K9 WILL
721 Roblin Road K0K 2W0 Napanee, ON, Canada

I explain this to a lot of clients

Tip #4 Phasing food out To phase food out you want to start to reward with food on every other repetition and praise on the other one. Then move to every third repetition or forth repetition remember to praise on the other reps that you don’t give food. Once you to get into the process the goal is to go to a variable or intermittent reward schedule. This means you may be rewarding on third rep or the seventh rep or the 11th rep or the first rep but the dog never understands t...here’s a consistent pattern to the reward schedule. When they don’t know when the reward is coming they strive harder to get the reward assuming the reward will come on the next repetition. I hope this helps.

Tip 3 Motivation part one. Motivation is a huge subject to cover but let’s start with what it is. Motivation is finding out what the dog really likes and using that to reward your dog. These include but are not limited to food, praise, toys, other oddities and lastly light leash pressure. Each dog will be motivated by their own thing, a lot of dogs are motivated by food so it makes these dogs easy to train as they will follow the food around. Other dogs prefer praise or... playing tug or fetch with them. What ever it is keep it fun with your dog. Don’t just hand them a liver treat be excited and happy while giving them the reward. If you put energy into your training your dog will give you energy back, especially if your interacting with them in their favourite way. Now there are some dogs that are really lacking in motivation and they won’t follow food. For these dogs teaching them how to move with gentle leash pressure followed by some fun mini event can often increase their level of motivation. When ever your training make sure to keep it light and fun and make your rewards into happy mini events to make as much motivation as possible. See more

Tip 2 First I will say that training a dog is about conditioning a response to a verbal que and not about dominating your dog. This is why timing is so important, the dog must associate the reward or the correction with the action they are doing. You have up to 5 seconds to deliver the reward so that the dog can make this association. One good way to help with this is marker training. This is where you use a verbal que to identify when the dog is doing the right behaviou...r and that their reward will follow. The marker will give the dog a good feeling in anticipation of the reward which has be shown to be more rewarding then the reward itself. So not only does it help us with our timing it helps us to phase the food rewards out as you progress with your training. I’m thinking about either motivation or reward placement as the next tip. Leave a comment to let me know which one you would prefer.

Tip 1 Socialization has two parts the first is meeting and greeting and the second is teaching the dog to focus on you with distractions around. Meeting and greeting should be limited as to many good experiences will cause you dog to be over excited in those situations in the future. For example if your dog is praised by every person or plays with lots of dogs then your dog will be excited each time they encounter people and dogs. On the other side if your dog has a nega...tive experience it could be traumatic. These both could lead to barking and lunging at people and dogs for different reasons. Teaching the dog to focus on you for rewards when around distractions teaches the dog to focus and it also makes a positive association to everything around you. This is important to achieve to avoid dogs be coming nervous of external stimuli. The trick is balance let you dog interact when you know it will be a positive experience and also teach them to focus on you while around other people and dogs. This way your dog will be prepared for both situations and understand what to do in either. Next I’ll discuss why timing is so important to the training process.

Who would like me to share some dog training tips on here?Who would like me to share some dog training tips on here?