Dog Obedience Training For Your Pet Dog

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.

Steve Haynes
Austin dog trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

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.

Steve Haynes
Austin dog trainer
fideliodogs.com

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.

Here’s to greener dog training.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

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.

Here it is:

Well, It’s time for my annual post on heat stroke and your dog. This year, instead of all of my anecdotes and whatnot I’m going to post an email I received this morning from a favorite client of mine. Read this and then do what’s right and don’t run your dog in the heat of the day!

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I only send this to you because I thought you might want a sobering story to remind all of your clients about the dangers of heatstroke.

Tuesday night I was with my trail running group in the greenbelt, and near the end of the run came across some guys carrying their great dane out, on a towel.
Heatstroke. I stopped running and helped them (and two cops) carry this dog out. Maybe a miracle happened and the dog survived, but during the 15 minutes I carried one end of the towel the dog went from very quiet to eyes wide open / tongue lodged out of the side of its mouth. As a dog lover, it is mighty hard to watch a young healthy dog die in front of your eyes.

I’m not an expert, but I know the heat is a killer. Dogs can’t sweat – when in doubt keep your dog’s time in the heat as short as possible.

db

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If that won’t make you think twice about dogs and heat I don’t know what will.

Be safe and keep you pups cool.

Steve Haynes
Austin dog trainer
fidelio dog works

Had a strange meeting with a client today. Their dog who is now over a year old and who I trained initially has developed a habit that his family thinks is unsettling.

It seems that the pup spends most of the day with the mom of the house, and while she is a great lady and a very dedicated dog trainer she is a bit of a perfectionist. Well, when the dad of the house comes home the pup goes nuts and wants to spend all the time with him. This, as you can imagine with a bit of a perfect mother, was unsettling.

Their question to me was “how do we make the dog like me [the husband] less and like her [the mom] more??” Simple actually. As with many things in life, familiarity breeds contempt. I told them to switch roles for a few days and let the dad do the walking, training, grooming, feeding… and let the mom do the come home and play thing. It should be an interesting experiment.

Now, while nothing in dog training is absolutely certain, I’ll bet a heavy wager that by the end of the week the pup will be following the mom around going “play with me, play with me, play with me” at every opportunity.

Hopefully, problem/issue solved

Many days I spend my time running between clients in the car and saying “sit”, ‘Down’, ‘come’ over and over…. all day. It’s not a bad way to spend a day, in the company of dogs and their people devoted to them, but it’s nice to once and a while get to work with a dog that will actually a have a job that it has to do. Particularly, an important job. Yesterday was one of those days.

Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist at Ft. Hood military base here in Texas is going to be taking his dog Lady to work with him. Dr. Gordon works with returning soldiers with PTSD and he’s found that having a dog in the room helps everyone deal with the difficult conversations and situations. That’s good for the people for sure, but that’s only half the story.

Lady, the dog, was found abandoned in a ditched car in the parking lot of the local hospital. No one knows how long she was locked in the car or anything at all about her history. All we do know is that Dr. Gordon rescued her and has been training with her since she landed with him. It’s a good match, probably the best match I’ve seen in a while.

So, long story short, Lady passed her Canine Good Citizen test yesterday and is now cleared by the Ft. Hood staff to accompany Dr. Gordon to the hospital and on all of his rounds with clients anywhere on the base. A true working dog!

Needless to say, I was pretty proud of both of them and I’m not shy to say that I had a tear in my eye when they walked away with their CGC certificate to head straight back to Ft. Hood to a group session with the soldiers.

Steve,

The best compliment I can give you is how many people meet Gunther and say (right away): “Oh, I can tell this is a Fidelio Dog….”

Marty J. S.

When a dog trainer (like me) starts looking for a puppy, I tend to start looking for English Cocker puppies.

This is a lovely ECS at 4 weeks old. Oh my.