This book is full of techniques in almost every chapter—methods like the Double Leash Lock-Off—that simplify and streamline the training process. And just like techniques for anything—karate, cooking, carpentry, anything—the more you practice them, the better you’ll get at executing them effectively. As you choose techniques in the coming pages to use in your dog’s training, keep in mind that they’ll probably seem a little awkward at first. It’s totally normal to feel that way because, much like your dog, you are learning something new here. I promise that over time the techniques swill get easier. Nobody walks into that first karate class and does a perfect round kick. Nobody makes a perfect soufflé on the first try. And whatever the first thing is you build with your hands, it’ll probably end up in the garage or the basement—not exactly a family heirloom.
ALWAYS HAVE A PLAN B
Every dog we meet comes with a combination of DNA and experiences that makes him as unique as a thumbprint. These are living, breathing, feeling beings, so of course no two are alike, and no two behavioral issues are ever exactly the same. So it only makes sense that not every dog responds to every training technique. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over my decades of working with animals is that it pays to always have a plan B. That way if I get pushback from a dog with my first approach, I can quickly switch gears and go in another direction. Sometimes it’s even a mix of approaches that leads to a breakthrough for a particular dog.
Throughout this book, I’ve included variations for all but the simplest and most consistently reliable training methods. As you read, and as you train, keep in mind that if you get stuck, you’ve got good alternatives right there on the page. Think of them as your training insurance. You may never need your plan B, but if you do, you’ll be ready.
The point here is that just because a technique challenges you (or your dog), it doesn’t mean you can’t do it or that it won’t work. The secret to your success will be in applying the proper technique over and over again—not just in a single perfect lesson. I’ve taught every method included in this book to clients who had never trained dogs before, and most of those clients ended up getting great results. As you conduct regular training sessions, your technique will steadily improve—and so will your dog’s obedience.
Tools
Tools go hand in hand with technique. Here are a few that can help you train almost any dog:
The Right Collar and Leash. There are a lot of collar varieties to choose from—everything from a simple flat nylon band to a spiked metal choker. If you’ve ever watched Lucky Dog, you may have noticed that the training collars I prefer are neither of the above. For most training, I recommend and use martingale-style collars.
Martingales aren’t named after the person or the company that invented the collar—they’re named after a piece of horse tack by the same name that riders use to keep their horses’ heads up. Even though the collar is a completely different piece of equipment, when you pull it, it cinches up—without choking your dog—and keeps his head high. If it chokes your dog, you’re using it wrong and may need someone experienced with this kind of collar to help you understand it. When this collar is used correctly, it utilizes an important concept any experienced dog trainer can confirm: the higher a dog’s head is, the more control you’ve got. If your dog can get his head low, he’ll have more freedom to choose to disregard your training. He’ll also have more horsepower, if he’s the type to push or pull. This is key to remember when working a powerful breed known for pulling like a Lab, a husky, or any bully breed.
The way a martingale works is through a two-loop system. The larger loop is designed to close to the size of your dog’s neck and no further. The smaller loop—the one the leash attaches to—has enough slack to allow you to narrow that larger loop or leave it slack. Most of the time, your dog will have more room in this kind of collar than in a regular flat collar. When you need more control, you’ll be able to apply enough pressure to narrow the large loop without hurting your dog. These collars are easy to understand and to use—a nice tool to have around when you need it.
Martingale collar
If your dog is a heavy puller, you may find that neither a flat nor a martingale collar provides enough leverage for you to maintain control. In that case, a halter-style head collar may be your solution. This collar also borrows a concept from horse tack, incorporating an over-the-nose strap that helps the handler control the dog’s movement. There are a few different brands of this kind of collar, and they can all work, but there is a learning curve for both owner and dog when using them. I don’t recommend using this kind of collar unless you’re willing to watch an instructional video and—if needed—get a little guidance from someone who knows how it works.
Halter-style head collar
Any leash will work for most of the training techniques you’ll find in this book, but you’ll need at least two of them on hand to utilize some of my methods.
Platform or Pedestal. Not every dog needs to be elevated to be trained, and if you’ve got a big dog, you probably won’t need a pedestal. For small dogs and for any dog with control issues, though, a raised training surface can help you gain some control and focus. On a pedestal, a small dog is closer to your eye level—a better place to communicate than by your ankles (plus it saves your back from breaking). In addition, a pedestal eliminates all kinds of distractions. Even though your dog could hop off and go investigate those things, most dogs don’t. That one extra measure of distance between them and their environment is usually just enough to keep them in place. In fact, sometimes even positioning a big dog on a curb can give you this small extra edge. At the ranch, I have pedestals of different heights and diameters, but a professional training pedestal may not be a practical accessory for your living room or yard. You can easily make do with something you have or with a homemade version. Picnic tables work great as pedestals (although you’ll have to be cautious your dog doesn’t pick up the bad habit of jumping on tables after, so feel this one out before you commit). For small dogs, try stools or benches. In the house, you can make a light-duty pedestal by putting a small rubber-backed mat on top of a sturdy dog crate.
