Hearing Dog Alerting: Soundwork online

02/08/2024

Going through old notes...here is one.

Starting out right with new dog training students:

The students might not be receptive to your different methods in the beginning, because they remember their other dogs as being healthy and well behaved. Their experience can't be denied without causing confrontation.

Once they respect you, they will listen.

Concentrate on praising every good thing they are doing, and point out every time the dog is looking at them, looking confident, or looking happy. Show them that you are noticing how great their dog is. Find the good points about each dog.

If neccessary, point out what the dog Is NOT doing ("Wow, he is not afraid of the other dogs at all! So many dogs are anxious at the first class". ) You are genuinely pointing out good things that the owner might have been taking for granted about their dog. If they are things the owner already knew, then you are showing that you appreciate their dogs good qualities, just like they do.

When I was a student in beginning OB classes, EVERY statement from the trainer had huge impact and meaning. i never forgot these statements, which either hurt my feelings, or I took as pronouncements from a deity on high. I interpreted more than what was probably meant. As the instructor, your mildest criticism might be remembered as a lifetime humiliation by a student. Or they will remember that you showed disrespect for their lifetime of owning dogs.

Prove to them that you understand their dog, and what and why it is doing things, give them the credit they deserve for raising other dogs, and they will start to want to learn more ways of doing things.

02/08/2024

What training skills do students learn in our Soundwork courses?

Learn The Skills You Need To Succeed

Discovering your dog's motivations.

Focusing those motivations to become intense, so your dog loves training.

Discovering and focusing your own motivations, so you will eagerly look forward to your training!

Reading and predicting dog behavior.

Analyzing problems in training.

Keeping your attitude positive and encouraging.

Empathizing with your dogs feelings.

Conditioning an association between a sound and food or other reward.

Manipulating your environment to make alerting easy for your dog.

Teaching any behavior.

Learning the difference between Training a SKILL, versus training a DESIRE to perform the skill.

Combining skills and desire, to create an enthusiastic canine sound-seeking alerting missile!!!

Teaching complex behavior chains.

Teaching initiative.

Teaching creative disobedience.

Teaching a dog to generalize easily to new sounds and situations.

Teaching a dog to alert to sounds and situations it has never been trained for.

Being a cheerleader and infusing energy into your dogs training. Then, in later training, switching to being passive and allowing the dog to figure things out.

Phasing out most food rewards and substituting your social relationship as a reward.

Learning the situations in which food rewards need to be used temporarily or permanently.

Solving family member issues such as jealousy of the dog, denial of the owners need for a Hearing Dog, and resistance to change.

Helping jealous children become great trainers and helpers!

Becoming a solid, bonded team!!

18/07/2024

DNA please!
I live in Bali and follow dogs around. I observe behavior and photograph them. I love the Bali Heritage Dogs and am writing a book about them.

I'd love to learn about your DNA results for Bali Dogs and mixes. It helps me figure out how the ancestral types looked.

I want to help preserve this valuable and amazing dog, and more information is so helpful! Not just DNA, but learning about their unique temperament and personality.

Thank you so much!

01/05/2024

WAKE UP! COURSE STARTING JUNE 1ST!

Wake-Up Alerts Course:

For Service Dogs, Hearing Dogs, and pets!

-Your dog will learn techniques to wake you up for alarms or other alerts. It will be happily persistent, and not let you go back to sleep.

-Train the dog to wake you to your essential sounds. If you have taken Soundwork 101, you'll have a good foundation, but that's not a requirement. We concentrate primarily on alarm-type sounds in this course.

-Train your dog to perform your preferred physical alert behavior. Choose the alert from many different possible behaviors.

-Your dog will learn to be motivated and eager to WAKE ITSELF UP even from deep sleep. They can't wake you up unless they think that waking up is fun and exciting!

-You will learn techniques to build that essential feature of all alerting: MOTIVATION to happily interact with you and be persistent, even as you moan and complain and try to go back to sleep.

-Wake-Up Alerts are useful for:

-Alarm clock and emergency notifications

-Medical device notifications

-Medical conditions that cause deep sleep.

-Medication side effects that affect waking.

-Improving previously trained medical scent, symptom, and behavioral/psychiatric alerts. We don't cover those alerts in this course, but I can help you adapt them to get more reliable wake-up responses.

-Improve your dog's responses to trained Name Call and Go Get Help Alerts: a person calls your name, and the dog must awaken you.

Positive methods are used: food, play, social interaction, life event rewards, toys, tug, and whatever your dog is eager to work for. Developing high motivation is essential for this alert. The alert becomes a self-reinforcing activity for your dog. That's the key to reliability in the middle of the night!

This is an online course with individualized coaching from me to adapt the course techniques to your alerting needs and your dog's temperament.

We also have weekly group chats on Messenger and a private FB group.

Go at your own pace. The course is designed to be doable in 6 to 8 weeks, but you have access to the course and my help for 18 months.

My 30 years of training hundreds of Hearing Dogs has taught me how to train effectively and efficiently with techniques that are easy for children and inexperienced owners to succeed with. Professional trainers can improve their skills to help clients in this rapidly expanding field.

Please share far and wide!
PM or email:
[email protected]

19/03/2024

Soundwork 101: Training your dog to alert to sounds, Name Calls, and novel situations.

