1.       Socialization

Dog trainers recognize how important it is to start socializing puppies early on and how much easier it is to prevent problems from arising instead of trying to fix them later. Puppies go through a sensitive period of socialization between 4 and 14 weeks of age (the exact length of this period is variable and constantly being debated). Within this time period, the worst thing we can do is to keep the puppy indoors at all times, with no access to members outside of the household. It is critical that the puppy goes outside to interact with the world.

There are some health considerations during this period because the puppy’s immune system is still developing and thus some caution is advised to minimize exposure to diseases. Going through where we should or shouldn’t take our puppies early on is beyond the scope of this article, but this is something that you can discuss with your veterinarian and dog training professional. If your veterinarian does not recognize the importance of early socialization and advises you to keep the puppy indoors until the puppy is four months old, I would recommend that you seek a second opinion.

Socialization is critical and you will probably only have one chance to do it right. If you start too late you are already risking the puppy developing phobias and other detrimental behavioural issues. I also recommend that socialization is an ongoing commitment with special emphasis during the first year. If you let too much time go by without exposure to a certain stimulus (dogs, people, places), the dog may start to show some type of negative emotional response towards those things.

Here is a real life example: imagine that you are raising a child and that between the ages of 2 and 15 years of age that child only lives inside the house and never goes out to school, to play with other children, to interact with other adults, to visit different places, etc. Certainly, this child would not develop healthy social habits and behaviour. A similar process happens to dogs, but it happens faster. Dog trainers are aware of this and they take their puppies out to interact with other puppies, friendly adult dogs, people from different age groups and ethnicity, and to places that look, feel, smell and sound different.


2.       Management

Dog trainers are very good at using management solutions to make their life (and their dogs’ life) easier. A dog in a new environment (especially if it is a puppy) with too much freedom to roam the house and make his/her own choices is a recipe for disaster. Dog trainers are aware of this and take a proactive approach to minimize the amount of mistakes that the dog can make.

The use of dog crates, baby gates, exercise pens, leashes (when supervising the puppy) and other management tools makes it easier to control where and what the dog is doing. Many new pet owners simply bring a puppy home and hope for the best (they hope that the puppy will know where to relieve himself/herself and what are appropriate chew items). Dog trainers know that puppies will probably make choices that we don’t like and so they use confinement to minimize issues during the initial phase. Thus, if the dog cannot be supervised he/she goes into a confinement option. Dog trainers are also aware that harnesses and leashes are great tools to be used inside the house, as long as this is done under supervision (leashes are not just for leash walking).

Dog trainers will balance out the amount of confinement with the amount of physical activity, mental stimulation, socialization and training sessions. When house training and chewing appropriate items is reaching success on a regular basis, dog trainers start to progressively offer the dog more freedom until the use of confinement is considerably reduced.


3.       Motivation

Dog trainers are fully aware that generally dogs will not do things to please us. They will mostly do things to please themselves. With that in mind, most dog trainers use access to high value resources contingent upon doing something that they want the dog to do. A great approach that many trainers use to put motivation working for them is to get rid of the food bowl and to offer food in training sessions, in puzzle toys or other environmental enrichment options. The dog’s wild cousins have to work hard to get food and that approach seems to make sense to our domesticated companions as well.

Dog trainers also put other resources working in their favour. Does the dog want to sniff a bush? Does he/she want to say hello to another dog or person? Go through a door? Does he/she want you to toss a tennis ball? Dog trainers will ask the dog to do something before they proceed with these highly prized events.

Petting and affection might be valuable in the living room, but out there in the real world they are probably not that high value for your dog. Dog trainers are aware of this and adapt accordingly to the situation they are in. In some cases a piece of kibble is high value enough for your dog to be engaged with you, but in other scenarios you may need a piece of cheese or cooked chicken.


4.       Occupational activities and exercise

Most dogs are pretty good at spending a big part of the day resting and sleeping, but they also need a regular supply of mental and physical stimulation. Dog trainers make sure that their dogs receive exercise and environmental enrichment on a regular basis.

Here are some tips and tricks that dog trainers use:

·         playing fetch will get a dog tired faster than walking him/her on a leash;

·         a long leash (8-15m) attached to a harness is a magnificent tool if the environment is safe enough to use such a device;

·         if you will have a very busy day consider using the services of a dog walker or doggie day care;

·         if the weather is terribly bad, there are still lots of stimulating activities that you can do indoors;

·         leaving a stuffed food toy for your dog to chew will make it more likely for the dog to be content with being left alone;

·         there are many “Kong recipes” out there that will make food toys more challenging and interesting;

·         finding food throughout the house and/or yard is more fun than eating it from a bowl;

·         preventing access to shoes, socks, rubbish, etc. is likely to make your life easier;

·         toys that are available all the time lose value and become “furniture”.


