Dog Obedience Training For Your Pet Dog

In the dog training business EVERYTHING goes in cycles. Some months I’ll have tons of Viszlas to train and the next month it’ll be Yorkies, and the next it’ll be wolf hybrids, it just goes like that.

This month though it’s been the month of interesting dog names and interesting commands.

Let’s start with the commands.

I’ve got one client this month that wanted their dog to work with commands in French. It doesn’t matter to the dog really what language you use, they don’t innately speak English. The issue with this scenario is my French is TERRIBLE and my accent is even worse. We made a list of the commands and started teaching them (Assis=Sit, Ici=come, Coucher=down, Au Pied=heel…..) but after we got going it became clear that while the dog’s owner had impeccable diction in French mine was, how shall we say it, Off a bit. The little dog started having trouble understand what we were saying for a while until it clicked that she had to work with a trainer that didn’t have a lovely Parisian accent.

My other cool command story this month is from some clients that are clearly Star Trek enthusiasts. I loved this one. The pup’s name is Ryker, which you can probably figure out, but the best are the commands they use for Come and Go Potty. For them the come command is ENGAGE. I LOVE it and it works really well. It’s a clear command, and the pup responds well to it. The second is their command for Go Potty. They’ve chosen the best command swap I’ve ever heard, they use Make It So.

I think I’m going to have to pay them royalties on using that one from now on I love it so much. It can be my legacy to dog training if I leave behind legions of clients who train their dogs to potty on the command “Make it So.” Clients will be in the park and hear each other say “Make it So” to their dogs, then they can give each other a secret wink and say “Steve’s your trainer too huh?”

As for names, we’ll keep these short. I’ll give the profession of the owner and then the name.

Physicist….dog name…Collider

Rock star singer…dog name…Moth

Both of those fit the dogs perfectly and the owners even better.

I bring the name up because we’re searching for a name for our new puppy that’s coming soon. Unless the dog’s personality is totally different from what I expect this is what it’ll look like.

Dog trainer…dog name…Folly.

What do you think?

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

Well, It’s that time I guess. I got a call yesterday from a breeder I’ve been talking with for the past 8 years on and off. I’ve wanted one of her dogs forever, but every litter has been spoken for before I could get my name on the list and I never got organized enough to actually PUT my name on her list before she had a litter.

In any case, she called me yesterday out of the blue and told me that she had a pup that wasn’t going to be able to go to it’s original home due to personal issues. I thought long and hard about it overnight, and now is as good a time as any to bring in a new puppy.

Contrary to what most clients think, I just don’t get overly excited about having a new puppy. I, unfortunately, know exactly what I’m in for and am already bracing for it. Getting up at night, walks in the foul weather, bodily fluids and solids inappropriately dropped/left places when the pup’s not attended, constant attention, and TONS AND TONS of TRAINING REPETITIONS.

With all that said though, I’m looking forward to working with the little guy. I’m sure we’ll be wearing out several clickers with him over the next few weeks.

I’m going to try to get video of the training and pictures and get them posted so that you can watch things develop. Hope it proves interesting to everyone.

I had a client recently that got a new puppy. Not an unusual occurrence in what I do but the situation around this dog was VERY unusual. The puppy is going to live in New York City starting in June. Normally this wouldn’t be unusual either except that the goals were for this puppy to be “trained” by the time it left Austin.

This client is unusual in that they can take all the time and muster all the resources to accomplish training to a high level really quickly. So the question was first, “Where do we start?”

Puppies don’t innately know how to pay attention to us. Sometimes they look like they do but in most cases we have to train them to do this the way we want. That’s where we start with puppies, teaching them to pay attention when we say their name.

clicker
With young pups, I love using a clicker. It takes time and attention but it’s one of the fastest ways to teach young pups provided you lay the appropriate groundwork.

load the clicker
With clickers you have to teach the pup that the noise means something. Generally we teach the pup that when they hear the clicker something good is going to happen. We start this by doing what we call “loading the clicker”. As soon as we get the puppy home we start feeding it meals by sitting on the floor and clicking the clicker and then giving the pup a piece of food. I do this over and over and over until we’ve gone through about 1,000 (yep, you read that right one thousand) repetitions. Once you go through that with a pup they are pretty conditioned to the clicker and you can start your real work.

train the name with the clicker
At this point I’ll start saying the pups name and if/when it turns it’s head in my direction I’ll “click” and reward the pup. Pretty soon the pup will start responding to their name and at least turning in your direction. The next step is to get the pup to actually “look” right at me when I say it’s name. To do this you begin to shape the initial behavior and hold off on the “click” and reward until the pup looks right at your face. Getting a pup to look right at you is a basic building block of training but it’s one that most people just do not spend enough time with.

train a turn around to the name with a clicker
Once you teach the pup to “look” at you when you say it’s name this next step is pretty simple. When you call a dog you generally want to give it another command as well and it helps if you can get the dog to turn all the way around and look at you when you say its name. At this point in the training I’ll start moving around the house and yard with the pup and whenever it starts to take off away from me I’ll call it and “click” when it turns toward me and reward that behavior.

So if you’re getting a puppy, you could do much worse than starting out by teaching the pup to look at you. It’s a skill that is out of favor a bit in dog training but it’s a requirement in my opinion and needs to be practiced quite a bit early on so the pup learns that you’re not just a chew toy for their entertainment.

So, back to the beginning of this post, what happened with that puppy? The puppy has now been in the home for one month and we have all of the basic commands done, sit, down, come, heel, go to your bed, stay, and a couple of others, but the real kicker is that the puppy is riding a skateboard already. All of this can be done this quickly if you just teach the pup to pay attention to you first.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer