[ training]
Got 5 Minutes?
It’s Time to Train! By Manny Guerra, ABCDT K9 Parent Training
The Problem
If your home is anything like many pet parent homes, then chances are at some point you’ve run into the same problem lots of folks run into—that is, reaching the end of the day and realizing you didn’t practice that training exercise you promised yourself you’d do with your dog. You know that homework your trainer gave you? You didn’t practice as much as you had hoped, and now you’ve run out of time for the day. You had planned to set aside time to work on some skills with your dog and before long the session got pushed aside for one reason or another and then that thing happened … bed time. How did this happen? You had every intention of doing the repetitions but then life happened and the training didn’t. The challenge is in how we think about working with and training our dogs. It is fairly easy to not have practiced as much as you meant to. All it takes is a particular perception of training your dog. When we think about training as something we have to get to, something that we’ll do later today, like an appointment, then it’s easy to find yourself prioritizing other things that happen in the day. This is because we usually don’t view the stakes as high if we don’t get around to doing that recall drill or that down-stay exercise.
What a Lot of People Do
People love their dogs, and they did mean to work on that training skill—they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. There are a lot of people out there that really
48 petcompanionmag.com
mean well when it comes to teaching their dogs. The issue is that, unfortunately, lots of families try to teach their dogs at the wrong time. They’ve pushed off proactively training their dog, and now they’re facing challenging behavior. What do they do? In a lot of scenarios, the family attempts to get their dog to perform obedience he hasn’t rehearsed or hold a still position he hasn’t spent any time practicing. And they’ll push this unpracticed behavior, all while the dog is dealing with his perception of whatever is happening around him at that moment. Then, as many families have shared with me, the dog typically isn’t able to perform the way the family desires, so frustration sets in. Now we have humans who are flustered and a dog that is confused. And this is not a fun place to be. It can feel like you’re going in circles and not getting anywhere. Some folks may begin to resent their dog, because they haven’t been able to get a handle on how their dog behaves when people come to their house or when they pass another dog while out on a walk. Miscommunication seems to be ever present.
A Different Approach
Instead of stacking up all your missed practice sessions and building momentum in the wrong direction, try to reframe the way you look at training your dog. Don’t view the work as something you have to get done. It’s not just a box to check off your list. Sure, training can be a box that deserves a check on your list of things to
get done. But think about training not as one task but as a little bit of work done a lot of the time. It doesn’t have to be this arduous, time-consuming thing we avoid and then eventually push off entirely. We tend to get better results with the shortand-sweet training sessions that are packed with quality repetitions. Remember that you don’t have to have long training sessions to get great results for your time and effort. The training sessions with your trainer are actually quite long, in most cases. When you train at home, it’s better to aim for small progress with a high rate of success. Whatever the behavior or skill you’re working on, moving slower and striving for more frequent, short sessions with your dog is usually the best way to go. It’s not that different from raising a child. Teaching happens a little bit at a time, all the time— not in big chunks of learning, only some of the time.
In the Moment vs Drilling Your Dog
I encourage all my clients to remember that there is a difference between asking your dog to do something in the moment and spending time setting up practice drills to facilitate learning. Think about why we did fire drills in school as kids. We never did a drill after a fire occurred. We wouldn’t start a fire just to practice a drill for the first time. It seems silly to even imagine. The purpose of our fire drills was to rehearse what to do, where to go, and how to behave in the event of a fire actually happening. It was all preventative.
