Puppy School Graduation 🎓Congratulations to our puppy teams! Super proud of the progress you have all made 🌟 Can’t wait to see you all back for level 2 and some more fun 💙🐾
#dogtraining #enrichment #dogsofinsta #happydogs
Beautiful Communication…
There is so much beautiful communication taking place in this video between Tilly and her Mum 🥹
Tilly doesn’t always like to be touched and historically would escalate her behaviour to prevent/stop people from touching her when she just wanted to be left alone 🦈 🦷
With a few little adjustments to
how Tilly’s family physically interact with her she has now learnt that she has some autonomy over how and when she is patted and that she doesn’t need to use her teeth to say no. The beautiful result of that is this video.
Tilly’s family ask her when she wants to be petted. If she wants some lovin she’ll let them know and if she doesn’t, she now chooses a very different behaviour to say ‘no thank you’ and Tilly’s incredible parents are more than happy to accomodate that choice.
You’ll notice her Mum stops petting every few seconds to check Tilly is still enjoying the interaction and Tilly is using her behaviour beautifully to say ‘more please’.
I’m so proud of this team and how far they have come in a relatively short space of time. They are so in-tune with the subtle behaviours their girl shows and incredibly dedicated to helping her feel happier day to day.
Can you guys adopt me too now please? 😁
#dogtraining #dogbehaviour #aggression #dogs
Happy first, training second
It’s easy to get a bit too focussed on training and ‘obedience’ when it comes to our dogs if we’re struggling with their behaviour.
But most of the time it can be much more beneficial to focus on our relationship with our animals and finding ways to help them feel happier as a priority.
It’s a lot easier to change behaviour when a dog is happy and having all of their needs met 😉
Thanks so much to @k9fundamentals for giving Willow and I the chance to just have some fun today 🐾
One of my favourite sounds is that of a dog really getting to use her nose 👃😍
What do you do when you catch your dog doing something they are not supposed to?
What do you do when you catch your dog doing something they are not supposed to?
Is it really difficult to interrupt them and get them back with you? Sometimes even stressful?
I get it. Here’s a few things that help with Roo when she’s doing something I’d rather she didn’t (like digging up all the veggies Dad spent ages planting 😬)
The first thing we do is prioritise management A LOT. That means Roo doesn’t just get left to practice those 🙄 things when we’re not around.
We’ve taught her a really solid recall should management fail and to enable us to give her more freedom.
We make a conscious effort to maintain important cues (such as recall) by giving her something she loves when she performs the behaviour associated with that cue. For example if she recalls in from the the garden I’ll grab a little treat from the tub by the door. Easy as.
Because Roo has a really big reinforcement history for these behaviours, it means it’s much more likely that if she’s doing something I don’t want to her to do (but something she enjoys)I stand a better chance at getting her to come away without any stress or big feelings for either of us.
The next thing I do is consider, what that behaviour she did was telling me? If I look at this particular example it’s that she’s probably in need of some extra enrichment today.
So to meet that need I might scatter her breakfast around the garden and in her digging pit to give her an opportunity to forage for food and dig.
Then I might give her a card board box to kill so she can practice some of her natural hunting behaviours such as biting, shaking, and dissecting. I’ll stay with her while she does this though so I can cheer her on and make sure she doesn’t try and ingest any of it (yep she’s one of those 😅). She might get another little scatter of treats after that.
Then we might have a play session where she gets to practice lots of stalking, chasing and biting again. We’ll make it
Training isn’t always just about training 😁
#dogtraining
𝙏𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙞𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙘𝙚𝙧𝙩𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙭𝙩𝙨 𝙞𝙨 𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙝𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙙𝙤𝙜
For Roo I’ve created the habit of voluntarily checking in with me, especially if she’s starting to feel a bit spicy and there’s things that may dare to move around her (insubordinate 🦆 trying to get out of theirs rows! How dare they, right Roo?).
