My Hart Dog Training

31/08/2024

Working with prey drive...

You don't need to use force..

You need to recognise their instinctual needs, and work with them.

Pinching a quote here ....
"Force has no place where there is need of skill... "The original quote is from Herodotus, 440 B.C.

🐾Video of one of my own dogs enjoying a retrieve training session with a very exciting distraction!🐾

31/08/2024

🐾One space available on our upcoming beginners ( Bronze Level ) UK Sniffer Dogs course!🐾

https://www.myhartdog.co.uk/beginner-bronze-level-scentwork/

26/08/2024

🐾🐾 Discover your dog’s inner detective with My Hart Dog Scentwork courses near Bristol! Whether you’re starting at Bronze level or honing advanced skills at Gold, we’ve got you covered.😎

🐾🐾 Exciting news! We have a couple of spots left in our September beginners courses, plus one space in our advanced Gold level.

🐾🐾 Want to learn more? Visit our website (www.myhartdog.co.uk) or drop me a message—I’m here to help you find the right course for your budding canine sleuth!🐾🐶

09/08/2024

Checking out a lovely location for a mock Gold level UKSD trial next week... thank you so much Tash Hutton 🐾🥰.

I just happened to have a few hides on me ( as you do.. 🤣) so had a little practice run with the gorgeous Holly and Teasel!🐾🥰🐶

Really looking forward to next Friday with the Gold Gang!

30/07/2024

Fabulous UK Sniffer Dog training session at the weekend with an Olympic theme! We also call Sundays "Spaniel Sunday!" 🤣Boy, do they keep you on your toes! 🐾🐶🐕

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9-fuNINqLg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

23/07/2024

Love this!

Socialisation should be more about gentle habituation at the puppy's pace - not a tick box exercise. Really like the blend of fun sniffy games that immerse the pup in a rewarding activity, mindulness in action! 🥰🐾😍

18/07/2024

Fabulous one to one with the gorgeous Sky and owner - what a team! 🐶🥳

Sky loves cheese as her "go to" food reward - but absolutely adores her bungee ball from Tug-E-Nuff as her ultimate reward. Spot the twinkle in her eye!

Do you use toys as rewards, and what are your dogs favourite?😍🐶🥎⚽️

15/07/2024

🐶🐶NEW dates for our UK Sniffer Dog Bronze course released in September! 🐶🐶

Plus..

🐾Sniffer club
🐾Truffle hunting Part 2 - for those who have attended Part 1.
🐾Find my Keys workshop coming soon!

https://www.myhartdog.co.uk/beginner-bronze-level-scentwork/

15/07/2024

Great work from Team UK Sniffer Dogs! 🎉👏👏

09/07/2024

🧯Advance warning!🧯

My Hart Dog Training and My Hart Dog Courses will be be off-line over the next few days as I merge both the websites. Fingers crossed they don't both go P**F! in a puff of smoke!🤣🤣

26/05/2024

🐾🐾 Spring UK Sniffer courses Update!🐾🐾

🐶 2 spaces left on our 6 week UK Sniffer Course BRONZE ( beginner level ) starting 8th June

🐶 FULL - UK Sniffer course Silver ( 30th June)

🐶 FULL - UK Sniffer course Gold ( 5th July)

🐶Sniffer Club will be running throughout June, Sunday morning at 9.30am- booking link will be updated later today! These are flexible training sessions for those who have completed Bronze, Silver or Gold. odour is Kong or Gunoil

🐶 Truffle workshop Part 2 - 10am to 12pm 18th August, for those who have attended the first workshop or are already on truffle oil. Booking link out later.

https://www.myhartdogcourses.co.uk/courses/8th-june-uk-sniffer-dogs-bronze-beginner-6-week-course

22/05/2024

🐾Oooh! Great new series of mini lunchtime lives covering some really useful doggy tips in bite-sized chunks! 🐾

We're starting off a new mini-series of lunchtime lives... chatting about anything from introducing your dog to guests in your home to how to help them get better rest.

Tomorrow - over on Instagram () Caroline will be walking you through her recent introductions of her own dog with a friend's new rescue. The strategies she used to ensure that the first meeting went off on the best paw. Come and give us a follow to be notified when we go live: instagram.com/barketplace

And just in case you're not on 'the gram' 🤦‍♀️, we'll share the replay here when it's ready.

21/05/2024

Great observations by the Glasgow Dog Trainer, It is also good practice to be mindful of our body posture, tension on the lead and how this might influence our dogs when searching.🐶🐶

14/05/2024

🐾🐾Truffle Fun at Sniffer Club!🐾🐾

Fabulous morning with Holly, Milton, Nina, Syd and Carla!🥰

We overran by TWO HOURS! Just having the best fun truffle hunting in beautiful weather. OK.. it wasn't real truffles but who cares?

By the end of the morning we were burying the truffle odour - and asking the dogs to find it. A big lesson for me is to mark where I buried the fake truffle!!🤣🤣Luckily we had such good sniffers it wasn't a problem.🥳🥳

Well done everyone you were amazing! Can't wait for part 2!

