Dog Training From Start to Finished

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Most dog owners make more or less effort to train their dogs.  If they are like me, they first learned to train dogs by rote.  By that I mean, you followed some particular recipe for getting the dog to do what you wanted and at some point it was “trained.”  As I’ve learned more about dogs and behaviour, it’s become clear to me that it isn’t quite that simple.  Those times when my dog didn’t perform as asked, he could have been distracted.  Or I could have been farther away than he was comfortable with or maybe the situation was just more stressful than normal and he didn’t feel comfortable.  What I know now is that you can train your do to work under a variety of conditions if you take the time to work at different levels of distraction, duration, and distance for each behaviour.  There are a lot of variables out there.  So are we ever “finished” training a particular behaviour?  Probably not.  It could always use a bit of sharpening.  Lucky for me, training my dog is something I enjoy very much and so does my dog.

A transcript of the main text of Dog Training From Start to Finished is available at the Life As A Human online magazine website. You can visit Life as a Human to find this and other articles.

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