more links please!

I need to update -- and please feel free to send me any great links you know of!

guaranteed to cheer you up

Or if you are like me, maybe make you a little misty eyed.

This is trainer Emily Larlham from Dogmantics, whose kikopup channel has probably the biggest collection of fantastic dog training videos on YouTube. A super resource that I'll be going through over the next few months. In the meantime here is a list of her free training videos.

do you have a question?

OOooh! pick me pick me! I know the answer!

Here's a problem I ran into with Hemi. I taught him a very cute sit up and wave a paw (the cue being "raise your hand if you have a question"). I also taught him a great start line stay. I can lead out a huge distance, running, all sorts of distractions, and he'll sit there (smiling).

But in an obedience class we were asked to walk out and turn and face the dogs and stand there while they held the stay. Um...Hemi thought, she's standing in front of me, looking at me, and ... what am I supposed to do? So he sat up very sweetly and raised his hand! (It cracked me up, just as it makes me laugh when he does it on the pause table, but it's frowned on in obedience world.)

This blogpost "Following Orders" from Nancy Gyes has a thoughtful discussion of what order one teaches a dog certain tricks or behaviors. She says: "I won't teach any tricks yet that involve him waving a front paw or cueing off a hand signal from me until I feel confident in his stays...Teaching him to move a foot before I have good sit stays might be counter productive." Click the link to read the rest of this post, and while you are there poke around a bit. Lots to read!

And while we are looking at Nancy Gyes, check out the great articles on the Power Paws Agility site. I got her Alphabet Drills book in the fall, a great resource for those of us who train alone, since you can easily set up one of the letters of the alphabet and get many, many exercises out of a small course.

Awesome videos

Reading handling books makes me sleepy...

One of the hardest things about training on one's own is that you don't often get an opportunity to watch someone who knows what they are doing. You can watch videos or try to catch it live (hard, things are fast), but the whole breaking-it-down aspect is missing.

Once again, amazing the generosity of trainers to put stuff out there for those of us who train on our own. Here is some video from Linda Mecklenburg that is an appendix to her Developing Handling Skills book. Awesome.

Also, I don't know how long these will be up, but Clean Run magazine forum also has a number of videos on combining front crosses from Mecklenburg, companion to the December 2011 issue.

missing links

I've been so busy training the puppy that I've slacked off in posting all the links I keep coming across! More to come SOON!

teaching your dog to drop something

From Surrey, UK, comes this video showing one way of teaching a dog to drop something. He uses classical conditioning, starting off by associating the word "drop" with something rewarding (treats) and then moving on to having "drop" mean spit out whatever you've got -- bone, toy, frisbee, etc. What I like about it is there is none of that ugly honking sound that often accompanies "leave it."



This guy has a number of interesting videos (I have no idea who he is other than cyber-sleuthing his website, but he also has a very impressive resume). He also has posted a fascinating video of a Bob Bailey chicken camp, showing how one inadvertently trains something other than what you thought you were training.

puppy interactions with other dogs in household

Here is Susan Garrett's most recent video on how her puppy interacts with the other dogs in the house, from her post Dogs do it, so shouldn't we? Here's a great argument for why we should not try to interact with dogs the way that other dogs treat them. Some dogs aren't fair. Some dogs want to be the boss of the other, rather than a team leader.

Worth reading the original post with the video. I'm inspired to make video now of my new puppy interacting with the other three. So many things to do with puppies and cameras!

jumping skills intro

I love YouTube, people are so generous about sharing their training videos with complete strangers. This is a nice video showing the first steps from Linda Mecklenburg's Developing Jumping Skills book. I'll just collect things as I go and hopefully the labels will help make sense of it all.

My puppy arrives in a little over two weeks!

puppy class inspiration

Late to posting this, but this video of Silvia Trkman's puppy class graduation is an awesome example of how good, enthusiastic, positive training can make even heeling fun for the dogs. Tons of great trick ideas in here, plus great to see handlers working both sides, dogs comfortable in close quarters, focused on their people.

