Training Your Dog Will Increase Your Bond

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, A Little a Day Keeps the Dog Trainer Away: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising a Happy and Obedient Dog by Tom Roderick.

I’ve always gravitated towards animals, particularly dogs. They’re more accessible than other domestic creatures or wild animals, and that makes it easy to be near them, interact with them, and pet them.

As a child, I often visited my grandfather’s estate in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. He kept Jack Russells and black Labradors. The Labradors were working dogs, and the Jack Russells had free run of the house. I soon learned the difference between a trained dog and an untrained dog.

One day, I was wrestling on the ground with my little brother, and one of the Jack Russells ran straight out of left field and attacked me.

This was a dog that got away with murder.

She barked out of the windows, behaved extremely dominantly towards other dogs, was allowed up on the couch whenever she wanted, was never crated, and once snacked on the mailman’s boots, for which she was never punished.

The Labradors were completely different. My grandfather used them to retrieve birds, so they were used to holding things very gently in their mouths. Jim, their trainer, encouraged me to put my arm into the kennel. I was only nine years old, and I was scared. “No, I don’t want to do it,” I said. “It’ll bite me,” but Jim convinced me.

The dog’s name was Annie. When I got up the courage to put my arm inside her kennel, she took hold of it gently and held it. She didn’t squeeze it. She didn’t shake me. She didn’t growl. She just held it. She looked right into my eyes and her whole body was shaking as though every inch of her was wagging. At that moment, I knew for sure that I loved dogs.

Training Approach

Years later, in 2010, I founded my own dog-training service, Walky Walk, in Boston. I take a coach approach to training now. Through one-on-one and an in-home style of training, I turn dog owners into dog trainers.

It’s imperative for owners to learn how to train their dogs. It is one of the most effective ways of building and enriching your relationship with your dog. “If I train my dog, will she still like me?” is a question I get quite often.

Believe me when I tell you that by training your dog, you will greatly enhance your bond.

Since training is progressive, I help owners systematically by bringing a specific lesson plan designed for their specific goals. In order to reach that goal, owners must complete training lesson by lesson. We usually meet for one hour a week, which is not long enough for me to train the dog effectively, but it is enough time to train the owners. I can’t be there for the rest of the week, so I rely on people making use of the suggestions I give them.

Once the owner has met the milestones for that session, he or she is ready to move on to the next phase of training. I come over again, bringing new material, and teach the next set of skills and exercises needed to reach the goals. As long as the owner is putting in the time and effort, training will be successful.

Jim once told me, “Dogs are a reflection of you. If they’re doing something incorrectly, it’s because you didn’t teach them effectively.”

Dog training isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t have to be complicated. We don’t need to reinvent dog training when we get a new puppy or have a behavior we need to work on. Be consistent and patient, and follow your plan. Remember, well-behaved dogs aren’t born, they’re trained.

You’re Already Training Your Dog

The purpose of this book is to give you the tools you need to raise a happy and obedient dog, one that will be a delight to you and your family for years to come. You may wonder whether you really need to train your puppy, and the answer to that question is: you already are.

Dogs learn through repetition. If you bring home a puppy, and you don’t train her proactively, your dog won’t have any instructions as to what she should be doing. She will fill that void by doing whatever she wants. Even if you don’t encourage your dog to jump up on you, or bark at the door, or beg at table, she may pick up those behaviors.

Here’s a common example. When you get home, you’re happy to see your dog. You get very excited, and the dog reciprocates. She jumps up on you. She starts to bark and whine. If you do that for a few months when you first get a puppy, you’re teaching your dog that it’s okay for her to enter a hyper-reactive, anxious state of mind when you walk through the door. The same is true when you leave.

If you give your dog a grand, theatrical farewell, you can accidentally condition her to develop separation anxiety. Although you’re not setting out to teach your dog to be anxious when you come home or leave the house, you’re indirectly encouraging the behavior.

One of the most common problems I work on is adult dogs that get overexcited when their owner comes home. That’s because the behavior took root when they were puppies. People think that they can encourage their dogs to jump up when they’re small, and then easily change that behavior when the dog’s grown. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

The good news is that you only need to do a little training from day one to make sure that you’re encouraging the behaviors you actually want your dog to display, and discouraging the ones you don’t. Of course, if you like your dog jumping up on you, that’s a different story. The golden rule is that if you’re happy with how your dog’s behaving, your dog is trained. If you want your dog to sleep in bed with you and you’re comfortable with your dog begging for food, your dog’s trained.

If you don’t want your dog to do those things, however, it’s important that you train your dog accordingly. Before you get a dog, it’s an excellent idea to sit down for an hour or two and consider your expectations.

Do you want your dog to sleep in a kennel, or do you want her to sleep in a bed? Do you want her to be allowed up on the furniture? Do you want her to eat in a specific area? Will she be allowed to beg at table? How do you want her to greet guests?

