If You Have a Dog, You Are a Trainer：BASIC TRAINING PRINCIPLES

ABC Practical Guide to Dog Training
Copyright . 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved Howell Book House
Appelbaum, Steven.

Hopefully, you will learn the crucial principles of training, so you can teach your dog what I call “foundation level” off-leash training, and, very importantly, teach this type of training whenever possible before you start on-leash work. how to redirect, focus and reward your dog for correct behavior, rather than just react, yell and give ineffective commands when you’re confronted with unacceptable behavior.

Here are some basic principles that all dog owners need to learn and follow:

1. Be consistent. A behavior is either acceptable or it isn’t. It can’t be acceptable on alternate Tuesdays when you’re in the mood. For example, it can’t be OK to allow your dog to jump all over you on the weekends when you’re in casual clothes, but not during the week when you’re dressed for work. That’s an obvious one, although you’d be amazed how many people I’ve met who do exactly that.

Here’s one that’s less obvious. It can’t be OK for your dog to chew fabric toys but not to chew “inappropriate” fabric items. In other words, if you give your dog an old sock and say, “Here, chew this,” don’t be surprised when she eats your shirt.

Consistency is a bit easier for singles or couples, and toughest for families. The more people who interact with the dog, the greater the likelihood of inconsistency. I strongly recommend that families conduct a few meetings to discuss and agree upon what will be universally unacceptable behavior on the part of the dog.

Everyone needs to clearly understand what the rules will be for a training program to be most successful. That being said, we live in the real world and I recognize how difficult consistency on the part of a six-year-old child will likely be. Parents of younger children will need to practice a fair amount of prevention and understand that the dog’s training process may be a little bit more difficult and prolonged.

2. Be consistent. Yes, I know I already said this, but consistency also extends to obedience commands. If you want your dog to learn to listen to obedience commands the first time they’re given, you need to be prepared to properly teach your dog to obey them the first time. This is most effectively accomplished if the initial foundation-level obedience you teach around the house is done off leash.

I have sometimes run into problems when discussing how important it is for dogs to obey commands consistently. In my opinion, this is an area where attitudes have gone downhill in the last 30 years. Decades ago the idea that a dog needed to obey commands the first time they were given would not have drawn comment. Today, there are many owners who are uncomfortable with the idea that their dog should be trained to respond so predictably.

I’ve had owners object, based on the idea that they did not want their dogs “to become robots.” It is important for these owners to understand that, first of all, if training is primarily done with compassion and reward this will not happen; and second of all, you might not care if your dog listens on the first command until the very first time she runs out into the street. Then, as cars are barreling toward her, you will pray she listens on the first command, because you may never get a second one.

3. Understand why behaviors take place and deal with problems by dealing with the cause. When owners learn to do this, they will not just be reacting to what are often symptoms of an underlying problem.

4. Learn basic training techniques and then follow rules one and two. All owners need to understand the principles of prevention, maintenance, redirection, reward and correction. And they need to use them consistently.

Now that you have an understanding of some of the challenges, let’s discuss a little bit about behavior, so that everyone can be clear what terms such as “prevention,” “maintenance,” “redirection” and “reward” really mean. Once you understand how a dog learns, we can get on to the business of training.

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How old does my dog have to be to start training?

ABC Practical Guide to Dog Training

Copyright . 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved Howell Book House

Appelbaum, Steven.
One of the most common questions I hear is, “How old does my dog have to be to start training?” My answer has always been the same: “From the minute you get your dog home, you are training her. If you have a dog, you are a trainer.” Often this response earns me confused looks. After all, most people have heard things like, “Wait until the dog is six months old before training” or, “Get your dog into puppy classes at twelve to sixteen weeks.”

Thirty years ago, the six-month rule was fairly common. This was due, in part, to the fact that all too often training classes in those days involved strong physical corrections, and a puppy younger than six months might be physically or emotionally damaged if she was trained that way before the six-month mark. As you can well imagine, putting a 12-week-old puppy on a choke chain and administering sharp leash corrections was generally a very harsh way to train, and sometimes caused real problems.

Fortunately—and this is one of the good things that has happened in the last 10 to 12 years—training methods have become far gentler. It is also pretty much universally understood in the training community that a great deal of effective training can be accomplished with puppies at a very young age. We have many trainers to thank for this, including such visionaries as Dr. Ian Dunbar. Trainers like Dunbar and others, including the ones in my company, have tried to communicate the importance of formal training at a young age.

Formal training—that is, training with a professional instructor in group or private lessons, or even in a kennel—can and does start much earlier now than in the past. However, my “if you have a dog, you are a trainer” answer goes a bit deeper than that. What I would like owners to understand in this chapter is that any time you interact with your dog, you are teaching your dog something. All too often what happens is that owners inadvertently teach their dogs the wrong lessons, without realizing they’re teaching lessons at all. This makes it tougher to train the dogs formally later on.