Practice your dog training skills by teaching your dog to walk between your legs. It is a fun, novel skill to work on. I call it ‘Peek-a-Boo’ .
Love Means Using Positive Reinforcement
Valentine’s Day is approaching…the holiday of love.
The trainer in me loves this quote by B.F. Skinner. Absolutely, love is the use of positive reinforcement and vice versa. In other words, love is about giving those in your life feedback that you like what they are doing by your doing something back that they value.
Lessons Learned From Chicken Camp
To practice and strengthen my mechanical skills as a trainer, last week…I trained chickens!
That’s right. I flew to North Carolina to attend a three-day chicken camp at TeamWorks Dog Training. There, my students were Ellen – a white leghorn, and Jane – a Rhode Island red. I was tasked with teaching them using clicker training to do several behaviors: peck a drum five times in a row, discriminate a red squishy toy from other colors, and to weave through three cones.
Using Capturing To Teach Behaviors
There are times when I am standing at my kitchen sink that Dawson, my maltipoo puppy, stops his play to come beside me and lay down with completely relaxed body muscles. I keep some treats in my cabinet for just those moments, for, when he does, I say ‘good’ in a slow and drawn out voice, reach down and drop a treat right at his nose. This may cause him to look up temporarily. I ignore that. If he drops his head down again, I drop another treat at his nose.
This is called teaching by ‘capturing behavior’ in dog training. Capturing as a form of training is simply that, it is the process of seeing a behavior, marking it (with a word or a click), and then giving reinforcement. Kathy Sdao, a well-known trainer who I look up to, coined the acronym SMART for See, Mark, and Reinforce Training.
Understanding Superstitious Behavior In Pets
What is something that parrots and dogs have in common with a world class athlete – superstitious behaviors! Understanding this, can help you in solving some pet behavior problems.
Communication Matters
I have long admired Leslie McDevitt, MLA, CDBC, CPDT, and have read her book, Control Unleashed, several times. The first time being early in my career, and it had a lot of influence on me. Leslie teaches how to use games and communication to affect behavior change, and build confidence, trust and focus in the learner. I love that.
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