Not included in PH 201

Train the dog in front of you

Positive Herding 201 is entering the final stages of pre-publication! After a few more tweaks the manuscript will be ready to upload so that a proof can be ordered. Once the proof arrives I will make any final changes and the manuscript can then be sent off to be made into an e-book. Yes!

So close and yet so far! It seems like the last few steps of publishing this book have taken forever but the second book in the Positive Herding Dog series will eventually be released. In the mean time, I want to offer you some practical training that may be helpful if you ever find yourself in the same situation that a recent webinar participant found herself.

During my webinar I was asked about how to get a dog to walk into the flirt pole rat if it had been taught, unintentionally, to wait for a release cue before moving to get the rat. This dog would hold position until released and then pounce on the rat. There was no behavior between full stop and rocket launch!

I didn't covered this scenario in PH 201 as I had never encountered this training problem before. After a bit of thought, I realized that walking to a target was what this dog needed to learn. So I came up with a simple training plan and did a short video showing the training in action.

It always amazes me how often our dogs learn something different from what we think we are teaching. When it does happen, it becomes more difficult to diagnose what is going on, probably because we are thinking of the training completely different than our dogs are perceiving it.

Fortunately, if you break down the behavior to its most basic movements, you can usually formulate a new training plan that both you and your dog can agree on. This is one plan that I came up with for the "stuck in place" situation:

Have you ever taught your dog a behavior that was totally different from what you had intended to teach? I know it has happened to me many times over the years.

Let me know what you taught, what you had intended to teach, and what you did to get you and your dog back on the same page in your training journal.

If you found this blog helpful, please tell your friends and spread the herd!

Barb

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