New York Animal Care & Control (AC&C)

This page is going to change periodically, so keep checking back here. I wanted to start things off with teaching you a little about dog training, and most importantly, so you can see if from your dog’s perspective. Believe it or not, there are a lot of things that go thought your dog’s head when you are training him.

In dog training there is sequence of events that will happen each time you ask the animal to perform a behavior. You will start off by giving your dog a CUE, which initiates a chain of events. Your response to what his dog does after you give him the CUE is a huge factor in all this. This decision is a major factor in the dog learning and understanding what he wants so that he may get better at that particular behavior. There are only 4 chains of events that will happen when you ask a dog to perform a behavior:

CUE - You will give the dog a CUE. This could be either a visual CUE (a cue with your hand) or a verbal CUE (you verbally telling the dog to do it).

THE RESPONSE - After you give the dog the CUE, your dog will respond to that CUE in either one of two ways. The animal will be either CORRECT or INCORRECT. (Pretty simple so far... right?)

REWARD OR CORRECT - Based on what you just saw, it is up to you to either:
- REWARD the dog for doing the behavior correctly
  
  OR

CORRECT the animal for doing the behavior incorrectly.

THE RELEASE - If the animal does the behavior correctly, and when you are content with the situation, you release the dog. Remember, just because you rewarded the dog does not mean the sequence is over with. The end of the sequence is dictated by you, not your dog, and that comes from you RELEASING the dog.

This is all dog training is. These 4 things!!!! So just think of:

THE CUE
THE RESPONSE
THE REWARD OR CORRECTION
THE RELEASE IF HE DID IT CORRECTLY

I want to talk about the RELEASE. This is something that I believe that not enough dog trainers teach new pet owners the importance of enough. Quite often I see a new owner teaching their dog to SIT and STAY, and it really is coming along great early on, but the only problem is as soon as the owner rewards the dog, the dog gets up. If you think about it from your dog’s point of view, the dog just got up on his own, and dictated when it was appropriate to get up. By this happening consistently, the dog will begin to get up on his own more and more. Once this happens, the owner can begin to lose control with other behaviors in the training sessions. Trust me, dogs are smart. A smart dog that gets up consistently before he is RELEASED will only learn to try it over and over again. Simply put... you lose control… And the dog wins!!!

The reason that we want to use a RELEASE is that we want to make it simple so that is a “defined” word and defined action that lets the dog know “we are done”. But the most important thing is that this is something that we are dictating, not the dog. What I have always have done from the beginning is use the word “OK”, and made the RELEASE a very firm and distinct pat on the dog’s side area. Now he is RELEASED from that behavior. Then afterwards, you have the choice of doing what you want. You can even immediately bring him right back to the spot and repeat it right away if you like. But feel free to use anything you like!

Remember, all you are doing is RELEASING the animal from the previous behavior, and it is an excellent form of control.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON DOG TRAINING, GO TO:
WWW.COMPANIONSFORLIFE.NET