We do this ‘habit’ pretty much every time we are out walking and even when we’re not. The habit I’ve created for Roo is each time something new changes in the environment run back to me instead of getting your knickers in a twist and telling everyone off 👮♀️
𝙏𝙞𝙥𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝘾𝙝𝙤𝙞𝙘𝙚𝙨…
𝙄𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚’𝙨 𝙖 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮’𝙡𝙡 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙞𝙩 𝙬𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜, 𝙥𝙪𝙩 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙣 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙥𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢 𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙩 𝙬𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜 🙅🏼♀️
For example if there’s a chance your dog will blow off your recall use a longline while you’re teaching them what to do instead.
𝙐𝙨𝙚 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙨 𝙫𝙖𝙡𝙪𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙣𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙘𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙝𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙩 🥓⚽️as much as possible. If you want that behaviour strong you will make your job so much easier if your dog knows ‘this cue/behaviour = good sh*t’. All the time, not just when you give up calling them in and wave the treat bag at the back door (no j
Teaching a dog to self disengage from a trigger does not need to look exciting, dramatic or even TikTok ♥️ worthy.
In fact if we are setting a dog up for success it usually looks pretty bloody boring. Like this video 😂
But, there is so much going on here and so many little choices being made by me (and Willow) that went into making it pretty bloody boring.
This session was only a minute but I’ve slowed it down to show just a few of the training decisions that were made here.
The trigger Willow is looking at is 8 excited, off leash Border Collies that had just exploded out of the back of a Ute onto the field we were working in. (I know right?! 💩 Worst nightmare!😂)
After using our ‘let’s go’ cue to get distance I was able to see these Collies were actually under incredible control, none of them had any interest in us and the owner kept a great distance from us.
More importantly I was able to see Willow. Was she coping? Taking food? Able to play? Yes. In fact she was at that sweet spot where she’s under threshold but just close enough to it that it’s a little bit difficult.
I don’t have a dramatic before video. I work really hard to ensure my clients don’t go over that threshold. And if something happens and they do, all of my focus is on trying to help them out of that situation.
There are always so many things to consider to helping dogs with big feelings but the training choices we make when we are considering the physical and emotional well being of the dog rarely make for very dramatic or ‘entertaining’ viewing.
But for us, this session was huge and there were so many wins. Well done Willow you absolute babe 🐾
#DogTraining #reactivity #dogs
Living with a high drive dog with behaviour challenges…
I recently looked back at this video from last year and came away with a few thoughts.
Firstly how far Roo has come. She’s 3 now and on the other side of adolescence. She’s sooo much easier to co-exist in semi harmony with now😅
But that doesn’t mean training with her is over.
She’s the kind of dog that will likely need close to lifelong “training” or some form of management. But this is not because she needs fixing or because I want her to be anything other than the incredible dog she is.
It’s because she needs it. I need it. Our relationship needs it. We are very similar in that sense. We both need our brains exercising or we start to get up to mischief 😅
The other thing that struck me was how much these unflashy tricks actually play in my day to day life in living with a dog that was so not designed for this modern pet dog life.
All of these cues that Roo knows really well now (and has been paid handsomely for) have been practiced a lot, just to give us both a chance to keep our brains sharp.
But they’ve been practiced a lot when we don’t need them, in every day life and I still choose to give Roo something yum or fun for doing them. Why? Because they allow us to live together with as little conflict as possible. Sometimes the things she wants to do have potential to put hers or my safety at risk. These cues often provide us a middle ground that allows us to navigate those situations especially when the 💩 has potential to hit the fan.
Here are just a few of the ways these tricks help us avoid pissing each other off in daily life:
🏠 🧠
I need you not to eat that thing I just dropped on the floor “in your crate”. Great now you get a handful of treats in the crate away from the thing while I pick it up. Then we’re gonna go play because ‘what a legend’.
I need you to move over here … “touch”. Great, here’s a treat now I can weigh you at the vets
“That dog needs training”
I see this comment on various Facebook threads so often and it always makes my eye twitch a little.
There’s a few reasons it makes me look like I’ve just sucked on a lemon or sat on my keys.
Yes, very often the dog in the video would likely benefit from good training where the quality of life of the dog and the owner is prioritised. But this comment irks me because it’s often accompanied with very questionable advice or other statements that show a limited understanding of canine behaviour and the multiple factors that can and do have an impact on how our dogs behave.
