.
I think this problem is one that plagues many a handler in general: a lack of information, or at least a lack of quality information. This is one of the main reasons why I decided to write this blog and my (future) ebooks and spread the word. I think the typical dog handler doesn’t have enough information nor easy access to it, so he is unable to train his dog the way he deserves to be trained.
I know it may seem overwhelming at first and that the amount of information you must process to give your dog quality training may seem almost frightful, but it’s really not that bad. Just take it one step at a time, and remember the steps are small. I am here to help you along the way. Be mindful and you will succeed.