It’s quite easy to train a puppy with specific goals in mind, and much more difficult to retrain an adult dog that has already formed strong habits. Time spent planning how you train your dog is time well spent. Imagine acquiring a German shepherd in the fall, only to discover in the spring that your six-month-old dog sheds her hair. If you’ve allowed your dog to lie on the couch, you’ll soon find that your couch is covered in dog hair.

Sit down with anyone else who has a vested interest in how your dog behaves and think about the rules you want to put in place. With a little foresight, you can come up with a training plan that will guide your choices and help you raise a happy, healthy dog that will be a much-loved part of the family for years to come.

What Does A Trained Dog Look Like?

Dogs learn through conditioning. Training your dog is essentially conditioning her responses so that she behaves the way you want her to. Have you ever shaken a bag of dog treats and had your dog run towards you because she knows she’s going to get a treat? That’s conditioning in action. If you always jingle the leash when you’re preparing to take your dog for a walk, your dog learns to come running whenever you jingle the leash.

To strengthen the power of your training and create lasting results, you need to tap into the power of conditioning.

Here’s an example of how conditioning works, using my Belgian shepherd, Twitch.

Every single time I start preparing her meal, I put a scoop of food into her bowl. The food makes a jingling sound, which alerts Twitch to the fact that she’s about to eat. She goes to her bed. I fill the bowl up with food, and then I go over to the sink, where I wet the food and set it down on the counter while it soaks. All this time, Twitch stays in her bed. Then I pour out the water, tell her to go to her crate, and she goes sprinting towards her crate.

Twitch does all this because right from the beginning I conditioned her responses. Whenever I prepared her food I would put her in her bed. After weeks of this she started going straight to her bed whenever she heard the food jingling in the bowl. Once I’d finished preparing the food, I told her to go to her crate, and she went running to the crate.

That’s a very strong conditioned response. Every single time she hears the food hit the bottom of the bowl, she understands that if she goes to her bed, she will soon get to go to her crate and, after that, she will get to eat. This approach only takes about forty-five seconds for breakfast and forty-five seconds for dinner, so a total of perhaps ninety seconds of training per day. The key is consistency. Twitch’s response comes from enacting the same routine every single day for months on end. She is over a year old now, and I’m still reinforcing the behavior.

The more training you do with your dog when she’s very young, the less training you have to do when she’s older. Before long, you will get to a point where your dog does things automatically, without even being told. You won’t even need to tell her to go to her bed or her crate. She’ll already be doing it.

That’s proactive training. The alternative is reactive training. When you train reactively, you wait to see what your dog does, and then you scramble to eliminate the behaviors you don’t want. It’s a lot harder, and it’s a lot more stressful, both for you and for your dog.

You can take your dog to a kennel and have her trained within two or three weeks, which is an incredibly short amount of time for a dog to learn everything you want her to learn. The downside to this approach is that a lot of corners will be cut. Your dog will be forced to do things she’s not conditioned to do. Reinforcing a conditioned response is much different then forcing a newbehavior.

I work a lot with people who have reached that stage. Typically, a client will tell me that the dog is reacting to other dogs or has tried to bite the client’s kid’s friend. It’s still very possible to recondition and rehabilitate the dog, but it’s so much more effective to get it right the first time.

Dogs Are Dogs, People Are People

One of the biggest obstacles to training dogs effectively is created by owners who try to humanize their dogs.

As a result, they’re reluctant to crate their dogs, to restrict them from running freely around the house, or to prevent the dog from being on the couch or the bed. At the extreme, I’ve seen people in downtown Boston dressing their dogs in sweaters and sunglasses, and pushing them around in strollers.

There’s nothing malicious about humanizing dogs, and we all do it to some extent. When you’re training a dog, however, it’s important to resist the temptation as much as possible. Dogs don’t learn like humans, and when you treat your dog like a human, you’ll confuse her and send the message that she’s more in control than she really is.

Then, when you want your dog to do something specific — for example, to get off the couch — you’ll find it very difficult to exert control. This is true even if you want your dog to be primarily your companion. Train your dog well for the first year or two of her life, and then you can relax the rules while remaining in control. You can invite your dog onto the couch and let her loose in the house, without fearing that she’ll be impossible to shift or that she’ll start ripping up everything in sight. Attempt to reverse engineer that situation, however, and you’ll run into trouble.

Some people resist crate training because they humanize their dogs and don’t want to cause them any pain. They fail to train their dogs while they are still puppies, and then they find themselves with an adult dog that drives them mad by doing things they don’t want them to do and won’t stay calm in a crate. Reconditioning the dog at that point is a far more painful process than crate training a puppy, and requires a lot of corrections. If you love your dog and don’t want to cause her pain, train her properly when she’s young.

Three Principles Of Successful Dog Training

In this book, we will cover three important components to training a happy and obedient dog: socialization, housebreaking, and motivation. Only after your dog’s motivation and drives are at their highest possible levels will you move on to more advanced and formal obedience training. At first, keep it simple.

