Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting to do more and more agility training. Now, I’m no agility specialist by any means but I do enjoy doing all of the basic work for it. Often times I’ll get clients to a very good base level of training by teaching the dog directions, target command, working on the “come command” (which is an absolute necessity in agility). After the dog masters these basics, I’ll usually send the clients off to an agility specialist if they want to compete or off to something like the Zoom Room here in Austin if they want to play around and have fun teaching their dog new things.
In all cases though, working with a dog by teaching them the basics of agility is a great way to engage their mind and get them to think about things in a new way. Anything that help a pup pay attention to their owner and gets them to anticipate what’s coming next is a plus in my book.
Well, Just a shot of a client’s dog at Zilker Park yesterday with the dew. Loved the way this one makes the park look like it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer and part time dog photographer
Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten more and more requests from clients to do photography work with their dogs. It works out well for me and my clients, as one of my serious hobbies is photography. The easy part is that the dogs I’m working with and photographing already know me and respond well to the direction and are generally comfortable with the shoot scenario. The combination of the two works quite well and I always enjoy when I get a photo request from clients.
One of the by products of doing this is that I’m always looking out for interesting photographs of pets. Yesterday I ran across Stephanie Rausser who does just absolutely wonderful work. She’s a professional photographer working primarily in the advertising space but I loved how she captured the pets. I’ve clipped one of my favorites from her website to post here but this is all Ms. Rausser’s work.
Now, believe it or not it’s astonishing how many times I get clients that want me to help them stop the dog from running around the house/yard/neighborhood…while carrying “intimates”. It’s a pretty common request and that’s why I loved this picture. So Kudos to Ms. Rausser for her fine pet photo work. She has a level of intimacy with her subjects that I admire greatly.
Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer and sometimes pet photographer.
One of the basic tenants of dog training is that the dog needs to pay attention to you before you can actually do any formal training. In my day to day work, it’s actually quite rare to find a dog that knows how to pay attention at a high level. This is a skill most trainers have to work on quite a bit before we can really start moving toward the goals most clients have for their dog.
What does “paying attention” actually mean in the dog world? Well, to keep it simple let’s just say that if your dog is looking at you it’s paying attention. Yes, that an over simplification and I admit it, but for the average client if we can teach the dog to look at them we’re well on our path to success.
So, when you think about your dog, does it watch and change directions with you when you alter your path with the pup on leash? Does it turn around and look at you when it gets a certain distance away when off leash, waiting for you to give it a direction? Does it swing by and check in on a regular basis when you are running around out in the woods? Most dogs don’t.
This attention issue is one of the reasons that most trainers start work with a leash in hand and start working on a skill called “loose leash walking”. It’s not complicated but it does take most dogs a while to actually get the hang of watching where the owner is in space when on the leash.
Now getting to this holy land of attention can be done in lots and lots of different ways. This is where real dog training differs significantly from Google dog training in that it’s impossible to figure out what technique will work best with any dog until we meet it and actually have the leash in hand. Those trainers that say you can solve every lack of attention issue with the same technique are nuts. But I will venture that every trainer would agree that to accomplish any meaningful training work with a dog, it will have to pay attention.
Up to this point I’ve talked a lot about attention but not how to improve it with your dog. Well, there is one small, simple technique that works with the vast majority of dogs from puppies to grown dogs. When you get home from work, throw a number of treats into your pocket and then start going about your normal activities. When you notice the dog watching you or moving around the house with you in a purposeful manner give it piece of kibble. Doing this very very simple exercise over and over will help train ‘attentiveness’ and will only improve how the dog performs in more distracting situations.
The little technique above absolutely will not solve all issues but it is a very very good start and is something any trainer worth their leash would ask you to do in the beginning of formal training.
Hope this helps but if you get the chance do whatever you can to help your pup learn attentiveness and all the training you do going forward will move much more smoothly.
People call me a pragmatic dog trainer. I’m flattered actually, but in some circles it’s meant as a slur. That’s ok, because what it really comes down to with me is helping people and their dogs have a better quality of life. Notice there that I said “people AND their dogs” not just the dogs and not just the people, that is a very important distinction about how we at Fidelio approach things.
Sometimes in my profession I run across situations that just amaze and confound me. This recent story is one of those.
I’ve got a client, a new client that called me a few weeks ago desperate because she was unable to walk her dog. She’d been working with another trainer for a number of sessions, and after 5, yep that’s right five, lessons she was still unable to walk her dog across the street without it yanking her injured shoulder to the point that it hurt. That’s a very bad situation with a high energy dog. This dog needed walking and it needed walking a LOT.
Well when I met with the client we talked for a few minutes about her health issues and the history of the dog, then it was time to go to work. Straight away when we clipped the leash onto the dog and it charged out the door and yanked hard on her owner. From what the owner told me, this was how every walk had been since she adopted the dog, and it’s also how the walks were with the previous trainer. Not a pretty site for the dog or the owner.
Now, I’m all for other trainers having a philosophy about dog training. That’s fine, but here is where the ‘pragmatic’ part of what I do comes into play. If that philosophy isn’t helping the dog, the owner, or the situation, it might be the wrong philosophy and it probably is time to change it. Unfortunately some trainers don’t or can’t look at things that way.
Once I touched this dog’s leash it took me exactly 20 seconds to get the dog walking properly without pulling, lunging, forging, or cutting in front of me. Within less than a minute the dog was managing a pretty decent heel position. I was flabbergasted about how another trainer had taken 5 HOURS thus far and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of lessons and not been able to get the dog to walk across the street peacefully with the owner? I didn’t really have to do anything special with this dog and certainly nothing that a first year trainer wouldn’t be able to do in their sleep. Also, I didn’t even have to use any special equipment or training collars with the dog to get it to perform.
By the end of the session the owner was walking the dog around the park in front of her house in a heel position passing other dogs with no issues and managing to move past the pesky squirrels that always elicited a strong lunge on the leash before. Now that, is improving someone’s quality of life and I’ll take my pragmatic approach any day over wasting hours and hours of time and hundreds of dollars on a failed philosophy of training.
Now, I don’t put myself or my company forward as some Super Trainer organization or anything like that. What I do believe is that we at Fidelio have the ability, skill, and training to look at the whole situation and do what is best for the dog AND the owner and get them to a better place in their lives in a pragmatic way.
The way I do dog training is a driving intensive endeavor. For the past few years I’ve driven around in a large Volvo wagon that I needed for hauling client dogs here and there but that part of the business has not been that important of late so it was time for a change.
On the average day I’ll drive about 100 miles between client meetings. Yep, I’m busy, and that’s a lot of drive time. To try to mitigate how much pollution I create doing my thing it was time to change vehicles. The new official vehicle of Fidelio Dog Works is not a not very sexy but super efficient Prius. We are saving many gallons of gas a day with this thing and it just makes us feel better about out not adding as many degrees of heat to the summer here in Austin. Just think of it as our way of keeping the dog’s feet just a bit cooler on the pavement during August.
Wow! I ran across this on youtube today and sat there for the whole time just completely enthralled. Anyone that works with “field” dogs will find this great fun to watch. Particularly if you like the “English” breeds of cockers, setters, and springers. Worth the 9 minutes or so to take a look.
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