Today I want to start an on-going series (again) high lighting some of the successful (and sometimes not-so-successful) techniques we’ve been using lately with clients. This is my chance to speak about individual learning styles of each dog I work with.
This week’s dog is Willy the pit mix. You can tell by his ears that he has some sort of terrier in him.
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| Here is Willy, right before I got him too excited and he jumped at me. You can see him contemplating. |
Willy’s mom came to me with the goal of “having him listen to me.” A respectable goal considering that I too wouldn’t want anything living in my house that didn’t play by my rules. During the rest of our consultation I saw he likes to pull on leash, eat things off the ground, and mouths when playing or being handled. All of which sounds worse than it is. I only saw behaviors that have a million different ways to teach. But when you’ve been living with a dog who doesn’t listen, I can imagine feeling a bit more stressed than I was.
The first thing we discussed training was loose leash. We talked about how this would meet her goal of teaching Willy to listen. Then we talked about the goal I wanted to set for him. For Willy, I saw our “graduation” as walking a lap through a store, loose leash the whole way. In order to do this, he would have to listen, as his mom wants, but he also has to perform many different obedience commands and show a certain amount of desensitization to distractions. The goal, when we get to that point, will demonstrate that obedience training is crucial to solving most behavioral problems.
The problem I run into in the first two or so sessions with a new client is that they will feel discouraged with their dog’s performance. In a culture of immediate satisfaction, not receiving that when working with a pet makes my job a bit harder. While we worked on loose leash in our first session, every time Willy would sit, the sit would last for a few seconds before his mom had to hand place him back at her left side. The issue is that Willy is about 50 pounds of muscle and his mom is not tall enough to get the best leverage against the leash. I could see and feel the frustration. It seemed like he wasn’t learning and in those moments, it’s crucial to maintain positivity.
It’s hard convincing a client that a lot of progress has been made. For Shimmer, a dog I’ve been training for three years, progress looks a lot different than for Willy, who has not been living with his mom all of his life and has been training for less time than that. For Willy, progress is sitting for 5 seconds instead of 4 seconds. To me, that’s a 25% improvement! But 1 second is never as satisfying as it should be. This is what we worked on for almost the whole session. We hardly walked at all because he wasn’t there yet.
On 9/4/14, our third and most recent session, we had a breakthrough. Not only did we learn that a clicker works better than a mark word, we were able to turn that revelation into walking loose leash for over 50 feet! Granted, there were a lot of stop and goes, but that’s fine. Willy was able to walk 50 feet loose leash. As opposed to three weeks ago when we were just working on positioning him at his mom’s side.
To get him from the first week to the third week we had to change a lot of how we approach working with Willy. The first thing we tried to do is change our positivity towards him. After a while of frustration, this was, and still is not, easy to manage. I tell my client to use her “12-year-old voice. I know you know how to use it.” Tone of voice became important towards managing Willy’s willingness to work with us.
We also learned that Willy does not work the best with us in the first and last 20 minutes of the session. To compensate for that, we do the easy stuff first. We work on Willy just sitting in a “heel” type position. This requires very little problem solving skills from him and he still gets tons of treats. Then in our middle 20 minutes, we work on the hard stuff, which is actually moving while loose leash.
If we only get 20 real minutes of loose leash training, and we’ve only worked three times, that means we’ve got Willy to a very basic loose leash walk in 60 minutes. That’s 1 hour, out of the total 168 hours in a week, dedicated to making Willy easier to live with. A very minimal time commitment.
The big progress is what seemed to make everybody the happiest, but it’s also important to recognize the little victories when they happen. I’m sure Willy’s mom can attest to me making a big deal out of what seems to be nothing. But any victory, regardless of size, is a victory in my book.
I’ll leave with this final note. I heard it when I was 14, just starting dog training, from a woman who seemingly didn’t like me at the time. She said “in order to be a good dog trainer, you have to be willing to make an ass of yourself.” Not just Willy’s mom, but all of my clients, can speak to how silly I can get. This is the attitude I try to impart on everyone I work with and when they finally feel comfortable to look and feel foolish, their dog will grow, just like Willy.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below, on my Facebook, or email me at Michael@concentricdog.com
I wrote this blog with Willy’s mom’s consent. The last thing I would want to do is invade someone’s privacy or misrepresent them in some way.
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