5.       Preparation for real life situations

Dog trainers realize that prevention and preparation will go a long way towards avoiding fears and other behaviours that we do not want our beloved dogs to show. They prepare for such a situation in a way that is easy for the dog to handle before he/she is confronted with the real life potential trigger.

Here is an example: many dogs are very likely to show fear towards thunderstorms or fireworks. One possible way to help preventing this occurrence is to play recorded sounds of those events with soft volume and then progressively increase the volume until it somehow resembles the real sound that the dog may encounter. This process is called desensitization. Dog trainers also like to pair desensitization with counter-conditioning. To include counter-conditioning in the previous example you would pair the “frighting sound” with something that the dog enjoys (e.g. food treats). The sequence would be: thunder sounds equals super yummy food rewards; no sound equals food treats are no longer available and “life is boring”. With this approach we would possibly create a positive emotional response to the sound of thunderstorms or fireworks.

A dog trainer will not wait for these events to be exposed to his/her dog in real life and hope for the best. Instead, a dog trainer will assume that a negative emotional response is likely to evolve if things are left for chance, and for that reason he/she will actively prepare the dog for a real life situation before it happens. If enough preparation is not possible, the dog trainer will use management and counter-conditioning to try to minimize the negative experience as much as possible.

Picture: www.morguefile.com

Here is a scenario that has happened to me when I started sharing animal training information and that I’ve encountered several times in the cybernetic space: a young animal trainer posts an article, shares a video or opinion on dog training and a more experienced trainer criticizes him/her, mentioning that it is too basic and that the person lacks experience. I consider criticism to be a bad idea and the wrong approach when interacting with another person (for more information on that topic please refer to my article “Gentle with animals, but harsh with people”), but let’s explore the situation from a different perspective.

 
To make this exercise easier, join me in an imaginary world where we can quantify knowledge (in this case, animal training knowledge). Imagine a scale from 0 to 10 in which 0 is a person that knows absolutely nothing about animal training and 10 is the person that knows everything there is to know on the topic. I can think of a few people that would be a 9 on this scale and many of them would be the influential trainers that have been showing the world that using a carrot is better than using a stick, backing it up with anecdotal and scientific data. In my opinion, the 10 is impossible to achieve because there is always stuff to be learned, but more on that later.


Going back to my opening sentence, imagine that the trainer posting the article or video is a level 3 trainer and gets the “correction” from a level 6 trainer. Probably, the level 6 trainer finds it very basic information and too irrelevant to be shared. Perhaps that specific community has many trainers that are at a higher level than the level 3 trainer. But here is the important piece of information: all the level 6 trainers were level 3 one day. Actually, there was a moment in which they were level 1 or 2 and knew less than this person does at the moment. More importantly, perhaps there are people in that group that are level 1 or 2 at the moment and that can learn from the content that the level 3 person shared.

 
Many fields related to the biological sciences have been evolving a lot and animal training is especially prone to new information. For many of us the evolution is constant and very fast paced. Let me give you an example in the first person: I offer a lot of free animal training videos on my Youtube channel. Many times, I shoot the video and by the time I start with the editing it has become obsolete in my view. I would change several things if I was to do it again. When I look back at videos that I have done a couple of years ago then my general thought is “what the heck was I thinking when I did that”? That is probably the case for many of my fellow friends and animal trainers. I do not believe however that this is a bad thing. It is evidence that we are trying to learn and evolve each and every day. It shows that a given trainer’s current approach is an improved one when compared with the one he/she was using in the past.

 
Why do we criticize the “already known” or “not ideal technique” then? Well, perhaps it is a hard wired behavior that evolved to make us survive, to get a competitive edge over others. It makes some intuitive sense that if we devalue someone else's work we might be valued instead. The problem is that we might discourage the level 3 trainer from becoming level 6 and who knows, perhaps one day becoming level 9. We do need force free trainers out there. We do need modern training techniques to be the mainstream information out there.

 
Some years ago I had a few younger colleagues starting to be given responsibilities that up until that point were only my responsibility or of some older, more experienced colleagues. When this happened, my first natural inclination was to find mistakes and criticize them. I had seen other people using this approach, so certainly that was the normal thing to do, right? Well, I was fortunate enough to follow the lead of some amazing people that would take on the success of younger colleagues and celebrate it as if it was their own success. More impressively, they would even try to learn from younger colleagues. Obviously, they would take most of their new knowledge from international references, but it was still remarkable that they would learn some bits with less experienced people.

 
Experience is important, but I believe that even more important than experience is a desire to hunt for new knowledge and ideas. I have met some very well experienced animal trainers that ended up stagnating their careers because they did not actively tried to acquire new knowledge. The best animal trainers in the word (the level 9 ones) are always trying to learn more stuff and sometimes they refer to “less knowledgeable people”. Let’s embrace new information even if it comes from newcomers and let’s make the world a more force free place.

 
Picture: http://www.morguefile.com