January is Train Your Dog Month

by lennearbNo Comments
Happy New Year, everyone! January is a time when many of us reflect on the past year and make plans and set goals for the new year. If stepping up your training is one of your goals, why not start in January? January is also Train Your Dog Month, so it's a perfect fit. The Association of Professional Dog Trainers tip for 2017 is "Make training a part of your everyday life with your dog!" That's my goal for the month, and you can make it yours too. If you don't currently include basic training, such as sit before going outside or before getting dinner, this is a great time to start. If you already do this, you can step things up to the next level. To support this effort, I'll be sharing short daily posts with different training ideas, and also sharing the same ideas on Next Best Pet social media channels. Want to share your own dog training adventure? Use #31DaysofDogTraining...
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Selecting Quality Cues

by lennearbNo Comments
When I am teaching new behaviors, the first cue we work on usually derives from movements related to the behavior being taught. Most families will want to go on to teach at least one additional cue (often a verbal cue, which I will use for examples in this post) for many behaviors. Personally, I prefer for my dogs to have a verbal cue and hand signal for most behaviors. However, the most obvious verbal cue may not always be the best one. Humans tend to prefer cues that "make sense." Since dogs don't share our language, they are not concerned about these elements. Here are a few elements of good cues: Clarity "Supercalifragilistic" might be a lot of fun to say, but it doesn't make a very good cue. It's so long that it's hard to say consistently, and it's likely to be hard for your dog to distinguish as a cue rather than a collection of syllables. One or two syllable...
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Origin of a Bad Habit

by lennearbNo Comments
This is a story about a pizza. Fortunately, given the fate of the pizza, it was not mine. But that's not really the point of the story. Once upon a time, let's say in June, someone left a pizza on the counter in my house and walked away from it. At this point, we had had Sirius Black for six years and eleven months, and he had no history of going after things on the counter. In fact, I had a somewhat problematic habit of forgetting things on the counter, and he never went after them. On the other hand, before this, they weren't ever hot delivery pizza. This time, they were. When the owner of the pizza returned, some period of time later, the pizza box was on the floor and the pizza was almost completely gone. Before pizza, Sirius had no history of reward for grabbing things off the counter. Frankly, the counter wasn't all that interesting to him. After the pizza, there...
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Back to Basics: Butts in Seats

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After starting this Back to Basics topic a few weeks ago with Attention and Find It/Name Game, I have allowed my own attention to wander a bit, but now it seems like a good time to refocus on basics, starting with the first behavior most people think about training a dog to do: sit. The ubiquity of the "sit" cue and the ease with which most dogs learn this behavior is both a blessing and a curse for dog training. Of course, it's a blessing to have a dog who will sit when you want him or her to do so. However, although many new students tell me that their dog knows a cue for "sit," a little investigation often reveals that the dogs do not know this cue out of it's usual context. One truth of dog training is that our dogs often do not focus on the same things we focus on. Humans are highly verbal, and we tend...
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A Quiet Walk in the Park

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When I left the house Saturday morning and spotted the sun, I admit I did a bit of a doubletake. What was that? After so many straight days of rain, it was easy to forget that the sun would be coming back again eventually. Since we did get lucky with some beautiful weather this past weekend, we decided to take advantage of it by going to the National Arboretum on Sunday for a walk. If you live in the DC area and haven't been to the Arboretum, it's well worth the trip. It's very family- and dog-friendly, but still has plenty of wide open places if you want to avoid getting too close to other people. Usually. That was less true than normal on Sunday, as the combination of sunny weather and Mother's Day had the Arboretum more full than I think I have ever seen it. If you are working on the basics of training your dog to be comfortable around...
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Back to Basics: Me and You

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With the recent hubbub over Beverly Cleary's 100th birthday, I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about Ramona Quimby. Does anyone else remember the scene (in Ramona the Pest, if you're wondering) where she arrives for the first day of school and is told to "Sit here for the present"? She thinks she is getting a gift, and she stays sitting in her chair for hours, waiting. All right, I may not tell that story as well as Cleary does, but my point is that instructions are only valuable if the recipient understands what is intended. Unfortunately, we often ask our dogs (cats and other pets too!) to follow instructions that they have not been prepared to understand. With that in mind, this seems like a good moment to review some basics. We'll start this week with two games I usually teach to my students as "Attention" and the "Name Game." These are not only great exercises for starting training, but...
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Ignoring the Outside World

by lennearbNo Comments
I always try to emphasize the importance of finding times to practice in your daily life. It's important for so many reasons, especially because if you save practicing for "when you have time," you probably won't practice (maybe at all, certainly as much as you want to). In addition, everyday life is when you want your dog to be able to perform whatever behaviors you are practicing, isn't it? That being said, there are always moments when we are not as on top of what is going on as we want to be. In those moments, we are left reacting to what happens, and figuring out what happens next. We had such an incident when a delivery person came to our door and I was unable to respond either to the door or to redirect the dog. (I was home on sick leave with limited mobility.) For once in my life, I was even without a cheesestick! A few minutes after that issue...
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About Group Classes

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I welcomed new students to my classes this past Saturday. Every time I do that, I am reminded of the questions people have about classes, including questions about what they can and cannot do for you. So here are some quick tips. Things Group Training Classes Can Do Provide a support community. Group training classes, especially age-based classes like puppy training, provide a great place to meet other people with similar experiences who can help you with issues you might be facing. Connect your dog with playmates. Especially in puppy classes and play-based classes, you may find a good play match for your dog, even if you don't have any in your circle of family and friends. You may even find someone you can meet up with outside of class. The class will be supervised, and the instructor will provide guidance about what to look for in safe dog play. For young dogs, this socialization experience is especially important. Provide a grounding in the...
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When Change Isn’t Progress

by lennearbNo Comments
We often think of dog training as a progression: first teach sit, then down, then stay. Many classes and manners of instruction are set up this way, my own included. Class names also tend to reinforce this progression mentality: Basic Manners, Intermediate Manners, Advanced Manners. There is some truth to this perception, of course. By starting training with simple behaviors that make use of dogs’ natural behavior patterns, and therefore are easy for our dogs to learn, we help them learn how to learn and plant the seeds for success in more advanced training down the road. However, having once learned a behavior is not a guarantee that your dog will continue to know and perform the behavior forever. Dogs, like people, respond to incentives, and they also form habits. If the incentive to perform a certain behavior is removed, the behavior is likely to fade. We use this to our advantage when we work to discourage undesirable behaviors like jumping up...
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Cats Can Can Learn Too

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How is your 2016? We are several days into 2016, and, crowded gyms notwithstanding, it's likely that many of us have already broken our well-intentioned new year’s resolutions. Last week, I said that my goals for 2016 were to work with Nefertiti on her polite behavior around food, especially wet food. I started working on this goal in late December. I think I have already made some progress but you can judge for yourself (sorry for the poor video quality): When working with cats, it is always important to keep in mind that they are not just agile, undersized dogs. I don't mean that to sound facetious. It is very common for pet owners to expect their cats to respond to stimuli, including cues, the same way that a dog would. However, cats are driven by a set of instincts that have developed to fit a very different social structure and environmental niche. Training cats is more effective when that training can tie into...
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