Susan G's 135 games to play with a puppy

It's getting closer to puppy time so I'm re-starting this to collect links and articles and videos for puppy elementary training. I am not teaching puppy class this fall but it will be my first time in five years that I've had a puppy (vs. getting an almost one year old, Hemi) so there is a lot of info to capture. 

And coincidentally, Susan Garrett is running a puppy class online, with links to videos, etc. It is a 'members only' thing (and yea, I'm a member, how could I resist?) but she has a wealth of information available free online. To begin with, here is a fantastic list of games, tricks, and skills

coming soon

Any day now will find out if my new puppy is on the way, from a very special breeding that I have wanted for a long time. So fingers crossed that there is a little girl in there for me. I've been very lax in starting up this puppy-e blog, but now have all sorts of incentive to get going!

clicker training chickens

Not as in, "You are a chicken if you don't try clicker training," but as in "You can clicker train anything, including chickens!"

Here are just a few clicker-training resources.

One of the big names in U.S. clicker training is former dolphin trainer Karen Pryor, whose book Don't Shoot the Dog! got a lot of people started on this method.  A fun read that doesn't just tell you how to not shoot your dog, but also how to teach dolphins to do flips in the air.  You know you need to know this.

Not a lot of free information on her website, but her new book Reaching the Animal Mind has a fantastic companion website with all sorts of cool links and a free chapter on teaching your dog to hand target.

Another book that I really like (because it teaches you to teach tricks) is The Power of Positive Dog Training by Pat Miller. She has a lot of good free dog training articles (not all of them clicker-related) here.

Gary Wilkes has a detailed (and free!) article on how to get your dog started with a clicker as well as a (free!) virtual clicker class.  Worth checking out if you are becoming a training nerd.

Over in England there is Kay Laurence at Learning About Dogs.  You should definitely read this article on getting started and check out her youtube channel for clips like this of teaching a dog to target a stick.

And finally, check out this clip from one of Bob Bailey's famous chicken camps.

clicker training part one

So...clicker training. Positive and fun, and helps build an even greater bond between you and your puppy. Rather than forcing the dog to do something or punishing ‘misbehavior’, you are encouraging your puppy to offer behaviors and then rewarding them for that! We started this the other night but there is just so much more than we can do in an hour, once a week.

“Clicker training” is the street word for one aspect of operant conditioning. Most simplistically put, operant conditioning is the way that an animal interacts with the environment. He’ll repeat something that brings a positive result, will avoid doing something that has a negative consequence.

For our puppies, food is a primary reinforcer. They are willing to do something for it, as when they make an effort to crawl towards their mother and push past their litter mates to nurse.

The clicker itself is simply a way of letting the dog know that “THAT, RIGHT THERE, WHAT YOU ARE DOING IN THIS INSTANT” is the behavior that is going to bring a reward. It marks the event. You can’t always pop a cookie in at the right moment -- there’s a lag time and the dog won’t learn as quickly what he is being rewarded for. But for the clicker trained dog, you now have a way to reward the right behavior.

The other night we started on teaching the dog to touch your hand for a click/treat. If you're interested this is a nice example of that.

click it or ticket

Clicker training requires good timing, fast reflexes, so that you "click" when the dog is doing the right thing!  Here are some sites to test your speed.

You can try swinging at a baseball or clicking a stoplight that looks like a clicker.

Test your reaction time to a dot changing color. or to the whole screen changing color or a box going from red to green.

more "it's yer choice"

A short clip of a very young puppy playing the game. I like because it shows that you aren't rewarding the puppy for sitting but for not lunging at cookies. A lot of the puppies will just offer sit as a default but this isn't a 'teach the sit' exercise and has applications way beyond just getting them not to grab cookies!

The trainer here is Tracy Sklenar who is one of the instructor's at Say Yes! Dog Training and also has her own dog school in New York. There are a few more good videos of her doing foundation work with her puppy on her youtube channel.

teaching stay

Here's a clip of how I teach my dogs to stay, featuring Hemi. I used to think "stay" not too important but lately I've had to use it (a) to keep a dog from going back to a porcupine and (b) for a 20+ yard lead out in some agility runs because Rumor was jumping off his contacts and I wanted to be out there to stop him. Super stimulating environments (wild animals, children running around, dogs lunging and barking at them). And they've held their stays perfectly.

