We have some principles that guide our training, some foundations which are involved in all our training in one way or another. For instance, working with positive reinforcement and an ambition to avoid physical and verbal corrections are important to us.
You can say a lot about this! Here I will focus on one thing though – the importance of making good choices.
Since we have chosen to avoid corrections in training we need dogs that make good choices all the time. Choices they do because they WANT to do them. Not because they have to. There is a huge difference between making a choice because I WANT to do it or making a choice because I´m not allowed to do something else, isn’t it?
If the dog makes a good decision (that is doing what I want him to do) I can reinforce it and then the probability for him doing it again will increase. That is the way we teach the dog to do what we want.
And that leads us to one off our favorite subjects: training with distractions.
From the very beginning we teach our puppies that it pays off to make the right decision (right decision = to do what we want them to do). We do exercises where the puppies get rewards for self-control, exercises where they get to deselect wrong behavior to choose the right one. We teach them that it is rewarding to listen to us in every situation.
It makes our dogs behaviors solid. It gives us, to do a long story short, dogs that choose a dummy instead off a hamburger. It gives us dogs that listen to us when 50 pheasants leave the ground to fly to the right – and we can at that same time direct the dog to the left. It gives us dogs that we can recall from a running hare. It gives us dogs that can stay by our side when meeting another dog, out on a walk.
The first time we published the film where Elsa´s Golden Retriever Diesel retrieves a dummy laying next to a hamburger (follow the link below) we received many questions about how Elsa taught her that and why. So – now we are going to give you the answers. 😉
Do you want to know more about how we think around this training? On October 24:th we will have a webinar on this subject. A webinar works like a lecture where you can ask questions in our chat. It is also possible to watch the webinar after it has occurred – you don´t need to attend the very exact moment when it takes place if the time doesn´t fit you.
Join us! Ask questions and reflect together with us!
Read more and register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/reliable_behaviors/
Welcome! Elsa and Lena