11/05/2024

Absolutely this! 🙏

Dogs and humans co-evolved, which means we have a very sophisticated system of collaboration and communication. Trouble is that somewhere along the way, humans seem to have forgotten all about it. Consequently, we obsess with getting dogs and all other animals to do our bidding through training. This is so intense that we now want them to “speak to us” in English, so we train them to use OUR words to talk to us. The message seems to be, “speak our language, else we will not bother”. But dogs DO talk to us in their own way and if we stopped being so anthropocentric in our approach, we may hear a lot of what they have to say.

For instance, dogs often let us know that they value our opinion on things. Trouble is, because we are so oblivious to their communication, we ignore it and do not provide them the input they seek. Consequently they end up having to deal with difficult situations without our support. They may feel overwhelmed in doing so and thus earn the label of a “problematic dog”.

But if we got out of our own heads and learnt to listen, we may see that communication is easier than we think it is. Once we engage in that dialogue with them, we may realise what they need to hear from us and we may be able to support them adequately.

This is why, our focus at BHARCS is this communication…untrained communication that is the hallmark of this interspecies entanglement between human and dog. If you are someone who likes exploring the richness of this entanglement, then you’ve come to the right place. Explore our resources and consider signing up for Canine Essential 101, our flagship workshop that teaches you everything you need to know about the BHARCS way.

29/04/2024

Well done Clara and Hollly! Super bag search demonstrating some lovely independent sniffing!

27/04/2024

🐶🐶Last night UK Sniffer Dog Bronze level - Week 3 and bag searches with a lovely mix of puppies and older dogs in class!🐶🐶

Such an absolute pleasure to see these teams really working together, beautiful handling, lovely sniffing and even at week 3 with lovely odour recognition coming along!

Young Woody our young chocoolate chonk made a guest appearance, demonstrating adding duration to an indication - bless him he was such a good boy! He later enjoyed some lovely play with puppy Spud at the end!🥰🥰

Well done to everyone and soooo looking forward to next week! 🥳🥳

25/04/2024

🐾🐾Sniffer club🐾🐾 - Open to teams who have completed either Bronze level or Silver level UK Sniffer Dog courses.

🐶Four week block starts Sunday 28th April bright eyed and bushy tailed at 9.30am!

🐶Attend one class or all four! 🥳

🐶We start with a fun theme!

🐾🐾LINK to book in comments!🐾🐾

24/04/2024

🐶 Love this infographic by Dogs Disclosed. So interesting for us to "see" the world as our dogs do from a visual perspective.

We know how amazing their noses are! Interesting to see how the RED KONG we use so much in various Scentwork activities, literally fades into the background, this encourages dogs to search with their nose and not their eyes.

WHAT COLOURS DO DOGS SEE?
Contrary to popular belief, dogs are not colour blind.

A dog’s visual world is certainly not as vibrantly colourful as ours, but they do see a range of yellow, grey and blue shades and have better night and peripheral vision than we do.

Colour is interpreted and discerned by nerve cells in the eyes. The retina has two main types of cells called rods, which detect light levels and motion and cones which differentiate colour.

A human’s eyes have three types of cones which can identify combinations of red, blue, and green.

Dogs have only two types of cones that are only able to discern shades of blue, yellow and grey – this perception of colour is called dichromatic vision.

An ophthalmology professor at the University of Washington discovered that dogs could see blues and yellows but not reds and greens. This information would have been confirmed by anatomical investigation of a dog’s eye.

It would make more sense if manufacturers of dog toys would take a dog’s colour spectrum into account when producing dog toys.

Toys are usually made to visually appeal to people, not dogs.

Shades of yellow, grey or blue are far more appealing to your dog than a bright shade of red or another colour.

23/04/2024

With a working dog when we understand what drives and motivates them, then we can work with them not against them which can cause conflict and friction in our relationship 🐾🐾

ORIENT > EYE > STALK > CHASE > GRAB-BITE > KILL-BITE > DISSECT > CONSUME

Migrate, track/trail, orient, eye, stalk, chase/herd, grab bite, kill bite, carry (retrieve), guard, dissect, consume.

This is the hunting pattern we have enhanced for domestic dogs through selective breeding. We have enhanced parts of these patterns and arrested others. For example, a Border Collie needs to herd but not bite, whereas heelers, corgis, might herd (chase) by biting at the feet of the cattle to keep them moving.

When we understand this sequence deeply, we can start to train our dogs through various aspects of it without conflict. We can also reduce the intensity of some parts of the sequence by asking the dog to repeat the earlier part - for example, my dog Logan would hold/carry and guard toys once he had them so I taught him to search for multiple toys in succession to reduce the perceived value of the one toy. This has worked extremely well over the years I've had him.

I was working with this young Malinois yesterday. We were playing with a ball (chase, grab, carry and repeat) at low intensity. We then played tug (grab bite, kill bite, carry). During the session, because of the way he had previously learned (no fault to the fella who lives with him, he's learning too and doing brilliantly), he then tripped into the guard part of the sequence. When this happens and we can't move him back to an earlier stage (search, chase) or to the end part (consume) he can get stuck in this place (I know this from experience with Logan).

