5 Minutes is Easier to Find Than 30

Yadi laying down behind me while I work

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well today. If you have ever been in class with me you have heard me say… “Don’t try to train for 30 whole minutes”. I don’t know about you but my life is very hectic. I have a 17-year-old stepson (Connor), a 4-year-old son (Ian), & year old Corgi pup (Yadi). Between our jobs, housework, laundry… oh my word at the laundry… trying to find 30 minutes a day to train my puppy is just insanity. Even if I could find those 30 golden minutes, my puppy wouldn’t have the attention span to focus on me the whole time.

So here is what I do instead. While typing this blog post, my puppy Yadi is chasing the Ian who is running through the house laughing and teasing Yadi with a toy to get him to follow him. Every few minutes I call Yadi to me and reward him for coming and then release him to go play. This looks a little like this:

I say “Yadi”
When I hear him turning towards me I say “Yadi Come”
When he gets to me, I reward him with a treat from a pile of treats on my desk
I pet him and scratch his back and then tell him “go play”

Now we are practicing this because as of the last couple of weeks he seems to think that

A pile of treats on my desk for random training.

"Come" means, run away from mom because she is going to pick me up and put me in the kennel. We also need to work on going into the kennel on cue as well.

By me practicing this every few minutes while I’m working, he is getting so many more repetitions than he would if I were standing somewhere in the house calling him. He would realize I have treats and not move away again. This way it’s also a “real world” setting. He is learning to call out of play to come to me, which is very important for a herding dog that can get overstimulated really quick. I NEED to have the ability to call him to me no matter what is going on and he must know, “I need to go see what mom needs”

Comments

Positive Changes of Dog Training

In the last century dog training has been under going an evolution of sorts. It wasn’t so long ago that the lexicon of dog training included words like punishment, compulsion and Intimidation. The tools of the trade where things designed to inflict pain and cruelty as a way of training dogs to do or not do things the handlers wanted. Dogs were punished with ear pinches and the like, if they didn’t perform the desired behaviors. The idea of training a dog was to break the dog of some bad habit it had. One of the forefathers of scientific study into dog behavior was Edward Thorndike (1874-1949). He studied the effect of positive reinforcement on dog behavior. Thorndike called his study the Law of Effect. His study put forth the idea that the key to understanding how to train dogs was to understand canine behavior. Behaviors that produce an effect that is desirable are ones that a dog is more likely to repeat, whereas behaviors...

The Kona Diaries - Secondary Fear Stage and Vet Visits

This morning I had a plan. I was going to take Kona to Hollywood Feed for some social interactions. Since spending all this time at home with the COVID-19 Shutdown, she has regressed a lot on her social skills. My intention was to do some filming of her while we were out, however that was quickly abandoned. At first, she did pretty well, she walked with me and would every now and then forge ahead of me but would come back to heel when I asked. Not once did she try to take anything off the shelves though. I was very proud. As we made a loop around to the front counter she caught sight of this sign spinning in the air and she just lost it. She never once barked at it but she crouched down and her legs were shaking. We have definitely had a setback. After a nap to try and get some relief from a migraine that had started making me feel sick, I went out with the pups and found a huge blood smear on my patio at first I thought Ko...

And just like that the wold fell apart

But my dogs still needed training!!! Within a couple weeks everything has ground to a halt and I went from doing 25-30 appointments a week, to not having left the house in two weeks. This time, it was not because of my depression or a mental breakdown it was because of a world wide virus that is spreading across the world like wild fire. So I jumped into to brining my students into online dog training but I failed to realize that this was going to showcase a big fear that I have been hiding. That I couldn’t do it anymore. This pup right here was my soul pup. Trainers often talk about that one dog that taught them so much about being a trainer. Well that was Tazie for me. This little dog put me though the wringer of emotions and taught me everything from how to teach basics to how to care for a dog with a neurological problem. We had a wild journey that took us from Atlanta, Ga to Rochester, Ny to Birmingham, Al and finally to Jonesboro, Ar. He ...

Conversations with a Dog Trainer

Search This Blog