If you are reading this article in Bay Woof it’s likely that at some point you’ve taken the time to train your dog. You probably diligently set aside specific time for training in your day or week, especially when your dog was a puppy or brand new in your life, or when you had a specific training goal in mind, and that is wonderful. Thank you for being such a cool and responsible dog owner!
However, once you reached your goals, or your new dog acclimated, or your pup grew up, you probably knocked off, or at least greatly reduced your number of training sessions because you figured your dog was trained.
And that is the precise moment your dog’s training began to deteriorate.
Maintaining a well-trained dog is no different than maintaining a physically fit body, you’ve got to use it or you’ll lose it.
Dogs are learning all of the time, behavior is always in motion, and because what is normal for dogs is generally not desirable for us humans, the direction of their behavior is going to go downhill unless we are actively working to shape it to please us and meet our requirements.
Most of us fail to realize that pretty much every day, every interaction with our dogs is a training scenario, practicing for the big event when we desperately need a recall, such as in an emergency, to impress someone, or during competition.
So we end up testing our dogs on rare occasions rather than setting them up for success via regular training scenarios when we’re just hanging out. Then suddenly we ask them to do as we say, often with major real-life distractions and little or no reinforcement.
We expect compliance as a given once a dog is “trained” and don’t reinforce the good behavior frequently enough in such everyday real-life situations to maintain the strength of the dog’s response.
The times you really need a perfect response from your dog are few and far between but they are extremely important. So protect your dog’s training by using your daily interactions as training sessions throughout the day. Don’t take good behavior for granted and don’t always test your dog to his or her limit.
When we simply expect good behavior or think of training as a finite project with an end date, we often stop rewarding and basically cause the good behavior to extinguish due to lack of reinforcement. This is a recipe for failure.
So, once your dog’s got the basics, go ahead and do away with the formal training sessions if you’d like, but by all means incorporate mini-training interludes into your dog’s normal routine on a frequent basis.
Here are a few more tips:
- If you find yourself uncertain that your dog will respond to you appropriately and quickly, manage the situation for safety and success – and then go back and train until you know you can count on her/him responding enthusiastically and promptly!
- Strengthen your reinforcement value and the relevance of your requests via games, high value rewards, and high reinforcement history. (Yes! Higher!!)
- Practice and heavily reinforce the basics, even if it’s just for five minutes a day. Don’t take them for granted.
- Occasionally add distractions in mini, real-life training set ups.
- Do the above throughout your dog’s life regardless of how well-trained your dog gets.
Having a trained dog is not an end goal but rather a dynamic, ever-changing life-long process. And remember, all this positive training interaction with your dog contributes to a strong and loving bond between you, the best reward of all.
Kelly Gorman Dunbar is Director of the Center for Applied Animal Behavior, where she recruits and trains the instructors for the Dunbar family business, SIRIUS® Puppy & Dog Training. She is the creator of the SIRIUS Sniffers scent-detection program, and is in the process of bringing the French sport of cavage (truffle hunting) to the US. Kelly is also Founder and President of Open Paw and consults on various matters.
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