Puppy imprinting- giving pups an introduction to new activities, stimuli and environments to build a confident and mentally sound dog. #eriedogco #puppyimprinting #puppytraining #beproactive #dogtraining #eriecolorado
Blow out for the Hoodster! When your dog trusts you, anything is possible! He’s trained to accept the blow drier and this drastically cuts down on his shedding and my vacuuming! Good boy, Hood! #eriedogco #eriecolorado #seniordogsrule #keepcalmandtrainon #harryhood #goodabouthood
Visual tracking impacts Learning Capacity
Although a scruffy haircut is cute- when it’s impairing a young dog’s vision, this will impact their visual tracking, which affects their coordination, their balance, their movement, their body awareness, the frequency of startle responses and impairs their communication.
This deficit is what we call a “LOW Proprioceptive Quotient.”
Why is this important? Well, Low Proprioception means the dog’s body and mind are NOT connected. And this creates a deficit in their LEARNING CAPACITY.
A dog’s learning capacity is their ability to learn new information, absorb and retain new information, sequence, generalize, extrapolate and problem solve.
To summarize, problems within the physical structure and deficiencies in the dog’s movement will directly affect the dog’s focus, engagement, and overall performance and attitude. THIS IS WHY VISION IS MASSIVELY IMPORTANT!!!
So, if I have a dog with a low learning capacity that means I need to work on building their proprioception. In some cases, it means that they need their nails trimmed to improve movement and a haircut so that they can see.
I always want to be looking at the entire dog and making sure that they are set up for success.
I’ve been working on visual tracking for 10 days with minimal success, so I urged the owners to let me trim his face. Plus, he is very uncooperative for grooming and I wanted to train him for that activity, too. I know the owners weren’t too thrilled with the face trimming I gave him during puppy training, but I again urged the importance of how vision affects his learning and his development, and if we really want the best for the dog, we have to remove the obstacles of learning.
I’ve been working on Brewster’s visual tracking to CATCH A TREAT for 10 days now and he hasn’t caught one piece. Not one. And with a haircut, immediately he’s catching 20 treats in row. Check out these before haircut and after videos of catching treats.
Now that he has visual trackin
Although a scruffy haircut is cute- when it’s impairing a young dog’s vision, this will impact their visual tracking, which affects their coordination, their balance, their movement, their body awareness, the frequency of startle responses and impairs their communication.
This deficit is what we call a “LOW Proprioceptive Quotient.”
Why is this important? Well, Low Proprioception means the dog’s body and mind are NOT connected. And this creates a deficit in their LEARNING CAPACITY.
A dog’s learning capacity is their ability to learn new information, absorb and retain new information, sequence, generalize, extrapolate and problem solve.
To summarize, problems within the physical structure and deficiencies in the dog’s movement will directly affect the dog’s focus, engagement, and overall performance and attitude. THIS IS WHY VISION IS MASSIVELY IMPORTANT!!!
So, if I have a dog with a low learning capacity that means I need to work on building their proprioception. In some cases, it means that they need their nails trimmed to improve movement and a haircut so that they can see.
I always want to be looking at the entire dog and making sure that they are set up for success.
I’ve been working on visual tracking for 10 days with minimal success, so I urged the owners to let me trim his face. Plus, he is very uncooperative for grooming and I wanted to train him for that activity, too. I know the owners weren’t too thrilled with the face trimming I gave him during puppy training, but I again urged the importance of how vision affects his learning and his development, and if we really want the best for the dog, we have to remove the obstacles of learning.
I’ve been working on Brewster’s visual tracking to CATCH A TREAT for 10 days now and he hasn’t caught one piece. Not one. And with a haircut, immediately he’s catching 20 treats in row. Check out these before haircut and after videos of catching treats.
Now that he has visual trackin
Generalizing the Heel command while building proprioception and body awareness. Practicing left turns into the dog will slow him down and ensure he knows how to reverse and hop back into heel position.
#eriedogco #eriecolorado #looseleashwalking #heelcommand #boardandtrain #bernadoodle
Dopamine drives behavior
Dopamine drives behavior!
So often, people allow their puppies to drag them to every stranger and jump on the person, and once the dog is bigger and stronger, they suddenly want to extinguish this behavior they have been allowing and reinforcing.
It can take a lot of work to break this habit because there is a big dopamine dump that happens every single time the puppy practices this, and DOPAMINE DRIVES BEHAVIOR!!
Puppies don’t grow out of this behavior… they grow into it. So it’s best not to create a bad habit of a competing reinforcer that we’ll have to extinguish later. Instead of changing the rules on the dog, we start by establishing the puppy rules based on what we want our adult dog to be doing. And the rule is that our dogs need permission to go greet a person or dog.
So how do we shape this behavior- I like to back up and recall the dog. And reward her with praise and food. It’s also a perfect opportunity to build muscle memory for the U-turn flip with recall, because let’s face it- when you need your dog to come when called, they’re probably running away from you! #eriedogco #eriecolorado #puppytraining #proactivetraining
