Which way is the right way to train my dog?
Or, which is the right way for you to train your dog?
It always comes back to you, are you an obedience training based person, are you a food reward based person or are you more open minded?
I am going to give you a list of rewards for a dog and the percentage importance against each one and lets see if you agree:
Eye contact, 100% value because it is your undivided attention.
Speaking your dogs name, 90% value because you are directly addressing your dog.
Stroking, 70% value because of the physical contact
Treats, 50% value because they are gone so quickly and they don’t require a change of thought and they are not you, they are independent of you.
You will disagree with these I am sure, everyone has their own thoughts on reward value, I base my thoughts on 30 years of experience working with dogs and having taught food obsessed Labradors to recall away from food for attention and ball obsessed Border Collies to recall away from a moving ball for attention.
I am not saying this will work with every dog/human relationship because it does depend on the patience of the human, most people are not overly patient which is why treats get involved to speed up the process.
This I find interesting because human to human relationships are not usually rushed just because a treat is offered and we tend to give your dogs so little time to actually learn so we are tempted to try and rush them.
Dogs need time to process, especially if we are changing ours and their behaviour and for me this is the most rewarding part of what I do, is giving the dog time to try and test because this is showing the dog making sense of the new requirement. The more intense the dog, the more time they need because their ability to process is less because of their intensity and the associated stress of that.
I love working with intense dogs, I love working with established behaviours and with stubborn dogs, they are all desperate and willing to learn, they just need more time than others to try, test and process.
I work on a 121 basis and I run group dog behaviour sessions because the general public and their dogs just don’t hang around long enough for some dogs to learn, so I create a positive learning environment for dog and owners to learn in.
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