Remember that this dog has already learned how to stay so a puppy isn't going to look like this. At first it will be smaller steps, shorter sessions, frequent releases, and a lot of verbal praise. If I can borrow a puppy (or get one of my own!) will do a re-make.



There are a ton of good videos out there on how to teach a dog to stay, a lot of different methods. The best ones are positive and focus on the three Ds -- duration, distance, distraction. Old School and uncool methods would include jerking dog's collar to snap them into a sit, making a smack-in-the-face move while bellowing the word "stay," and then bouncing them back in place when they break the stay. AVOID.

It's important to build in your motion from the beginning. And be careful not to condition your dog to stay only when you are creeping backwards nervously with your hand in front of you, saying stay-stay-staaaaaaaaaaaay. Aim to be normal, just move how you normally move.

when does puppy class begin?

The other night I asked the puppy-e students to go around for a few minutes and introduce themselves and their dogs to each other. I just wanted to watch the dynamics for a minute. How interesting! Very few handlers (maybe 2 out of 10) were using treats to engage or reward their puppies -- they just didn’t see the meet-and-greet as a training opportunity. Which is fine, why would they, it’s the kind of thing you get into once you start obsessing (in a good way, right?) about dog training.

So I asked them to go around the room again, this time using treats. And again so interesting, because I didn’t say, “this time making your puppy sit when you meet people” or anything like that. I just said, “use treats.” But what a great group of handlers -- they know the drill. So this time they were asking their puppies to sit, and rewarding it like crazy, and praising for paying attention. They wanted to find a reason to give their puppies a cookie and so they chose behaviors that the puppy could actually succeed at. LOVE these people.

When does puppy class actually begin? When you walk in the building? When you let the dog out of the car? Maybe when you leave your house? How far do you back it up in time? (Soon you’ll have food stashes all over the house and you will discover which treats go through the laundry cycle without falling apart.)

next week we'll do this

OK Go's brand new video featuring a great assortment of well-trained rescue dogs. I wonder if I can convince my puppy class to do some choreography? Hmm...



Click here to read the story behind the making of the video: weeks of practice so that they could do it in one cut.

teaching puppy to make good choices

"The attributes that contribute to a great family pet lay the foundation for a phenomenal ________ dog." -- Susan Garrett.

Susan Garrett's all about teaching dogs self-control and mad speed. (And tricks of course.) She has a whole slew of books, articles, and dvds, as well as her blog. Even if you use a different agility handling system you'd be silly to pass up learning from her because she's a brilliant dog trainer. I went to "Advances in Dog Training" at Say Yes! and came home completely inspired.



This video demonstrates her "It's Yer Choice" game. This isn't Susan in the video, but it's a faithful presentation of the exercise and shows how you can begin teaching self control right away to a puppy and then progress to greater tests of self control. But it's not a bummer of a self-control game, it should be fun for the puppy, get her using that little brain to figure out what she needs to do to get the cookie.
Basically you are teaching "Leave It" -- but without needing to say the command, or shout NO! NO!, or make that weird honking sounds (anghk-anghk) that people use to scare their dogs off stuff.

great puppy class video

Silvia Trkman is a world class agility competitor from Slovenia and simply a great all-around dog trainer. Here is a video from her puppy class. I love how she mixes up tricks with formal obedience exercises like heeling. These puppies are so motivated and happy. It's very inspiring.

This link is to a longer version of the puppy class video.

Wondering how the puppies learn to heel in Silvia's class? This video from one of her students shows how they start off teaching the puppy to move her back feet around while her front feet are on a bucket or bowl. That is transferred to working on the floor and moving hind legs to line up with handler. I'm definitely going to try this with my dogs!

Last winter I was lucky to do a two-day handling workshop with Silvia in New Hampshire. She really helps handlers build enthusiasm and speed. Fun. You can find her website here -- be sure to check out her amazing tricks videos.