It also perpetuates the myth that training just ‘fixes’ everything (often with the expectation this happens in just a couple of sessions).
Many people would look at snapshots of Roo’s behaviour and say “that dog needs training”. Take this video of me doing my post surgery re-hab for example.
Many would believe that a dog who thinks it’s okay to start trying to bite (however gently) Mum’s foot is not acceptable. Before I became a trainer I too would have believed that and that training would ‘fix’ this.
Roo isn’t doing this because she ‘thinks it’s okay’ or because she’s not had any training.
She’s had a lot of training and in many situations is now able to do something other than what multiple systems in her body are telling her to do. Herd that sh*t! (or get frustrated for not being able to do so).
The reality is, Roo is always going to be triggered by movement. She is genetically wired to be responsive to it or things in her environment and to use her behaviour to impact that movement.
Training has given me the tool of being able to ask Roo to do something else.
Training doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be new things that she hasn’t experienced before and her brain defaults to what she was designed to do. Training isn’t going to take that away. The next time I do my re-hab I’ll ask her onto her bed befor
Mr Marvin made some brilliant progress this week 😍
He had started showing some early signs of resource guarding so (rather than letting that become a bigger issue) his awesome Mum & Dad got straight in touch so we could do something about it.
We immediately put a management plan in place so Marvin didn’t continue rehearsing that behaviour and to keep everyone safe. Then we met up and went through some important things to be aware of about resource guarding. We also introduced him to a switch out game so that he starts to learn how to swap the valuable stuff and that no one is just going to take things away from him.
As you can see it also turned out to be a mega fun and enriching game for this wee dude 😁 it’s going to be really helpful to give him lots of practice for swapping toys etc if Mum and Dad ever need to take stuff off him for safety reasons. Well done team! 👏
#dogtraining #resourceguarding
GRYYFFINDOOOOORRRRR! 🧙♂️ 😂
(Her celebration dance will forever be my favourite thing)
When you’re on a date but the chat is laaaaaame 😂🙋🏼♀️
#okaybye
#dogtraining
The more I get to know my dog the more I realise how similar we are. Mainly that we both have a flare for the dramatic 😅
Silliness aside, I love trick training for so many reasons. Aside from it being so much fun, there are countless benefits and it can have a really positive impact on our dog’s behaviour and our relationship with them.
Here are just a few reasons why teaching new, fun tricks can be beneficial to your training journey with your dog:
✅ it can help us understand the importance of setting up our environment with few distractions while our dog is learning
✅ it can give us excellent insight into how much work goes into training a new behaviour to fluency and in turn understand why behaviour modification can often take longer than we might expect
✅ it’s an excellent way to practice breaking down behaviour into small, achievable steps and reinforcing those steps with something our dog loves
✅ it enables us to practice our mechanics and timing. That stuff is important, when we are dealing with more serious behaviours especially
✅ it allows us to meet needs that our dog may not necessarily be having met which will have a positive impact on their behaviour challenges and overall well being
✅ it allows us to get to know and understand our dogs on a much deeper level. What makes them tick, how they move and what things they find harder than others
✅ you will often find your dog naturally becomes more attentive to you as they learn that working with you provides a high rate of reinforcement and is enjoyable
✅ you will have a fun alternative behaviour that your dogs can do when they might be about to do something we’d rather they didn’t or if we may need them to focus on us for a moment
But most importantly it feels good. For the unique individuals at both ends of the leash, and feeling good makes us happy. If our dogs feel happy, their behaviour often improves alongside it 😊🐾
#dogtraining #dontshootthedog
Roo is the kind of dog that’s always going to be ‘a little bit spicy’ about handling
🌶 🖐
If I’d had her from a pup she may be a little less spicy (and I can’t emphasise enough how important teaching your puppies to be more comfortable with handling is).
But ultimately (for Roo at least) training is only ever going to get us so far. She’s naturally very spacially aware and very sensitive to people being all up in her grill.
She has a pretty precise list of how and when she is to be touched and by whom. It’s part of her temperament and part of who she is.