We are so used to telling our dogs things, but how often do we listen to them? The secret to a strong Service Dog partnership is, well, the partnership. Listening to each other. Dogs sense so many things we humans are completely unaware of, but they usually give up on trying to share their world with us, because we don’t pay attention to what they are saying.

But what if your dog was motivated to contact you about how it perceives the world? What if it would alert you when specific sounds and situations happen? That training opens up a whole new world for you and your dog. Communication starts to snowball into real life alerts to all kinds of emergencies we could not predict or set up to train for.

Start the new year with real communication from your dog about the way it senses the world!

Communication and motivation between the two of you is the secret to success in any Service Dog partnership.

This course makes it easy for you to succeed. The lessons teach you how to motivate your dog to communicate, and easily understood methods for training the essential foundation sound alerts. I give you individualized attention to tailor the training to fit your own needs.

Our methods seamlessly incorporate training into your daily life, so it’s no longer work. It's just having even more fun with your dog. Our goal is to teach you to focus on each other with joy and intent so that you can develop alerts that go far beyond simple trick-type behaviors.

Class takes place with written lessons and watching videos on the web site, then personalizing your training goals with me in our live group chats and a private Facebook group.

Class is designed to be easily completed in eight weeks. However, the class materials are available for eighteen months to give everyone plenty of time to work through the program in their own time!

Participants can upload their own videos privately to me for review and critique, ask questions, and partake in discussions.

What you get:
Each of the eight lessons cover different aspects of motivation and alerting, with detailed instructions and videos.

You can access each lesson whenever you want, so YOU decide when you want to train. No rush!
Post videos of your training sessions and ask questions for critique and assistance.

Access to class materials for eighteen months, so if you get busy, you can come back to it later.

Class is ongoing, so you can start at any time. Make sure to friend me on Facebook so I can add you to your private FB group and live chats.

Email: [email protected]

19/03/2024

So, with Soundwork:

Think of your home the same way you think of the competition ring...but instead of trying to get our dogs to perform confidently at a trial, we try to get them to perform confidently and consistently in the home environment.

At competitions, when a dog acts completely untrained, we often hear the wail, “BUT he does it perfectly at home!!!”

In Soundwork, when a dog acts completely untrained, we often hear the wail, “BUT he does it perfectly whenever he notices me setting up for a lesson!!!”

This is why a 5 second training session during daily life (ring timer, act happy, give treat) can be so important. At the HDP, we did regular scheduled training. But we found it was equally important to let the dog hang out during lunch and make sounds and treats and fun happen.

21/07/2021

Our students get intensive personalized coaching to find the best strategy for motivating and becoming a great working team with their dog. Our group chats and private Facebook group include personal interaction with me, and our talented student trainers share their experiences so we can all learn from each other.
https://e-trainingfordogs.com/training-dogs-in-basic-sound-alerting-skills/

This course teaches training dogs in basic sound alerting skills and building a foundation for your dog to eagerly communicate with you about what it perceives.

03/07/2021

Jeep training the timer alert today.

02/06/2021

I am enjoying being an instructor for Barbara Leonard Handelman’s SD trainer course. I am able to teach the parts I specialize in, and am learning so much about the parts I know less about. Barbara and Christina are amazing teachers. Our students are all people with extensive experience in dogs, and have taught me so much about their own specialties and interests that relate to Service Dog training and careers.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kUNA98Wf3hZScx1SvEewlkHxBf60RRzj/view?usp=sharing

30/05/2021

Hand To Hand Step 1.

Multiple treats in each hand.

Jeep already knows to follow a wiggling lured treat.

Goals of this exercise: Be lured back and forth continously, getting one treat each time lured.

1) Show the treat and use the Wiggle-lure motion away from the dog. Give the treat when the dog follows the treat for a few inches.

2) The hand closes. The dog realizes that trying to get the treats in the closed hand is not productive.

3) The other hand puts the treat up to the dog's nose, and Wiggle-lures away. Close the fist after the dog has taken the treat.

4) Repeat about ten times or more, continuously, depending on the dog's attention span and hunger.

5) you will see an "AHA! Moment when the dog is ready to move on to Step 2:
It will start to grab a treat and zip over to the other hand before the fist can be closed and before the other hand can lure.

The Wiggle-lure movement will later become an all-purpose cue to the dog that we are starting a session of training activated uninhibited fast-moving behaviors like alerting.

The closed fist will later become a Send cue for the dog to leave the person to go to a sound or to another person.

Jeep is on his third 5-minute session of Step 1. He is maintaining focus on the game, is trying less to invade the closed fist where he can scent the treats, and is following the Wiggle-lure movement.

He is making fast progress, although he can only concentrate for about 40 seconds at a time even when hungry. Good response for an 8 week pup.

I would predict he will only need 2 more sessions of Step 1, because he is occasionally turning his head away from my closed fist before I can lure.

In Step 2, the lured food is not brought all the way up to the dog's nose, and it starts to respond more to the Wiggle-lure motion.

Hand to Hand is the foundation for all our back-and-forth alerts, both to sounds or for Go Get Help alerts. It is taught in "Soundwork 102: Back-and-Forth Alerts", which builds on the foundation work done in Soundwork 101.

Please share. Join our fun FB group "Open Forum Martha Hoffman Hearing Dogs" for tips and training discussions!

21/05/2021