Blog

Closer to Home (part 3)

Your Attitude in Training

The Premise behind dissecting a duty of a task one-step at a time has for all times been proven effective and vastly valuable especially in an era where ‘instants’ is unparalleled, instant meal, instant chat, or instant gratification. This is especially valuable to the dog who is mostly clueless of what we want them to do and effective because that is the only way that they can learn. Now, in a world where the milestone of positive training has created better teaching methods than its counterparts (punitive training), the proliferation of snubbing a dog or attrition which often works’ with humans, has become the worst form of pressure to the dog since they do not know how to get out of it, and this is especially true to a dog who is trying hard to please you. Putting pressure comes from the idea that we have to give them pressure to be able to make them do something: that, in and of itself is true and false. Hence, when these sentiments arise directly from us and does not emanate from the dog, the tendency is to put a little too much pressure, which the dog cannot cope, then they lose their trust in us. Then true, because the pressure should never come from us directly, but we can create an acceptable pressure that they themselves can take or where they know how to handle. That is, to calmly repeat an exercise time after time up until they get an indirect form of pressure. When you hold up to this training principle every time you see your dog being confuse at your attempt to teach it something new, then your dog will not only start to trust you, but will eventually learn what you are trying to teach. Besides, holding up to the dog’s learning curve will prove priceless to people who has issues in finding time to train their dog because of work or some other forms of outside chores. While here, you can make use of the short time you have with your dog to focus on those decremental exercises, like fetching for instance that involves many other correlating functions to make a perfect retrieve. And this often is the issue with us today since we want instant results, and as a consequence, we tend to overlook those faulty gestures that our dog makes simply because it was able to fetch anyway. When this becomes your itinerary in training them, another new task that requires the dog to heel adjacent to your side becomes a big hindrance, harder to fix or might as well tolerate those inherited delinquencies and start to articular direct pressure for an end that you want them to do.

Then, after that gradual yet meaningful preparation, you’ll be surprise how advance your dog has become as you integrate all those fragmented exercises as part of a perfect performance. This is how they groom a versatile hunting dog, one who is trained to hunt, retrieve and track wounded games on both land and water. Moreover, while yours might not sign up for those things but instead join other narrower matches or shows, to showcase what you have, or just simply enjoy their enchanting company. What you will one day have is just as valuable us those well celebrated top dogs that its owner is honored to have.

Note, that in whatever activity you want to pursue, never forget the overarching philosophy of training dogs that I’ve taught, which is to play a hunting game with them per se’, or use a hunting game as a reward, in order to wield the dogs energy to radiate intensely where there will not be a dull moment for them even in those mundane exercises.