Rather than fighting this or resorting to harsher methods that could risk our relationship or creating bigger issues, I accept this about her fully. Not only that, I respect it and I understand it. I’m not entirely dissimilar in my own feelings when it comes to medical procedures. But I have the luxury of verbal communication with all involved and can articulate how I’m feeling and when I may need a break. Roo doesn’t have that luxury.
So we work really hard to help Roo feel a little better about handling or at least increase her tolerance of it. We do some form of handling training every day. Whether that’s co-operative harnessing, putting on her collars and leashes, collar grabs or sessions like this where we have no goal other than to take our time and slowly work on areas she’s still (and may always be) sensitive about.
Most dogs don’t ‘love’ handling. A lot of dogs either tolerate it or have the same big feelings as Roo but their stress may present as a flight or freeze response.
To expect Roo to ever ‘enjoy’ handling or that training will just ‘fix’ this issue is a pretty unrealistic expectation. She’s just not built that way. And early exposure and experiences on top of temperament count for a lot.
That doesn’t mean there’s no point working on this. We still have huge wins. Like last week when Roo cut her leg and allowed me to clean it co-operative
Are your pets and pats damaging your training? 🤔
Now before you all come at me, I’m not one of those trainers who advocates for withholding affection from their dogs because your dogs “need to know who’s boss”. Just no.
But I am a trainer who encourages owners to look at what your dog is actually doing when you physically interact with them in different contexts.
With my first puppy I remember being told countless times “when she does something right, give her a pat and tell her she’s a good girl”. You’d be totally forgiven for falling into this trap too. We did and we struggled through training A LOT.
Fast forward a few years (just a few, I’m only 21 🤥😂) I’m now lucky to have Roo.
Roo is the kind of dog that does not find a good old pat reinforcing. In fact, in many contexts she would find physical touch incredibly aversive and punishing.
If I were to recall Roo and she came bombing back over to me and all I had to offer was a heavy handed pat she would flip into the air like a shark breaking the surface and very quickly put some distance between myself and her. If I did that more than once
after recalling Roo then her recall would VERY quickly fall apart and she’d stop coming back. I would have (without realising) punished the very behaviour I was trying to train. It’s also very likely that cue would never be quite as ‘effective’ again because it now means something yucky for Roo.
I’ve seen other dogs being trained to “wait” who have got the ‘good girl’ pat for doing well and then instantly moved away because in that moment, being touched was not only punishing, it was something they wanted to actively avoid.
I have met a few dogs who find touch incredibly reinforcing. But it is rare to find a dog for whom touch is truly reinforcing and in every scenario.
It is our dogs that get to decide what is reinforcing and what is punishing. If we can accept that, we find a key to unlocking a really cool world that dee
Like a recall, ‘leave it’ can be a really easy cue to poison or allow to deteriorate.
Especially when we only use it to angrily call our dogs away from things they would much rather be doing. Quite often we also haven’t actually taught them how to ‘leave’ something and built a solid reinforcement history for them doing so.
For Roo ‘leave that’ is a really important cue. Because of her tendency to resource guard new and novel things we’ve made ‘leave that’ a very heavily reinforced behaviour in Roo’s repertoire for ‘emergencies’.
We practice every day when we don’t actually need it and on really boring things that are not likely to be much competition for Roo’s attention.
The actual behaviour we’ve trained Roo to associate with her ‘leave that’ cue is to stop what she’s doing and come to me as I move away. This means we have been able to generalise it to many different scenarios and things that happen in her day to day life. This equals lots and lots of practice for her at getting it right and getting ‘all the good stuff’ for doing so.
Because we’ve made it very difficult for Roo to make a mistake while learning her ‘leave that’ cue and increased the difficulty very gradually, she finds it much easier to respond to this cue in situations she would have really struggled with previously.
It’s a cue that I will forever choose to reinforce with something Roo really enjoys, wherever humanly possible because (like her recall) it can be a life saver.
Watch to the end to enjoy Roo’s determination to go through her favourite tunnel which today was ‘out of service’ 😂😂
