As a dog training professional many of your clients will present behavioral or training challenges that are a result of an emotional response, a problematic emotional response. The observable behavior you see, the operant behavior is elicited because the dog is afraid, scared, anxious etc. To change the problematic operant behavior you have to change
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Listen to a five minute podcast about the DogSmith and our training and behavior services. There is a difference between the two. Alternatively you can contact your DogSmith who will help guide you in your choice of services. So What Is The Difference? Dog Training is about building up new and appropriate skills and helping
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Introduction Here at the DogSmith, professional members of the Pet Professional Guild (PPG), we like to focus on building relationships with our pets by using positive reinforcement to train new skills, and to build new behaviors as replacements for problematic ones. Because the emotional brain inhibits the rational brain (and vice versa), nobody, and that
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The personal goals I have for my dogs and myself are very simple. They are for them to have the skills and confidence they need to successfully share my home with the minimum amount of human injected control or management. So, I haven’t ever and do not now, spend hours and hours on orchestrated training
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When a dog growls it is its way of communicating that it is uncomfortable, afraid or stressed. Dogs have a communication hierarchy that starts with subtle face shifts, lip licks and yawns. The growl is present when previous communication has failed and the dog needs to escalate its message. Please do not think or feel
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by Niki Tudge With our pet dogs they need to be able to respond not only accurately, but quickly as well. Very few behaviors are truly functional when they occur with a long delay after the antecedent. Imagine asking your dog to “down” and then the behavior comes ten seconds later. To be truly “mastered”
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by Angelica Steinker 1. Shaping 2. Prompting 3. Capturing 4. Observational Learning Shaping – the process of training your dog by rewarding a very small part of the end behavior. Gradually, over time, you will require more of the dog until you have ‘shaped’ the goal behavior. For example, you want your dog
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by Niki Tudge Isn’t it amazing how we expect puppies to arrive in our home fully trained and perfectly fluent in the English language? And then we are amazed when our new dog doesn’t understand the simplest instructions we give them. Like a tourist in a foreign country, we think that if we just talk
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