What did we do? We waited. We took a breath. We waited some more. We relaxed, and offered him water. We didn't try to take the toy from him. We waited it out. Guess what happened? He started to relax. When he did so, we offered him treats. He didn't take them initially, so we waited a little longer. Then he started relaxing more, took some more food, we moved him away from the toy and the most important part - we did not make a grab for the toy, we pretended it wasn't there. When we saw him start to relax and enjoy being petted, we led him a little further away, and I calmly picked up the toy and put it away.

When we don't understand this well enough, or have the skills to implement it, this leads to imbecilic comments like "tRy gIvINg HiM a TreaT wHeN he's cHASinG a rAbbIt". Yeah, we don't do that, that's not how it works. When we don't know how to do it we are left with becoming more adversarial, harsher, more aversive, turning up the shock on the shock collar, harder corrections on the prong collar etc. When we do understand this and take time and patience to teach it, we get good results, positively, without conflict.

Lastly, the closer the behaviours are in the sequence, the harder they are to separate without practice. If we react, rather than respond, we dive on top of our cocker spaniel puppy or young retriever and prize or yank and item out of their mouth (carry/retrieve) it's much easier for them to trip into the guarding part. We end up training "resource guarding" by accident.

This can be done, it takes intelligence, kindness and compassion for both yourself and your dog as learners. We deserve that, so do our dogs.

22/04/2024

Well done to all the UK Sniffer Dog Silver graduates from last night! We finished the 6 week course on a high with a mock trial, with every team finding all the hides! 🐾🐾

Well done to Mya, Cinders and Charlie! You nailed it! 🥳🥳

Next UK Silver course Sunday morning at 9.30am on the 30th June at our lovely dog training barn. Training sessions are both inside and out.

🤩🐾 TWO spaces left! 🐾🤩

UK Sniffer Dogs SILVER ( progressive level ) Scent detection 6 week course on 2 odours, Gunoil and Kong - Thornbury, near Bristol

04/04/2024

🥳Fabulous one to one training session today with the lovely Sky and her amazing owner! Absolutely nailed the active retrieve on catnip, with a super hand delivery! Well done! 🥳🥳👏👏

Today we were working on hand delivery of a retrieve article - backchaining with a paint roller to develop the hand delivery, before progressing to hiding the catnip infused felt squirrels.

I use paint rollers because they are a nice size, with no flappy or interesting bits attached. Sky however, was completely obsessed by the paint rollers! Throughout the whole session kept one beady eye on the box where I kept them 🤣🤣.This prompted an interesting conversation about the "value" of the retrieve article, in Sky's case, the rollers held HUGE value! So, we decided to finish the training session on a high, and let her retreive a whole box of them which she loved!

Who needs expensive toys when you can buy cheap paint rollers from B&Q for a few pounds each!😁😁

Today Sky really made me think about motivation and play..and to always to think about reinforcement from the dogs perspective...🥰🥰

03/04/2024

🐾Walking the gang of 6 this morning - still feels strange to say 6 instead of 7, after we lost Casper a month ago. He was the grand age of 15 years young and such a wonderful, incorrigible character. He didn't really understand dog training that much, I think he thought it was a fad -and eventually I would give up! Fur dummies were for chewing, and anything with feathers on he took to our nextdoors garden to consume in peace and quiet. Strangers and BMWs were for chasing! 🤣🤣

Casper taught me more than any trainer, book or online course. He showed me the importance of having daily conversations, making the effort to really understand our dogs, and respect the honesty of their canine dialogue. The value of autonomy with guiding boundaries ( closed gate - long line! 😁)

Here is the gang on their morning bimble. Otter ( thats her at the start of the video! 😍😍) Bramble, River, Woody, Teasel and Benson now the oldest at 11 years old.🥰🥰

02/04/2024

Did you know?? It is absolutely OK to sometimes not walk your dog.

I am a great fan of recognising when your dog ( and you..) just need a break from the stress of walking in a public place. That doesn't mean not doing stuff together, actually you will probably end up doing more fun stuff together for example Scentwork round the garden or inside.

If you enjoy a good podcast, check out https://thepawpost.co.uk/news/niki-french-dont-walk-dog/ with the amazing Niki French! 😍🐾🐾

31/03/2024

Roll on Spring! 🐣🐣🤣🤣🐾

Anyone else sooo fed up of the mud and rain?🌧🌧 - apart from Benson our choccy lab who loves a muddly puddle! 🤣🤣

24/03/2024

🐾Fantastic time at Sniffer Club this morning! We had a little Easter themed competition with 2 teams 🥳 - not to say anyone got competitive! 🤣🤣It was great fun, and special thanks to Bethan for the gorgeous cake! 🍰🍰

Well done to everyone! I really enjoyed watching some super searching and lovely handling! 😍🥳🐾🤩

23/03/2024

🥚 Getting ready for our Easter-themed Scentwork games at Sniffer Club tommorrow morning!🐰✨ Here's a sneak peek behind the scenes as we prepare for the final week of Sniffer Club, with an Eggcellent Easter twist! 🌸🥚