Use a pedestal or other raised surface, such as a couch or chair, to gain control and focus with a small dog.
A Penny Bottle or a Shake & Break™. Fair warning: you’re going to be coming across these simple, effective, inexpensive tools several times in this book. I swear by them and use them to train a lot of dogs—and from time to time I even try them on my friends. The reason they work is almost too simple: dogs get startled by the sounds they make. The noise literally stops dogs in their tracks when they’re behaving badly, giving you a chance to redirect them to more acceptable behaviors.
The penny bottle is the make-it-yourself version of this tool, and it’s as easy to own one as tossing a handful of coins in an empty water bottle and putting the cap back on. When you shake the bottle, the unorthodox noise will startle your dog and capture his attention. The Shake & Break is a more adaptable, kicked-up-a-notch version of this simple tool. It’s a training bottle I designed with dense hardened plastic on one end and aluminum on the other. That composition makes it possible to get the same kind of sound distraction you’d get with a penny bottle when the metal weights inside are shaken toward the plastic—and to get a sharper, more piercing sound when they’re shaken toward the metal. I tested the Shake & Break on hundreds of dogs during its development and found its range of sounds and the option of its intense metal-on-metal tone to be especially effective on stubborn dogs, multiple dogs, and dogs who get so focused on the trouble they’re up to that it’s sometimes difficult to get their attention.
The Shake & Break: my versatile, kicked-up-a-notch version of the humble penny bottle.
I’ve known people who have used everything from air horns to dog whistles to aversive collars to stop their dogs’ bad behaviors, but I don’t think any of those tools holds a candle to the humble penny bottle or the versatile
Shake & Break.
A Clicker. You won’t need a clicker to train most of the techniques in this book, but there are few times when you’ll find it very helpful. In addition, some dogs respond really well to clicker training. If yours is one, you can easily incorporate the clicker into almost every method in this book.
Teaching your dog to respond to the clicker may be the simplest training technique you’ll ever encounter. All you need to get started is a clicker and a handful of treats. With your dog controlled and focused, click and then immediately give him a treat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The point of this exercise is simply to teach your dog to equate the sound of the clicker with a reward. Later, we’ll utilize this tool to teach your dog to COME when called, but it has applications to any training technique when you might have trouble getting a treat to your dog at the exact moment he does something right. The clicker is a way to tell your dog, “Yes! That’s it!” even when you’re out of reach. I also find the clicker to be very effective in training shelter dogs who’ve been abused. Most of these dogs have been yelled at and verbally abused along with any physical mistreatment, and some become fearful when people talk to them. Even hearing “good dog” might scare them. On the other hand, the clicker—which is quick, quiet, and closely associated with rewards—can do no wrong.
Conditioning
There are very few techniques in this book that most dogs can’t master in a week. But there’s a big difference between teaching a dog to recognize a command and helping that dog to really know it. What’s the difference? A dog who still has to think about a command is at risk of regressing, or losing it altogether. But a dog who has practiced responding to a command so many times over an extended period that the action has become a matter of muscle memory—that dog likely has the command for life.
While you’re involved in a dedicated training program, I recommend working on each skill in a few sessions each day, repeating it ten times or more during each session. In my experience, dogs learn much better in multiple short sessions than in a single long one. If you sense your dog is reaching his limit, wrap up the session on a high note and set aside the skill until the next time. Overtraining is never a good idea. Done right, training can be fun and rewarding for you and your dog, but training too hard will make it stressful and unpleasant, and neither of you will want to stick to it. In addition, if you have a dog who’s out of control in a lot of areas, don’t start with a difficult training concept. Start with something easy, like SIT or DOWN so your dog can have early success. Work up to more difficult concepts like HEEL or QUIET over time. To increase your dog’s odds of success, train in a few fifteen-minute sessions spread out over the day. And always end each session on a successful, good note.
After a few days of practicing a new skill successfully, the next step is to taper off the rewards, ensuring your dog will still obey when you aren’t dangling a treat in front of his nose. To accomplish this, you’ll need to adopt what I call a lottery system—a pattern of rewards where the dog doesn’t hit the jackpot every single time he plays. The way to go about this is to keep the first and last rewards in play while eliminating a few of the treats that would come in between. Take your time at this, gradually reducing your dog to eight rewards out of ten tries, then six, then four, and then two—first and last. All the while you’re cutting back on treats, your dog will still be learning and internalizing the command, getting better at it every day. By the time you get to just two rewards per session, he’ll be ready to perform the command out of habit—not just for a prize. After that, you can still give random rewards to keep your dog on his toes, but you should be seeing a consistent response to the command when you’re empty-handed.
Once you’ve taught your dog a command and weaned him off rewards—don’t stop there! If you keep up the practice for just a single session every day, after a few weeks your dog will become truly automatic at it. That extended practice is the difference between a kinda trained dog and a well-trained dog. I know which kind I prefer to have.
