The Art & Science of Dog Training--My Training Approach(03)

The next thing I look at in my training approach, is how to simply prevent the dog from doing the thing you don’t want him to do.

Pat Miller, training editor of Whole Dog Journal, and owner of Peaceable Paws Training Academy has a wonderful three-step solution for changing any behavior problem.

§ First, envision what you want your dog to do.
§ Second, prevent your dog from doing what you don’t want your dog to do
§ Third, generously and consistently reward the behavior you do want.

This is such sound advice, I wonder why it isn’t on every dog owners’ lips all the time! But I know the answer to that: The first two steps require creativity and the third means you have to pay attention.

Necessity is the mother of invention and in my life—with 6 rescue dogs and a rescue kitty in a small house—without a fenced-in yard—I’ve had to get creative about preventing trouble. My dogs (and cat) have forced me to pinnacles of genius…and I say that with all modesty, because they frequently have forced me there kicking and screaming all the way.

In my life, tears come before strokes of genius. Generally, I absolutely have to be pushed to the brink of frustration before I come up with a new way to solve an old problem. This is an important lesson for all of us--dogs and people: Frustration can work for ya, or agin’ ya. The trick, the art, is learning how to get it to work in your favor more frequently.

And maybe this is why, creativity is so difficult for us in solving problems with our dogs. We have an idea that a dog is our BEST FRIEND, our unquestioning companion. I think we often get a dog as a friend to ease our frustrations, forgetting she's a separate individual who’s likely to compound them.

I’m here to tell you: adding any individual to your life—-dog or human (or cat, for that matter) is going to add complications. It’s not a blank slate, it’s a dog with a unique personality and way of looking at the world. Frustration happens in any relationship. In the best relationships, creativity happens, too.

So, I’ll leave frustration and creativity for now, and go on to Pat Miller’s third step: generously and frequently rewarding the behavior you do want. This is a two-fold task. First, you have to learn to be generous. And that’s so hard for us. We say “I don’t want to make my dog fat” as if every act of generosity has to be one whole corn-riddled biscuit. You can be cheap and generous all at the same time, if you set your dog’s world up in the right way. You can have lean healthy dogs who work for food and myriad other tangible treats and benefits. Believe me, there are few people on the planet as cheap as I am. People: it’s all in the marketing.

But in order to make generosity work, you have to know when to be generous and when to say “oops, sorry, bank’s closed.” And the only way you will learn how to spend your generosity wisely is by paying attention. It’s important, really important, not to make your acts of generosity random. They have to be clearly linked to behaviors you do want.

Unfortunately, we tend to notice our dogs most when they’re acting inappropriately. A barking dog gets our attention, we’re all too willing to let a sleeping dog lie.

Copyright (c) 2010 ~ Peg Dawson Harrington ~ All Rights Reserved