Socialization is the single most important aspect of training. Socialize your dog as a puppy by exposing her to her environment and introducing her to all walks of life. In this way, you’ll have a well-rounded dog that feels confident and enjoys being around all kinds of people, is comfortable and happy going to new places, and likes the experience of being out and about.

I don’t care if your dog can sit, lie down, go to the crate on command, and get you a beer from the fridge. If your dog is unfriendly and aggressive towards people and/or other dogs, it turns dog ownership into a liability. Make training your dog to be sociable your number-one priority.

Your second priority is housebreaking. Again, I don’t care if your dog knows how to do a back flip. If she’s going to the bathroom upstairs in your room every single night, what’s that worth?

Your third priority, which you can begin working on simultaneously with socialization and housebreaking, is motivation.

Motivation is the key to teaching and correcting wanted and unwanted behaviors. It’s through the power of motivation that we’ll teach our dogs basic and advanced behaviors. People will often ask me, “Tom, what’s the hardest kind of dog to train?” My response is, “An unmotivated one.”

Obedience training through motivation may not require utilizing complex commands such as walking without a leash or being able to recall your dog from fifty yards away in highly stimulating environments. It’s more about maintaining some level of control over your dog. That will help to eliminate numerous unwelcome behaviors, and owning a dog becomes much more enjoyable when your dog is well behaved and under control. As discussed above, obedience training starts by developing your dog’s motivation before using it to train her.

Motivation needs to be balanced and can be broken down into positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is adding something to make the outcome of a behavior or command more likely to happen. This can be rewards or corrections. Negative reinforcement is the removal of something to make a behavior or command more likely to happen. Here are a few examples of how to motivate your dog.

Every dog instinctually needs food to survive, so you can use that to your advantage in your training. Dogs work for food. Also, the nice thing about food is that it’s very simple to manipulate a dog into different positions and behaviors. You can lure a dog on or off her bed. You can hold food right above her head and lure her into a sit. You can lure her downward and teach her how to lie down. Her motivation for food drives her to learn just about anything. I’ve had tremendous success with boiled chicken.

Another excellent way to motivate your dog is by using toys. All dogs have a natural instinct to catch things that move. If you have a tennis ball, for example, it stimulates them in a similar fashion as a small animal running away from them would. I prefer tug toys or a ball on a rope to incorporate toys for training.

Being social creatures, dogs thrive on being a part of something. I like to think praise has an element of camaraderie. You’re involved in the training process as much as your dog is, and when you use praise correctly, it conveys appreciation, acceptance, approval, and enthusiasm for what she’s doing or what she’s done. Even though all dogs love to be praised, I find it even more effective when it’s paired with either food or toys. It intensifies the reward and makes the experience of doing something correctly even more fun and desirable. Praise also helps you, the owner, become synonymous with the reward. Praise has to be believable and stimulate your dog, otherwise it’s not effective.

Motivation through negative reinforcement is one of the most misunderstood aspects of dog training. Often confused with “positive punishment,” negative reinforcement is simply the removal of something to make the outcome of a command or behavior more likely to be repeated on a more reliable basis.

Depending upon your goals for your dog, you may not use this concept at all. Negative reinforcement is solely used to enhance and proof train once a dog already has a very solid foundation in the behaviors you wish to advance, and you should never attempt to use this approach to teach your dog a new behavior. Many people buy a prong collar or an electric collar and think that as soon as they pop or shock their dog, their dog will do what they want, like a remote would a TV.

It doesn’t work like that. In fact, this is a horrible way to train a dog. Prong collars and electric collars are only effective when the dog understands the concept of negative reinforcement. Your dog needs to feel in control during this phase, which is why you should only layer it on top of behaviors the dog already knows extremely well.

The Choice Is Yours

To reiterate, there’s no such thing as not training your dog. Whatever you do, you’re conditioning your dog’s behavior from the moment you bring her home. Take the time to plan ahead and train your dog while she’s still a puppy, and you can set yourself up for years of joy. Make the mistake of thinking you can easily reverse unwanted behaviors when your dog’s two or three years old, and you’re asking for a lot of totally avoidable stress.

Over the following chapters, you’ll learn everything you need to know to set your home up for a new puppy, along with training techniques that will prepare you to train your pup proactively. Take them to heart, and you’ll set yourself on the road to having a dog that is fully potty trained, calm both in and out of the crate, sociable, and obedient — a dog that is a delight to you and to anyone else your dog comes into contact with.

Ignore the steps laid out here, and you may still get lucky. You may have a particularly good-natured dog. You may live in an area where obedience training isn’t a necessity. You may have a high tolerance for challenging behaviors. Alternatively, you may find that, when your dog is a year old, you can’t get her off the couch, she barks all night, and she reacts poorly around other dogs.

Take control of that process, and you won’t just have to hope for the best.

For more on your how to train your dog effectively, pick up A Little a Day Keeps the Dog Trainer Away: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising a Happy and Obedient Dog by Tom Roderick.