Key Skills

Seeing with New Eyes

➤  Key Skills

Life with Dogs

Puppies : First Year

Connection Collective

Every Dog Every Day Book

Teaching with Reinforcement Book

Training with Food

Skills have a direct impact on the life of our dogs

We can learn to do better. We can learn with a different mindset.

Likely to expand your horizon, make you ask questions of yourself, your understanding and your expectations. For browsers, for passers-by and of course for training geeks.

What We Get Right About Dogs

What We Get Right About Dogs

We can learn from remarkable people who have worked with remarkable dogs: training and learning are not the same thing at all.

Location is Their Cue

Location is Their Cue

We begin teaching the dog to go to a target, such as a mat or platform and in this process our focus is on the outcome – the dog can place feet on the object or settle down. But at the same time this learning is happening the dog is also noting the location: where this is happening in this room, in the house, relative to the food-machine (you).

Cue Seeking is Connection

Cue Seeking is Connection

Connection is very individual and to be authentic we have to observe, slow down, understand our dogs and meet them where they are.

Back to Basics?

Back to Basics?

The word “basic” is often derided as synonymous with “shallow,” but in its origins it is the very opposite: foundational, profound, supportive.

Do you see what I see

Do you see what I see

Doing better is the reward from doing the work. This work needs to be the right work at the right time with the right intent done in the right way.

Luring: Hand lures

Learning the skills for clear communication with hand-lure: collect, engage, follow, feed.

Stop doing that ….

Can we teach an effective Cease That Behaviour? Absolutely. We can teach that positively, without harm, and we should teach them the skills of stopping that and doing this instead.

Remote lures

Lures at a distance, separated from hands, pockets . Using reward stations, patterns, containers

Duration: sustaining movement

Continuing and maintaining a specific movement

Shaping by rewards

When I see a dog showing a behaviour that is heading towards potential conflict, my first question is “what rewards are available?”

Teaching People: more than rewards and reinforcers

Familiarisation with the behaviourists’ models of reinforcement, punishment, shaping, extinction, can prevent us from looking outside the windows for either dogs or people …

Release cue or stay cue

Many of us begin with teaching sit or down, and this is one of the earliest experiences of training with reinforcement. Is the sit, or down, going to be a terminal behaviour, or a temporary position?

One dog watching

The other dog working
or ….how to train the spectators to quietly rest and watch whilst you work, play, teach a single member of the group

Do We Want Impulse Control?

Teaching your Collie “impulse control” is the wrong way of thinking about their urges, and certainly an unhelpful way of dealing with them.

Construction or suppression

Looking at the way the behaviour is carried out is the most important element, and that is the product of all the considerations.

Ethos: A Personal Trust Pilot

Experience changes our ethos. There are many pathways that will broaden our choices.

The Power of A Cue

We cannot presume a cue is a reinforcer unless we can shape a new behaviour using that cue as the marker. Read carefully. Think carefully. Consider multiple perspectives. Sometimes it seems easier to let someone else do the thinking for you and just copy, but we need to become thoughtful trainers.

Collies : Masters at Laser Focus

When we ask the dog to Be Collie and use all their inherited instincts, part of that package is the exclusion of stimulus irrelevant to that intense predatory focus.

A Road to Nowhere

When familiarity is stripped away we seek recognisable signposts that will take us back to comfort and security. This is survival instinct. It is worth listening to as it keeps us alive.

Not Today and Not for My Sheepdogs

Standard protocols of extinction, impulse control, counterconditioning are quickly grabbed off the shelf as satisfactory solutions. These solutions are unlikely to help your collie, your sheepdog as the focus is heavily on suppression of who they are and why they live.

It’s Not Training

A carefully planned learning pathway, paced to suit that particular learner for their life ahead.

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