Outtake
Since the success of Lucky Dog, sometimes when I train a new dog in public, I wear a ball cap or sunglasses. Don’t worry—I haven’t gone Hollywood—I just need to give each dog I work with my full attention at training time. That can be tough to manage if someone recognizes me while I’m on the job, because a chance encounter often ends up with me fielding twenty questions about how to solve their dog’s issues. Besides, sometimes when I’m working with a brand-new client, the dog’s behavior isn’t a very positive reflection on my professional skills. That was the case when I took a five-month-old goldendoodle to an outdoor mall in LA to work on her out-of-control behavior around new people. Her owner told me the problem was terrible, but I needed to test the waters in a public place to see it for myself. The way I actually test a dog is usually to let him go completely out of control and see how bad things get before I even start training. This gives me a foundation to build from. To someone just passing by, I’m sure it sometimes appears my dog-handling skills are a lost cause.
During this particular real-time assessment, it quickly became clear the dog’s issues were bad with a capital B. As soon as we got out of the car, this big, excitable puppy started going nuts, jumping so high as she approached each new stranger that she was nearly doing backflips. She actually got so excited when someone approached her that she started jumping up and down and peeing all over herself, spraying the stranger in the process.
Of course, it seemed like everyone else in the shopping center was on their best behavior that day—so they all noticed me and my crazy student as she romped around like a maniac. I could feel the eyes on us, with some people openly staring and shaking their heads. I even heard one man mutter, “Poor guy.” But I focused on the task at hand—figuring out the first step in breaking this otherwise good dog of her bad behavior. I was so locked in that I barely acknowledged when a woman came up beside me and said, “Excuse me, you look like you’re having a little trouble. I know a great dog trainer if you’d maybe like his card?” As she held out the business card, I turned toward her—and then burst out laughing.
The woman was one of my clients—and she was offering me my own card. I faced her and tipped my glasses up. “Jessica, it’s me!” Glancing at the bouncing dog, I added, “Remember what your dog was like on the first day?”
The moral of this story is this: Every tough training case starts with a day like that day in the mall—just me at one end of the leash and a student with a big problem at the other. Dogs don’t just look at me and start to behave—no such luck. If that were the case, I wouldn’t even be writing this book . . .
PART TWO
THE 7 COMMON COMMANDS
4
SIT
Before we delve into this first command, let’s talk a little about what it takes to tackle the 7 Common Commands in seven days. I recommend that you start here, with SIT—the simplest command—and then let your dog’s variables help dictate your choices as you move through the remaining ABCs of obedience.
Many dogs will already know the SIT command, and many others will pick it up almost immediately. They may be ready to move on to DOWN before you’ve even finished your morning coffee on day one. Others, though, will need a little extra time for each command. In general, you can expect to be able to teach your dog the basics of one command each day, and then reinforce those commands throughout the week. That said, let’s acknowledge one important fact here: a dog is not a mechanism like a Rubik’s Cube that we can simply manipulate a couple of turns in one direction and then a few turns in another to “solve.” Your dog is far more complex and unique than that.
So while I recommend teaching one command each day and then practicing those commands a few times each day for a week, I strongly encourage you to pay attention to how your dog seems to learn best and adjust accordingly. Some dogs are eager to learn and may be able to grasp three or more new commands in a single day. Others are slower and steadier, needing a full day—or
more—to take in one new command before tackling another. Likewise, some dogs retain training best if you work them for three or four twenty-minute sessions each day. Others do best with twice as many ten-minute sessions instead.
Regardless of your dog’s learning style, she is capable of learning all 7 Common Commands. Just follow the steps in these chapters, remember that repetition is the key to success, and focus on positive, confident training. The face you show your dog is the face that’ll be shown back to you.
Now let’s get started on that SIT command.
The SIT command serves a vital purpose in obedience and manners for any dog. It’s usually the simplest command to teach, and it’s one of the most practical as well. A dog with a good SIT is not only obedient but also controlled. And a controlled dog is a well-mannered dog.
This command is ideal for a lot of different situations. It’s almost the canine equivalent of putting your car in park. It can help settle down a dog if she’s running wild. It can also help calm her if she’s anxious, or help you gain your dog’s focus when you need it. Lastly, it teaches and reinforces respect. A dog who has a well-refined and reliable SIT has good manners and knows how to use them.
Besides serving as a baseline for control, the SIT command is a prerequisite for just about every one of my other 7 Common Commands. Even though they can be taught in any order, teaching the SIT is the logical place to start obedience training. And since this command helps your dog focus, once she has it down, teaching some of the other commands will be easier for both of you.
Here’s the best news: even many dogs who seem to have no training at all have a SIT inside them somewhere. That’s because it’s usually the first command any owner or trainer teaches. Most dogs have encountered it at some point in the first months or years of their lives.
Lucky Dog Lessons Page 7
